The End of SNAP-Ed Leaves Underserved Communities With Even Fewer Resources
Phyllis Pacheco, 72, lives about 6 miles from the New Mexico border in an unincorporated community called Lobatos, so small that its mailing address is nearby Antonito, Colorado. She’s lived there most of her life, and still works as a certified nursing assistant. Pacheco took cooking classes offered by Conejos County twice in 2020, healthy food education that taught her to shop better, read food package labels more effectively, and prepare more nutritious dishes. “Instructor Lois was a real pro in presenting the classes and made them fun and educational,” she said. “I found the shopping class very educational, and to this day I am using the skills I learned and very much appreciated. There was excellent turnout for the classes. We needed and wanted them in this area.” While Colorado has a strong health ranking, Conejos County has a low overall health equity score and higher rates of obesity and lifestyle-related diseases. For residents like Pacheco, cooking classes help to make mealtime “colorful and appetizing,” but also heart-healthy and lower in fat, salt, and sugar. Those healthy cooking classes are a casualty of a Trump administration decision to end SNAP-Ed, the longstanding educational arm of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). SNAP-Ed started as a pilot program in 1977 and was formalized in 1992. “There will be some losses in my community,” Pacheco said. “We won’t have that guidance, or help in comparing quantity and quality when we shop for groceries.” For more than three decades, SNAP-Ed has helped millions of food-insecure Americans make healthier food choices. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act eliminated the program in July, giving program administrators 90 days to dismantle a nationwide network of nutrition classes and outreach efforts. Funding ended Sept. 30. Some states, like Georgia, will be able to keep their SNAP-Ed programs intact for about a year due to other funding sources, but other states, like Colorado, are already experiencing significant losses, starting with staff layoffs at nutrition programs. At a time when food prices are at a record high, reducing the infrastructure and staff for community nutrition work will have a cascade of long-term consequences, according to public health nutrition experts. Experts are concerned that eliminating SNAP-Ed—community-level guidance in healthier home cooking and food choices—will exacerbate Americans’ poor metabolic health and likely drive even more reliance on ultra-processed foods. Potential Nationwide Impacts of Snap-Ed’s End SNAP-Ed brought nutrition education directly to around 2 million low-income Americans annually, and to another 10 million through community collaborations. Its work was carried out in more than 23,000 community sites that helped individuals and families make healthier, cost-effective food choices through cooking classes, physical activity promotion, and other activities. In 2025, SNAP-Ed’s budget was $536 million, less than 1 percent of SNAP’s total budget. SNAP recipients receive $2.23 per meal in SNAP benefits on average, making it a challenge to put nutritious food on the table, but SNAP-Ed aimed to help recipients stretch their food dollars further. SNAP-Ed’s elimination was justified by a 2019 U.S. Government Accountability Office report that claimed poor coordination across programs, program duplication, and insufficient information on whether the program met its goals. In some sense, redundancy or duplication was baked into how SNAP-Ed was administered. Federal SNAP-Ed money was doled out to states, which in turn decided upon implementing agencies, which in turn partnered with community-based organizations. This meant there might be two organizations in one low-income community that, while overlapping geographically, served different populations. A neighborhood’s community center and a food pantry down the street might both have offered “better for you” cooking classes, demonstrations, or literature funded by SNAP-Ed, for instance. “So much of the work SNAP-Ed did isn’t visibly SNAP-Ed, because it was seamlessly integrated with partners,” said Chris Mornick, policy committee co-chair with the Association of State Public Health Nutritionists and a member of the leadership team of the Association of SNAP Nutrition Education Administrators (ASNNSA). “We had subcontractors who didn’t even realize they were funded through this federal program.” It’s also difficult to measure success for a program like SNAP-Ed and whether it prompted participants to change their cooking and eating habits. But USDA studies have shown that for every $1 spent on SNAP-Ed, up to $10.64 is saved in healthcare costs. For national anti-hunger organizations, the end of SNAP-Ed is less immediate and quantifiable than when 42 million Americans were at risk of losing SNAP food assistance benefits during the government shutdown. But it will undoubtedly impact the infrastructure and staff for community nutrition work, for which SNAP-Ed was one of the largest funding sources, said Carolyn Vega, associate director of policy analysis at No Kid Hungry. “We won’t fully realize the effects of that for a number of years,” she said. Grassroots community organizations will be hit particularly hard, said Mornick. “Small community-led organizations relied on SNAP-Ed to support their work, and they don’t have another way to fill that gap,” she said. Roughly 12,000 jobs will be lost nationwide, according to ASNNSA. The program’s end also jeopardizes classes and educational support for local schools, food pantries, community gardens, and families. States are allowed to spend residual money from the program until September 2026, so a patchwork of programming will continue. States will all be affected differently, said Gina Crist, who has overseen SNAP-Ed’s work in Delaware. Some states have employed SNAP-Ed educators in the hundreds, others as few as a dozen—“and it’s not that the largest states have the largest number of employees.” Colorado as a Case Study in State SNAP-Ed Losses SNAP-Ed’s funding formula was based half on historic precedent and half on SNAP participation. Colorado was in the middle of the pack. It will lose $6.3 million in annual federal funding due to SNAP-Ed’s elimination, and more than 40 full-time positions will be cut across the state at the two implementing agencies, Nourish Colorado and the University of Colorado’s Rocky Mountain Prevention Research Center, as well as at the community organizations they partner with; those cuts have already begun. Denver resident Dinah, 31, who preferred to not share her last name, lives in a household of three that includes her 9-year-old son. She works part-time a few days a week doing cleaning and childcare and has taken SNAP-Ed cooking classes at Metro Caring, a local anti-hunger organization. The classes helped her in many ways, including learning new cooking techniques, meeting new people, practicing the English language, and breaking out of her routine, she said through a Spanish translator. For example, she learned different methods for seasoning food, such as incorporating maple syrup and pepper, which were not common in her kitchen. “I think that if we lose these classes,” she said, “we not only lose the opportunity to connect with different people, but also the chance to learn about nutrition and how it relates to our family’s future and how to create new things through cooking.” Colorado’s SNAP-Ed program had three components: a school-based nutrition education program and a preschool program, both overseen by UC Denver, and Cooking Matters classes for adults and caregivers, overseen by Nourish Colorado. Nourish Colorado had 17 employees this summer, according to Executive Director Wendy Peters Moschetti. It now has 12. “We had to let go everyone who was fully funded from SNAP-Ed. Six of us had partial funding from SNAP-Ed, so we were able to fill that for the rest of 2025,” she said. “The other losses people don’t talk about are the loss of administrative overhead that organizations lose when large contracts just disappear,” she added, and said the SNAP-Ed contract was going to pay Nourish Colorado $170,000 for administrative, overhead, and indirect costs in fiscal year 2026, in addition to paying nutrition education staff salaries. “Now that is all gone as well,” she said. “So, now the rest of our work has to cover all administrative costs with zero time for us as an organization to pivot or fundraise. Organizations like ours are in a real pickle and are facing a very tight 2026 without private dollars coming in to help with the loss of something so significant.” Peters Moschetti said Nourish no longer provides nutrition education, but the team is continuing its farm-to-school programming, another program that provides extra cash for households to purchase fruits and vegetables, and its state and federal policy advocacy work. “Broadly speaking, what we are losing is support for food pantries and corner stores that want to highlight and promote fresh foods, and support for schools to integrate more school gardens and other things,” she said, adding that even the toolkits and online resources intended to help agencies make data-informed decisions will go away with the end of the program. The Trickle-Down Effect in Colorado Jazmin Bojorquez was one of the staffers who lost her job on Sept. 30 with Nourish Colorado, where she served as the policy, systems, and environmental (PSE) change manager. Her four-person team, all funded by SNAP-Ed, were laid off, too. They spent their final 60 days winding down a 30-year program: reporting on impact, closing down initiatives, and getting remaining funds into the field. “As examples of PSE, we would have food skills and nutrition messaging at corner stores, food pantries, mobile markets, and farmers’ markets, where we would share ideas on how to use familiar and unfamiliar produce,” Bojorquez said. “We would use community gardens as social hubs and expand growing operations at large food pantries so we didn’t always have to purchase food.” One effort aimed to improve infant and maternal health with a baby café offered in many counties. Moms would receive lactation consultation in addition to nutrition education and cooking classes, as well as vouchers for shopping at the free food market downstairs. Bojorquez has started her own urban planning consulting firm but said that former colleagues are still looking for work. A Nourish Colorado partner, Denver’s Metro Caring, used SNAP-Ed funding for community-led nutrition classes like Cocina y Nutrición and Kidz in the Kitchen, offered in both English and Spanish, which Dinah attended. The collaboration allowed Metro Caring to provide nutrition education, cooking classes, and lactation support, according to Brandon McKinley, Metro Caring’s communications and marketing specialist. Thus far, he said, they have dropped one cooking class but have managed to retain staff by moving resources around. Metro Caring received SNAP-Ed funding for the first time this year, which created new possibilities and stability, especially for nutrition programs, McKinley said. The loss will impact ingredient sourcing for classes and grocery store-style food markets offering free, culturally specific foods. “Overall, this is yet another blow to an already unstable funding period,” he said. “It comes on the heels of the federal government’s Local Food Purchasing Agreement not being renewed.” Andrea Cervantes, Metro Caring’s nutrition team lead, depended on the Bridge Project, which she said was a community-support organization similar to Metro Caring, while growing up in subsidized housing in Denver. “A program in low-income housing for decades, it helped fund some of my education, and I was able to come back as a nutrition educator in their summer programming,” she said. “We had a makeshift kitchen where we taught kids from kindergarten to high school. Denver’s a diverse community, so I got to learn about different cultures.” Cervantes said the people she teaches at Metro Caring are hungry for any sort of relatable nutrition information. “They are people who want to share a safe space,” she said. “It’s families and often older retired folks who have medical conditions, and they want to learn more about nutrition to manage their conditions.” Cervantes is currently still teaching, but the way forward is hazy. “Our hope is to continue programming. We are going to figure it out,” she said. “We just don’t know how yet.” The post The End of SNAP-Ed Leaves Underserved Communities With Even Fewer Resources appeared first on Civil Eats.
“Instructor Lois was a real pro in presenting the classes and made them fun and educational,” she said. “I found the shopping class very educational, and to this day I am using the skills I learned and very much appreciated. There was excellent turnout for the classes. We needed and wanted them in this area.” […] The post The End of SNAP-Ed Leaves Underserved Communities With Even Fewer Resources appeared first on Civil Eats.
Phyllis Pacheco, 72, lives about 6 miles from the New Mexico border in an unincorporated community called Lobatos, so small that its mailing address is nearby Antonito, Colorado. She’s lived there most of her life, and still works as a certified nursing assistant. Pacheco took cooking classes offered by Conejos County twice in 2020, healthy food education that taught her to shop better, read food package labels more effectively, and prepare more nutritious dishes.
“Instructor Lois was a real pro in presenting the classes and made them fun and educational,” she said. “I found the shopping class very educational, and to this day I am using the skills I learned and very much appreciated. There was excellent turnout for the classes. We needed and wanted them in this area.”
While Colorado has a strong health ranking, Conejos County has a low overall health equity score and higher rates of obesity and lifestyle-related diseases. For residents like Pacheco, cooking classes help to make mealtime “colorful and appetizing,” but also heart-healthy and lower in fat, salt, and sugar.
Those healthy cooking classes are a casualty of a Trump administration decision to end SNAP-Ed, the longstanding educational arm of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). SNAP-Ed started as a pilot program in 1977 and was formalized in 1992.
“There will be some losses in my community,” Pacheco said. “We won’t have that guidance, or help in comparing quantity and quality when we shop for groceries.”
For more than three decades, SNAP-Ed has helped millions of food-insecure Americans make healthier food choices. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act eliminated the program in July, giving program administrators 90 days to dismantle a nationwide network of nutrition classes and outreach efforts. Funding ended Sept. 30.
Some states, like Georgia, will be able to keep their SNAP-Ed programs intact for about a year due to other funding sources, but other states, like Colorado, are already experiencing significant losses, starting with staff layoffs at nutrition programs.
At a time when food prices are at a record high, reducing the infrastructure and staff for community nutrition work will have a cascade of long-term consequences, according to public health nutrition experts. Experts are concerned that eliminating SNAP-Ed—community-level guidance in healthier home cooking and food choices—will exacerbate Americans’ poor metabolic health and likely drive even more reliance on ultra-processed foods.
Potential Nationwide Impacts of Snap-Ed’s End
SNAP-Ed brought nutrition education directly to around 2 million low-income Americans annually, and to another 10 million through community collaborations. Its work was carried out in more than 23,000 community sites that helped individuals and families make healthier, cost-effective food choices through cooking classes, physical activity promotion, and other activities.
In 2025, SNAP-Ed’s budget was $536 million, less than 1 percent of SNAP’s total budget. SNAP recipients receive $2.23 per meal in SNAP benefits on average, making it a challenge to put nutritious food on the table, but SNAP-Ed aimed to help recipients stretch their food dollars further.
SNAP-Ed’s elimination was justified by a 2019 U.S. Government Accountability Office report that claimed poor coordination across programs, program duplication, and insufficient information on whether the program met its goals.
In some sense, redundancy or duplication was baked into how SNAP-Ed was administered. Federal SNAP-Ed money was doled out to states, which in turn decided upon implementing agencies, which in turn partnered with community-based organizations.
This meant there might be two organizations in one low-income community that, while overlapping geographically, served different populations. A neighborhood’s community center and a food pantry down the street might both have offered “better for you” cooking classes, demonstrations, or literature funded by SNAP-Ed, for instance.
“So much of the work SNAP-Ed did isn’t visibly SNAP-Ed, because it was seamlessly integrated with partners,” said Chris Mornick, policy committee co-chair with the Association of State Public Health Nutritionists and a member of the leadership team of the Association of SNAP Nutrition Education Administrators (ASNNSA). “We had subcontractors who didn’t even realize they were funded through this federal program.”
It’s also difficult to measure success for a program like SNAP-Ed and whether it prompted participants to change their cooking and eating habits. But USDA studies have shown that for every $1 spent on SNAP-Ed, up to $10.64 is saved in healthcare costs.
For national anti-hunger organizations, the end of SNAP-Ed is less immediate and quantifiable than when 42 million Americans were at risk of losing SNAP food assistance benefits during the government shutdown. But it will undoubtedly impact the infrastructure and staff for community nutrition work, for which SNAP-Ed was one of the largest funding sources, said Carolyn Vega, associate director of policy analysis at No Kid Hungry.
“We won’t fully realize the effects of that for a number of years,” she said.
Grassroots community organizations will be hit particularly hard, said Mornick. “Small community-led organizations relied on SNAP-Ed to support their work, and they don’t have another way to fill that gap,” she said.
Roughly 12,000 jobs will be lost nationwide, according to ASNNSA. The program’s end also jeopardizes classes and educational support for local schools, food pantries, community gardens, and families. States are allowed to spend residual money from the program until September 2026, so a patchwork of programming will continue.
States will all be affected differently, said Gina Crist, who has overseen SNAP-Ed’s work in Delaware. Some states have employed SNAP-Ed educators in the hundreds, others as few as a dozen—“and it’s not that the largest states have the largest number of employees.”
Colorado as a Case Study in State SNAP-Ed Losses
SNAP-Ed’s funding formula was based half on historic precedent and half on SNAP participation. Colorado was in the middle of the pack. It will lose $6.3 million in annual federal funding due to SNAP-Ed’s elimination, and more than 40 full-time positions will be cut across the state at the two implementing agencies, Nourish Colorado and the University of Colorado’s Rocky Mountain Prevention Research Center, as well as at the community organizations they partner with; those cuts have already begun.
Denver resident Dinah, 31, who preferred to not share her last name, lives in a household of three that includes her 9-year-old son. She works part-time a few days a week doing cleaning and childcare and has taken SNAP-Ed cooking classes at Metro Caring, a local anti-hunger organization.
The classes helped her in many ways, including learning new cooking techniques, meeting new people, practicing the English language, and breaking out of her routine, she said through a Spanish translator. For example, she learned different methods for seasoning food, such as incorporating maple syrup and pepper, which were not common in her kitchen.
“I think that if we lose these classes,” she said, “we not only lose the opportunity to connect with different people, but also the chance to learn about nutrition and how it relates to our family’s future and how to create new things through cooking.”
Colorado’s SNAP-Ed program had three components: a school-based nutrition education program and a preschool program, both overseen by UC Denver, and Cooking Matters classes for adults and caregivers, overseen by Nourish Colorado.
Nourish Colorado had 17 employees this summer, according to Executive Director Wendy Peters Moschetti. It now has 12.
“We had to let go everyone who was fully funded from SNAP-Ed. Six of us had partial funding from SNAP-Ed, so we were able to fill that for the rest of 2025,” she said.
“The other losses people don’t talk about are the loss of administrative overhead that organizations lose when large contracts just disappear,” she added, and said the SNAP-Ed contract was going to pay Nourish Colorado $170,000 for administrative, overhead, and indirect costs in fiscal year 2026, in addition to paying nutrition education staff salaries.
“Now that is all gone as well,” she said. “So, now the rest of our work has to cover all administrative costs with zero time for us as an organization to pivot or fundraise. Organizations like ours are in a real pickle and are facing a very tight 2026 without private dollars coming in to help with the loss of something so significant.”
Peters Moschetti said Nourish no longer provides nutrition education, but the team is continuing its farm-to-school programming, another program that provides extra cash for households to purchase fruits and vegetables, and its state and federal policy advocacy work.
“Broadly speaking, what we are losing is support for food pantries and corner stores that want to highlight and promote fresh foods, and support for schools to integrate more school gardens and other things,” she said, adding that even the toolkits and online resources intended to help agencies make data-informed decisions will go away with the end of the program.
The Trickle-Down Effect in Colorado
Jazmin Bojorquez was one of the staffers who lost her job on Sept. 30 with Nourish Colorado, where she served as the policy, systems, and environmental (PSE) change manager. Her four-person team, all funded by SNAP-Ed, were laid off, too. They spent their final 60 days winding down a 30-year program: reporting on impact, closing down initiatives, and getting remaining funds into the field.
“As examples of PSE, we would have food skills and nutrition messaging at corner stores, food pantries, mobile markets, and farmers’ markets, where we would share ideas on how to use familiar and unfamiliar produce,” Bojorquez said. “We would use community gardens as social hubs and expand growing operations at large food pantries so we didn’t always have to purchase food.”
One effort aimed to improve infant and maternal health with a baby café offered in many counties. Moms would receive lactation consultation in addition to nutrition education and cooking classes, as well as vouchers for shopping at the free food market downstairs.
Bojorquez has started her own urban planning consulting firm but said that former colleagues are still looking for work.
A Nourish Colorado partner, Denver’s Metro Caring, used SNAP-Ed funding for community-led nutrition classes like Cocina y Nutrición and Kidz in the Kitchen, offered in both English and Spanish, which Dinah attended. The collaboration allowed Metro Caring to provide nutrition education, cooking classes, and lactation support, according to Brandon McKinley, Metro Caring’s communications and marketing specialist.
Thus far, he said, they have dropped one cooking class but have managed to retain staff by moving resources around.
Metro Caring received SNAP-Ed funding for the first time this year, which created new possibilities and stability, especially for nutrition programs, McKinley said. The loss will impact ingredient sourcing for classes and grocery store-style food markets offering free, culturally specific foods.
“Overall, this is yet another blow to an already unstable funding period,” he said. “It comes on the heels of the federal government’s Local Food Purchasing Agreement not being renewed.”
Andrea Cervantes, Metro Caring’s nutrition team lead, depended on the Bridge Project, which she said was a community-support organization similar to Metro Caring, while growing up in subsidized housing in Denver.
“A program in low-income housing for decades, it helped fund some of my education, and I was able to come back as a nutrition educator in their summer programming,” she said. “We had a makeshift kitchen where we taught kids from kindergarten to high school. Denver’s a diverse community, so I got to learn about different cultures.”
Cervantes said the people she teaches at Metro Caring are hungry for any sort of relatable nutrition information.
“They are people who want to share a safe space,” she said. “It’s families and often older retired folks who have medical conditions, and they want to learn more about nutrition to manage their conditions.”
Cervantes is currently still teaching, but the way forward is hazy.
“Our hope is to continue programming. We are going to figure it out,” she said. “We just don’t know how yet.”
The post The End of SNAP-Ed Leaves Underserved Communities With Even Fewer Resources appeared first on Civil Eats.