Propel CEO Jimmy Chen knows how it feels to go hungry.
When he was growing up in Kansas City, his parents sometimes struggled to put food on the table. Today, his Brooklyn tech company makes a free app for people on the federal government's anti-hunger Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.
About 5 million people use Propel's app to check their SNAP balances, and get coupons and discounts on groceries. That gives Chen a pretty good view into how they're being affected by the federal government's unprecedented delay in sending out November payments.
"Their budgets are already extremely tight. There's usually not a lot of wiggle room," Chen says. "So a delay of even a few days on an expected deposit ends up being a really, really huge deal."
Now his company is trying to bridge that gap, joining other private businesses, nonprofits, and individuals scrambling to offset the government's delayed SNAP payments. On Saturday, Propel started giving payments of $50 to people using its app, prioritizing those with children and little or no income.
"We understand that $50 is not enough," Chen says, adding that Propel is trying to reach the largest number of families and "provide an amount that gives them a little bit of breathing room."
The company has identified about 230,000 users who fit this "high need" profile. It has donated $1 million of the total $10 million it needs to fund $50 payments to most of them, and is hoping to beat that target.
Looking for partners
Propel has also lined up some donations from its corporate partners, including the New York anti-poverty nonprofit Robin Hood and ecommerce platform Babylist. It also set up a crowdfunding campaign with the nonprofit GiveDirectly, which runs similar programs all over the world and which has worked with Propel in the past.
GiveDirectly says it's raised a total of $6 million, including Propel's contributions, so far.
"The sheer scale and volume of this need is so immense. We're talking about millions of low income Americans who are at risk of not getting this assistance," says Sarina Jain, GiveDirectly's senior program manager focused on U.S. disaster responses.
Even as they've scrambled to launch this donation program, Chen and Jain acknowledge that all of the efforts from non-profits and private companies can never replace the federal government, which spends $8 billion every month on the country's largest anti-hunger program.
"At the end of the day, the single biggest thing we can do in this country is to get SNAP back online, depositing on a predictable schedule to the people who receive it," Chen says.
42 million SNAP recipients face delayed payments
Almost 42 million people rely on SNAP. Now they're waiting for payments that the government stopped making on Saturday — and they're facing delays that could stretch into months.
After two federal judges ruled that freezing SNAP payments is unlawful, the Trump administration on Monday said it would restart partial SNAP payments.
But the government added that states would only receive about half the amount of federal funding they usually get. It plans to use money from an Agriculture Department contingency fund, which contains only $5 billion — well short of the $8 billion it costs to provide full SNAP benefits each month.
The government also warned that it could take some states "anywhere from a few weeks to up to several months" to process the reduced payments.
That could be disastrous for many SNAP recipients, such as Shenita Melton. The 37-year-old lives in rural Anson County, North Carolina, and relies on SNAP to help feed her four children.
Propel connected NPR to Melton, who said last week that she was already starting to scramble to find enough food for her kids — especially her three teenagers, who "eat a lot."
There aren't many food banks in the rural area where she lives. The few that do exist only allow people to pick up groceries once or twice a month.
Melton also says that many of the groceries at those food banks are expired.
"I'm kind of scared to give my kids expired food," she says. "But sometimes you have to do what you have to do."
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