Hawaii’s SNAP recipients at risk of losing nutritional benefits

Around 158,000 of Hawaii’s low-income seniors, families and single adults could lose essential nutrition education and access to local produce by the end of September if the U.S. House- proposed tax bill, which would cut an estimated $300 billion from the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, is approved by the Senate.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the cuts would shrink SNAP nationally by 30%. In Hawaii, SNAP provides food assistance to households that make 200% below the poverty level. The tax bill would also essentially end SNAP-Ed, the education and community outreach arm of the program that, for over 30 years, has funded state agencies to provide SNAP-qualifying individuals with access to healthy foods and physical activities in every state.

Trump administration officials and House Republicans have said cuts to SNAP and other federal social services, including Medicaid, are needed to rein in what they say is massive fraud and waste in the programs.

In Hawaii, about $1.57 million is funneled from the federal government through the state Department of Human Services into two implementing agencies — the state Department of Health and University of Hawaii’s College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resilience (CTAHR), both of which work with about 150 state agencies and nonprofit organizations to provide nutrition education and public health programs across the islands.

But without those funds, Hawaii’s SNAP-Ed’s current budget would end Sept. 30, according to Jean Butel, director of the SNAP-Ed program at UH Manoa’s CTAHR.

U.S. Rep. Jill Tokuda (D-HI), who represents neighbor islands with a large percentage of SNAP recipients, told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser that SNAP and SNAP-Ed are “lifelines.”

“When you think about our SNAP beneficiaries in Hawaii and across the country, many of them are vulnerable populations. They are households with children, they have family members with a disability. They are kupuna, they are veterans,” Tokuda said. “Parallel to this, (the House is) trying to cut Medicare and Medicaid — talk about a triple cut to people right there, because it’s not about giving money to food, it’s about improving your quality of life.”

CTAHR’s services work with schools, rehabilitation and recovery programs, senior centers and public housing sites to provide nutrition education and lessons on how to invest their SNAP funds in healthy foods, Butel said.

While the allotted amount of SNAP funds vary per state and income per household, as of 2024, a family of four in Hawaii received up to $1,759 a month in SNAP benefits, Gov. Josh Green’s office said in September. In 2024, the total value of SNAP benefits in Hawaii exceeded $60 million, according the governor’s office .

That’s largely due to the fact that affordability issues are exacerbated in Hawaii where “people are already struggling with the high cost of living and high cost of imported food,” Butel said.

“By adding the next cut of our social safety net by eliminating SNAP-Ed, we’re cutting their benefits, we’re eliminating their benefits, and then we’re not even giving them the tools, the resources and the connections they have within the community to stretch their food dollars, to make whatever they’re buying healthier,” Butel said. “It’s realizing that (SNAP users) buy processed, cheap food because it’s what they got. This helps them figure out how they can expand those dollars.”

While the SNAP-Ed programs specifically target populations and neighborhoods that host a high percentage of SNAP users, everyone would be impacted by its termination, whether they know it or not, said Heidi Hansen Smith, who runs the state Health Department’s SNAP-Ed program.

DOH, she said, handles broad population-level policy work and community projects that benefit school districts of low-income families and senior residents.

That includes their more than 30 “quick build” projects that work with schools, nongovernmental organizations and counties to beautify areas of low-income neighborhoods with murals and street art, install continuous walking and biking pathways and implement makeshift skate parks to encourage physical activity without risking safety.

While SNAP-Ed has not funded all of the quick builds across the state, Hansen Smith said, the initiatives are community-based, achievable and equitable for low-income neighborhoods.

“If you can do work around schools and connect whole communities — everybody lives close to some school, right?” Hansen Smith said. “It’s a really good way to not only have spaces for kids, but kupuna, for everybody.”

DOH’s SNAP-Ed program also contracts food access coordinators in each county, and an extra coordinator in Waianae, that work closely with counties to increase SNAP access to locally produced food.

“We know a lot of these communities, that’s where the farmers are — they’re growing local produce, but it’s not staying in the communities, so it’s working with all of the partners and figuring out how do we all come together and make sure that there’s access in these communities?” Hansen Smith said.

Supporters say CTAHR’s SNAP-Ed services provide more individualized serv­ices, as their educators and community providers work directly with families, single individuals and kupuna in weekly classes and work with schools to implement school gardens, all of which Butel said reach more than 15,000 SNAP users statewide. That includes the six-week-long direct education program, where SNAP users learn from nutrition experts on how to look for the most nutritious items with their food stamp allowance and different local recipes they can make with limited resources.

Those recipes, like garlic eggplant and using a rice cooker to steam ‘uala, are often tailored to meet the needs of the community they are working with, Butel said.

As a result, Butel said that the program has seen 91% of participants improve their diet, 83% develop skills like comparing food prices and planning meals, and 40% reported that they stretched their food dollars further and had enough food to feed their families.

Deanna Au-Wong has worked as a special project coordinator at UH Manoa’s SNAP-Ed program for seven years, connecting with agencies and participants daily.

In 2020, she founded the Food to Grow program, which provides SNAP users vegetable seedlings and a starter kit to grow their own food, along with recipes that incorporate their homegrown produce.

Around 66% of SNAP users don’t know that their benefits can be used to buy fruit, vegetable and herb seeds and plants and 32% have never grown their own food before, according to Food to Grow’s website.

But Au-Wong said those skills are essential and make all the difference when resources are already stretched thin. She said for every dollar of every seed packet and fertilizer purchased, you can grow up to $25 worth of produce.

“It’s things like that, people wouldn’t know without us,” Au-Wong said. “If you grow your own food, that saves even more money. All of it hopefully puts them in a better place.”

Au-Wong, who continues to run the program today, finds vegetables that are versatile in Hawaii kitchens and are known to thrive in the environment, like bok choy, green beans, Asian purple eggplant and the Komo­hana grape tomato, a tomato variety developed by UH specifically for Hawaii soil.

In her role, she also provides “(Electronic Benefits Transfer) accepted here” signage to local city and county farmers markets across the state. It’s another aspect of SNAP benefits that many Hawaii-based users don’t know about, she said, but can make all the difference in their health outcomes.

“The very day I put up the signs (at Kaumoali‘i Farmers Market in Kalihi), there was a gentleman walking and saw the standing sign and stopped. He’s reading it and then he said, ‘Hey, mom, look! This farmers market takes EBT. We can use our EBT here!’” Au-Wong said. “I did Hilo Farmers Market last year because they accepted (EBT) but they didn’t have signage at the produce section, so it’s like, how would people know?”

Around 940 local businesses accept and rely on SNAP EBT, Tokuda told the Star-Advertiser. The cuts to SNAP-Ed wouldn’t just affect SNAP users — the ripple effect, she said, would be expansive.

“You’re talking about people not being able to eat. You’re talking about the fact that you’re going to have a significant amount less of EBT dollars being used at grocery stores and general stores that accept SNAP EBT,” Tokuda said. “It won’t just be impacting families that need to eat. The places that they were spending those dollars will also be impacted by having less customers and less SNAP dollars flowing through their businesses.”

Hansen Smith said that while the cuts would not necessarily wipe out SNAP as a whole, the possibility that SNAP-Ed could end would take away resources and perpetuate a cycle of low-income individuals and families being unable to have the access and options of healthy food.

“The work we do is stealthy, it’s underground. People want to make healthy choices, but if it’s harder to do that, then they’re not going to,” Hansen Smith said. “If we make it easier to say, ‘Here’s fresh vegetables at a farmers market’ than it is to say ‘Go to McDonald’s and grab a hamburger,’ it’s just providing those choices and options.”