Immigrants and Food Stamps Pub!

I almost forgot! I have a new publication coming out tomorrow in New York. I'm only the third author and I haven't been working on this stuff for a while, what with the living in Peru and all. It's from my old job at the Urban Justice Center. The supervisor that I had there, Rebecca was just a rock star, very intense, but very good at her job. We did research for advocacy purposes about the implementation of the Food Stamps Program in New York City, so basically we were just trying to figure out how to get more Food Stamps to more people efficiently and legally. In New York there are a lot of new immigrants and a lot of new immigrants are really struggling financially so some are eligible for Food Stamps. The report makes some suggestions to the city about how to make Food Stamps more accesible to immigrants.

There are all kinds of issues with people being weird about immigrants getting Food Stamps. "Those people come here and take advantage," kind of bologna. But, after interviewing a hundred immigrants or so about food stamps I feel like I'm in a position to say that it is a very rare person who is willing to ask for help if they don't REALLY need it and a lot of people who do really need it are still too proud or too scared to ask for help. Also, the eligibility guidelines are very strict so a lot of documented immigrants aren't eligible and if they're not documented, well that's a total lost cause. Anyway, I think Nourishing NYC: Increasing Food Stamps Access in Immigrant Communities will be available at this link starting tomorrow. It's a lot less polemical than I am here. You know, data and all.