Swain County low-income workers face troubles amid high prices

The Swain County Social Services Department is seeing some more activity lately, with more people applying for SNAP benefits in the wake of high grocery prices.

As previous articles in the Smoky Mountain Times have highlighted, the prices for food have gone up as of late, the price of eggs and other ingredients have restaurants hurting. Meanwhile, no one is happy with the grocery store prices.

Now, Swain DSS Economics Services Supervisor Janet Jones says there has been a definitive uptick in SNAP applications.

“We have definitely had more Food and Nutrition Applications than normal,” she said. “Grocery and gas prices are up. People are trying to get assistance.”

That sentiment was echoed by Melissa Barker, director with the Swain Family Resource Center. The resource center offers food and assistance with other needs like paying bills.

“We’ve seen an increase in clients,” she said. “The requests for what they need are in larger amounts.”

She said the increase in requests for food, along with the rising food prices themselves, are putting a strain on the center.

“It means our funds don’t go as far,” she said. “We’re not able to purchase as much food, the dollar doesn’t go as far as it used to.”

Barker said the center is looking for new sources of funding that could potentially even things out for them, though she said they “don’t know if we’ll be successful.”

Giving Spoon

Meanwhile, The Giving Spoon, a charity nonprofit run out of the Bryson City Presbyterian Church that serves hot meals twice a week for free, has seen similar troubles.

Kathleen Burns, executive director of The Giving Spoon, said the high prices have affected them in two ways.

“The high prices have been going on for a long time,” she said. “There’s been no decline that I’ve seen, they might be getting higher. Families are struggling to make ends meet.”

Burns described a doubling of the number of meals the nonprofit was giving out. Before the pandemic, she said they were distributing around 600 meals per week. Now the number has ballooned to around 1,100.

She spoke of similar problems as the resource center including higher costs, strained resources. The meals go to all sorts of people, including seniors and families with young children.

“A lot of people don’t know how many people we serve,” she said. “They think it’s just the homeless or I don’t know what they think.”

Burns added with the high cost of gas is also a strain. Giving Spoon has volunteers who deliver meals to people’s homes.

The Giving Spoon and the Family Resource Center have both worked with Asheville-based MANNA FoodBank to get more food to give out in the area. MANNA has also been facing its own troubles.

Kara Imani, director of marketing and communications with MANNA, said it was a “perfect storm” of circumstances, such as high demand and high prices. She said the food bank was seeing record numbers of people coming in.

Jones said there was a confluence of events that would be negative for many folks, in the fact that the Covid-related emergency supplement put in place in 2020 was ending.

“It gave people the maximum amount of assistance no matter what,” she said. “That is ending soon. It is going back to what the number would have been two years ago. People got used to the extra money, but now that is going away.”

She predicts it will have the unfortunate effect of squeezing peoples’ wallets even further.

Family Resource Center also helps with heating assistance, and the agency reports people also having trouble affording that as well, as fuel prices have impacted home heating sources as well.

“The program helps you buy up to $600 of fuel,” Jones said. “The price of kerosene has gone up to about $589 recently. Our program used to be able to help people two times, but now we can often only do it once. The price of heating and fuel will have an impact on people, too.”

Unfortunately, there is only so much DSS could do at the end of the day.

“A lot of people will have to readjust,” she said.