Are you making the most of your NCRC Membership?

Learn what resources, services, content and networking opportunities your membership includes and how being a NCRC member can help you in your fight for a #JustEconomy. NCRC staff share tips for making the most of your membership and provide a walk-through of NCRC’s newest member features.

Speakers

• Caitie Rountree, Director of Membership and Events, NCRC
• Diane Ashong, Membership Engagement Manager, NCRC
• Ralph Cyrus, Membership Engagement Specialist, NCRC
• Tara Flynn, Policy Director, NCRC
• Jacelyn Matthews, Director of National Training Academy, NCRC

Transcript:

NCRC video transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. They are lightly edited for style and clarity.

Rountree 0:06
Well, welcome to this conversation on what it means to be an NCRC member. We’re excited to have you here. Whether you are a longtime member learning a little bit more about our membership benefits, a newer member, an organization exploring membership, or maybe you are a staff person at an organization that’s been a member for a long time, but you’ve never actually directly engaged with NCRC. Wherever you’re coming from today, we’re glad you’re here.

Just a little bit of housekeeping before we jump into our conversation today. This event, as all our events, whether virtual or in person, is subject to NCRC’s code of conduct. Please take a look at that if you need a refresher on like to engage in spaces respectfully. But high expectations of all of you. One note: we do not allow AI chatbots on the webinar. This webinar is being recorded, and the recording and slides will be shared afterwards. So our staff will be removing chatbots, but don’t worry; the content will be shared with all registrants afterwards. Please submit questions along the way in the Q and A button at the bottom of your screen. A small thing: if you have updated Zoom recently, you may look for that box and find that it has moved. If you don’t see it where you normally do, click on the more icon with the three dots and look for the Q and A box there. And we’ll answer some of those as we go along. And we’ll also pause along the way to answer verbally. And make sure to follow us on our social media accounts so that you can stay in the loop with new developments.

All right, I would love to introduce the rest of our speakers today, and before we get to that, I’ll I’ll tell you a little bit about NCRC as an organization. So we’re a national advocacy organization, a network of over 700 member organizations working to advance wealth equity by improving how capital flows into communities. We convene leaders just like you across sectors to advance policy change, expand opportunities, and strengthen a financial system that better serves communities and shares prosperity. We do that through three primary strategies: by boosting knowledge, by building capacity, and by bridging access. Together, these strategies help create an economy where communities have greater power to shape local growth, where families have a fair opportunity to build wealth, and financial institutions are more accountable to the people and communities that they serve. That’s the foundation that NCRC was built on. So the natural next question is, what does that mean for you, and why does it make sense to be a part of this coalition?

So NCRC combines advocacy, coalition building and accountability strategies to drive systemic change. As a national convener, we bring together community organizations, policymakers, financial institutions and corporate leaders to develop solutions that strengthen communities and expand opportunity. Our network-driven approach connects local experience, policy expertise and investment initiatives that ensure that communities have both a voice and a seat at the table. You’ve heard what NCRC is and what we do, but membership isn’t measured by a list of benefits. It’s measured by what those benefits actually make possible. So instead of giving you a catalog of services, I’d actually like to show you membership in action. We’re going to talk about a real member, anonymous, but I think you’ll be able to get a sense of the organization, a real challenge that they brought to us, and just one way that NCRC helped them achieve an outcome that they couldn’t have accomplished as easily on their own.

One of our members is a homeownership nonprofit in the Upper Midwest that operates a down payment assistance loan program. Like many community organizations, they were doing really important work, but they didn’t have an in-house research team. They wanted to better understand their program’s impact, where it was succeeding, where there were opportunities to improve, and how to communicate those findings to the partners and funders investing in the work. So they came to NCRC’s research team for help. Our researchers conducted a loan-level analysis and delivered a comprehensive impact report, complete with data visualizations, supporting analysis and practical insights they could immediately put to use. The result wasn’t just a polished report; it helped the organization better understand what was happening in their community, so they could strengthen their program and better meet local needs. It also gave them credible evidence to show partners and funders how investing in this work could improve the flow of capital in the community and expand opportunities for homeownership.

That’s what membership looks like across our network. Your organization doesn’t have to solve every challenge alone. Through the coalition, you gain access to research, to policy expertise, training, and relationships that help your organization better understand community needs, strengthen your work, and ultimately help communities shape how opportunity and investment flow where they’re needed most. So, if we can move to the next slide, I’m about to introduce you to a couple of different people who bring that same kind of support in very different ways. Tara from our policy team, and then Jacelyn from our National Training Academy. They’ll show you two more examples of how NCRC’s expert staff partners with members to strengthen our communities. So Tara, I’m going to turn it over to you.

Flynn 5:01
Great, hi everybody. I’m Tara Flynn. I’m NCRC’s policy director. Just for context, I started here about six months ago after a career in federal government as a consumer protection attorney at the FTC and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Our policy team is small but mighty, and I should note that we work really closely with the research team that got such a nice shout-out just now, Caitie. You know they do fantastic work, and they provide essential data analysis for our policy work, and obviously provide that same assistance to members. So officially, the policy team is four people. We’re all up on the screen. Our fearless leader, Eden Forsythe, who heads up policy and research. Kevin Hill, who is a senior policy analyst, and he focuses a lot on Community Reinvestment Act-related issues. Manon Shah, he’s a policy analyst who focuses on CDFI and small business issues, and I focus on the intersection of fintech and banking. And lately, that has meant I’ve been focusing a lot on stablecoin and crypto. We, you know, I’ve said we specialize or focus on certain areas, but we are all available. If you ever need anything, you don’t need to know which one to talk to. We all talk to each other. So, what does this policy team do? Well, we provide strategic direction on policy research and advocacy for NCRC. That means you know we think about how we should deploy our resources, what issues we should prioritize, what we should engage on, and what we should respond to. We also analyze policies and proposals and translate them into hopefully practical guidance for members. That’s figuring out essentially how legislative and regulatory proposals impact our core issues, and I’ll talk a little bit more about that in a bit. And we also create a lot of educational content, webinars, things up on our website, and you know, comment letters, draft model comment letters, things like that that can help educate and provide assistance to our members.

We form strategies for our advocacy, and you know that again, we want to figure out how can we effectively impact the debate and hopefully impact the outcome. So we also try to bring members’ experience into policymaking, and one way we do that is connecting members with Capitol Hill staff. For example, in connection with our opposition to the digital asset market structure bill known as the Clarity Act, we requested meetings from the staffs of senators who had voted for the Genius Act, which is the bill that was passed last year about stablecoin. But the Clarity Act is a broader bill, and so we wanted to talk to senators before they voted on it in at the Senate Banking Committee. So one of our big concerns is whether stablecoin and crypto might cause the deposits to migrate out of banks, and then deposits wouldn’t be available for lending and investment in communities. So we made our request for these meetings. We got a couple meetings, and then we reached out. One was in Georgia, Senator Ossoff of Georgia, and Senator Gallego of Arizona. And then we got members. We asked members, and they graciously agreed to attend these meetings with us as constituents, and that really helped. Their participation and their sharing of their stories of how a lack of capital impacts their communities was really helpful, and I think strengthened our advocacy. So that’s just an example of the way that we try to do that, bring stories to Capitol Hill. And we also mobilize membership around our shared priorities, and you know try to identify opportunities to influence public policy. We’ll talk a bit more about it on a later slide, but there are lots of opportunities for NCRC members to influence public policy and our advocacy. So I have a quick example from this week. There was the House Financial Services Committee was considering a bill called the Main Street Access to Capital Bill, which had some good CDFI provisions in it, but mostly it was terrible. It was a deregulatory bill, so the vote was coming up fast. We had to mobilize quickly. We wrote a letter and we sent out a call to members to see if they would sign on. And even though we only had three hours to do it, we got 30 members to sign on. And then the ranking member of the House Financial Services Committee actually referenced the letter, and most importantly, that members from throughout the country had signed on to it. So mobilizing membership and using our collective voice is an important part of what we do.

So what are our priorities? So they’re written out here, and I think they’re probably, hopefully, shared priorities for you all too. We want to hold financial institutions accountable to communities, especially the communities that they serve. We want to strengthen and protect the Community Reinvestment Act and fair lending laws. Advance fair lending and combat discrimination in mortgage lending, appraisals, and insurance and access to housing. We want to expand affordable home ownership, rental housing, responsible credit for underserved communities, and increase investment in CDFIs, affordable housing, and community development.

So, how can we work together? Well, I already talked a little bit about comment letters. I gave the you know previous example, but that is one way that we are able to work together, have a collective voice. We often also provide draft comment letters or help member organizations with their comment letters about legislation, or actually, you know, regulation, which is another big area that we focus on. We hold a monthly call to keep members apprised of what our regulatory or legislative developments in that may actually impact our priority areas. So that’s something that’s a give and take and a conversation. And we also have Hill Day on there. During the Just Economy Conference, we dedicate a whole day to going to the Hill to share our stories and share our priorities with members of Congress and well, more likely their staffs. But it’s a great opportunity for us all to create and enhance our relationships with members of Congress and promote NCRC’s legislative priorities. And we coalition and connection formation-that’s super important. We all don’t all have the same issues that we value different issues differently, and so it’s important that when people have priority issues, that we can work, you know, get the group of people who are really interested in a particular issue together and share ideas. So we set up smaller groups, talk about issues. For example, we have a group that talks about 1071 business lending data collection. We have another one that someone suggested recently on leg-reg call about Small Business Administration loans and lending practices. These coalitions can also include work with state groups, several state groups where we’re trying to advance legislation. We had a very successful effort with advancing legislation in Illinois for a state CRA, working with the Illinois CRA Coalition to strengthen Illinois’s CRA law. And speaking of CRA, sort of going back to the you know how we can stay informed and mobilize our members. I wanted to do a quick shout-out for the fact that we are having a webinar next Wednesday at 330, and that is, you know, the NCRC’s president and CEO Jesse Van Tol and the policy team will be sharing our latest intel about proposed changes to the Community Reinvestment Act and how to work together to prevent it from being significantly weakened. So that’s just an example of I think of several of these things that we’ve talked about. But providing ways to stay informed, mobilizing our membership, and I think it’s a great example. And I hope any of you who are interested do attend. I think I’ve covered everything. I hope that I gave you a little bit of a flavor of the kind of policy work we do, and you know how we can work together to try to advance our priorities. So, if you have any questions, please contact me. I shared that picture because that was right before I testified before Congress. Very exciting day for me.

Rountree 13:59
We all cheered really loud for Tara. Yeah, thank you so much, Tara, for sharing and for your continued advocacy on behalf of and with our members. So research helps our members understand what’s happening in their communities. Our policy team helps shape the systems that affect those communities. But lasting change also depends on the people doing the work every day, that’s where our National Training Academy comes in. Jacelyn and her team equip practitioners with the knowledge, skills, and technical assistance they need to translate ideas into action and create stronger outcomes in the communities that they serve. So, Jacelyn, I’m going to turn it over to you to introduce your team and talk about how y’all work with NCRC members,

Matthews 14:41
Thanks, Caitie, and thank you all for being with us this afternoon to learn more about the benefits of membership. As Caitie mentioned, I’m the director of the National Training Academy here at NCRC. My name is Jacelyn Matthews, and on my team is Doug Mollet, who is our program manager, Sally Sim, who is another program manager, and then Simon Wang, who is our project specialist. I will say that Doug and Simon are leading our work when it comes to economic mobility, and then Sally works really closely on our housing counseling trainings.

So just to kind of give you an idea of who we are and what we do as NTA, the National Training Academy here. We really are the professional development and capacity-building arm for NCRC. So we work on equipping nonprofit organizations, housing counselors, as I mentioned, financial counselors, workforce development professionals, and community practitioners with the tools they need to really strengthen their organizations and better serve their communities. We want to make sure people feel really equipped to do the work they do, so any way that we can hone or enhance those skills, we are here to do so through the trainings that we offer. So it’s whether through our trainings, whether it’s like technical assistance that we offer, peer learning cohorts, and specialized initiatives, our goal really is to help organizations build capacity and create lasting community impact.

Um, so they already switched over to the slide that talks about the work that we do and the type of topics that we cover through our programming. So as you can see, we’re offering live webinars and virtual trainings. We don’t want a webinar just to be a webinar. We don’t want you to spend 90 minutes of your day just to kind of have information kind of force-fed to you. We really want it to be a deeper dive on a topic that is of interest to you. So we do like to get feedback from our community about what are some of the things that they’re seeing in the field that they want to learn a little bit more about. We try to be as responsive as possible in what we offer. We do offer multi-day, in-person trainings, usually just on one topic, where again we’re trying to drill down and give you really like the meat of the topic, so that you feel better prepared to do the work that you are already doing a great job at. But how can we help to hone some of those skills? As I mentioned, place-based learning experiences, professional development for individuals and teams. Again, if you’re wanting to grow your team and build on their tools, we want to make sure we’re able to do that as well. Technical assistance and implementation support, specialized workforce and economic mobility initiatives, and as you can see here, we cover a range of topics. This is not an exhaustive list; it’s just an example of some of the things that we cover. But wanted to give you an idea of what we do.

I did want to highlight some of the work that our economic mobility team has been working on with our SNAP E&T. So SNAP E&T is employment and training. They’re focused on that. So this initiative helps NCRC, NCRC is helping actually workforce development organizations to understand, launch, and strengthen SNAP employment and training programs that connect individuals receiving SNAP benefits with education, skills training, employment opportunities and supportive services. So NTA provides technical assistance and toolkits statewide, learning cohorts and peer learning opportunities that help organizations navigate program requirements and become successful third-party providers. So this work expands organizations’ ability to secure additional resources for their organization, while increasing economic mobility for communities that they serve. And so, we’ve seen some of that take place in Kentucky, for example. We were able to get a number of organizations to be able to get this additional SNAP E&T funding, and that’s something that we have really prided ourselves on what we’ve been able to do, and if you’re wanting more information about that, that information I think is going to be dropped in the chat, so you can kind of get a better sense of the SAP E&T work.

I also want to mention before we move on to the next one. So when it comes to our professional development for individuals and teams, just to give you an idea of what we do there as a member, if you are reaching out because you have some changes on your staff, or there’s some key items and things that you want them to learn and grow in, we have been able to send out an instructor that can actually lead trainings for you in the organization within your within your organization or within your your center or your offices. So it’s not that you have to bring everyone over to where we are to learn said topic. If it is an in-person training, it’s not that you can only bring one or two people and have to bring back the information. This is something that you can actually reach out to us and say, like, hey, we would like someone that can bring this information to our office so that everybody can hear it in real time and be able to respond and ask questions, etc. So that is a benefit as well.

As a member of NCRC, how you can leverage the work with NTA. So again, there’s access to discounted member pricing on trains and events. Right now, there is a cost for all of our trainings, but the great thing is that members receive either free or heavily discounted access to said trainings. You’re able to attend member-exclusive webinars, develop new and existing staff through professional development, as I mentioned before, earn continual education credits when available, staying informed about emerging policies, regulations, and best practices, and I won’t read all of these here to you, but I think that what I want to highlight is that we also work really closely with other departments across the organization. So if they’re wanting to put on webinars to showcase subject matter expertise internally about the work that they’re doing, we work with them to create those topics as well. So we are not just focused on housing counseling and economic mobility, but there’s opportunities for you to have a better understanding of the work that’s happening across the organization through some of the webinars that we do hold as well.

And so, I do want to make sure that I make mention of if you are interested, particularly when it comes to housing counseling topics. Part of the great thing about what we offer is that you’re able to get all of the prep that you need to either become a housing counseling agency, to be certified as a HUD-certified housing counselor, or even to become a HECCOM-certified housing counselor, do offer those trainings as well, so that people are able to get what they need. Whether that is as a virtual training, we had an in-person training in Milwaukee on HECCOM just last month, or if it is something that we’re able to offer, so that if you’re not able to actually join for the virtual training that’s happening when it comes to HECCOM or housing counseling, that there is something that’s self-paced, right? So that you’re able to do it on your time and then be able to come back and ask questions and you know receive support on those things as well. So I do think that what we have to offer, one, we are getting some of the best trainers in the business, right? So that you are again information that’s on the cutting edge of what’s out there. Nothing’s dated. We try to make sure that we are always giving you something that’s new, exciting, and fresh because we know that things are constantly changing, right? In the work that you do, and so how can we make sure that we are consistently relevant in what we have to offer?

And so those are some of the things that we do offer. If you ever have questions about topics that we offer or ideas about topics, also are really open to hearing that as well from our members to make sure again that we are providing things that are relevant to the work that you’re currently doing and things that you’re wanting to learn and grow in. With that being said, I’ll turn it back over to Caitie.

Rountree 22:06
Thanks so much, Jacelyn, and I’ll make a direct plug here. If you have not done a training with NCRC yet, I would really strongly recommend that you start with CRA content that our training academy offers. What you’ll find at NCRC is that while we work on a variety of issues, not all of them directly tied to CRA, understanding how NCRC engages and thinks about the Community Reinvestment Act serves as a really good foundation and entry point for a lot of the ways that we work with our members and with financial institutions, and so that is a great start here really, before engaging in other trainings, policy work, research, it’ll just give you the lens to see a lot of the other work that we do with our members. So, if you’re not sure where to start, that’s where you start. So, I’m gonna turn it over in a minute to talk more about some of the specifics of membership. But wanted to pause for a handful of questions here for Tara or Jacelyn about the way our policy teams and our training staff work to support members. And just as a reminder, this feels like a good point to remind folks that we will be sharing the recording and the slides, and our membership team is also happy to follow up with additional questions and support following this webinar.

The first question that I’d like to turn over to Jacelyn and then Tara, because it actually I think touches on both of their support to members, is a question about advocacy training for nonprofits. So for organizations that are interested in support for to do advocacy at the local, state, and federal level, how do we support members in that work? Jacelyn, I’m going to start with you, and then actually, Tara, there might be additional ways of support that you want to highlight as well. So, Jacelyn.

Matthaws 24:00
Sure. So first, I will say that when it comes to advocacy, if you’re wanting to learn how to actually go about doing that, we have wanted to start trying to offer more training on those topics. So, actually, how do you actually go about doing advocacy work? We’ve done something. We’re starting out with our community investment institute, which is really trying to deep dive into a couple of different things when it comes to membership. But that’s one of the things that we’ve been talking about: is how do we actually provide additional training and resources for those who are wanting to learn about what advocacy is? And then, for example, we’ve done recently the training before Hill Day this year. We did a storytelling workshop so that people can feel more connected to their story and feeling really confident about their story when they’re going to actually speak to their state or federal legislator. And so it’s something that we have seen as something that is important for us to do. Really working on curriculum that really meets the need in the moment as well. Don’t want it to be a flyby night. Hey, we put something together, but want to be really intentional about it. And so, it is something that we are working to build out and really be able to showcase soon. And I’ll leave it to Tara if she has something additional that she would like to share there.

Flynn 25:15
Hi. Yeah. I guess I’d just say that often in terms of how to advocate regarding a particular issue, we do that through our smaller working groups or through, you know, the development of materials that we share with members when we’re working on a campaign. So, for example, I mentioned what was you know there are some developments regarding the Community Reinvestment Act, perhaps some re-examining anticipated by the regulators, and so we are in the throes of thinking through what kind of materials and educational and training materials we can put together so that folks, NCRC members, can help, you know we can help mobilize, and folks will mobilize and use those resources to you know tell the story of how the CRA is important to you know every organization. I don’t know if that addresses the question, but I think that it’s more campaign focused in terms of what sort of resources we developed on the policy team.

Rountree 26:20
That’s perfect, Tara. And just to restate something you said, answering another question, just specifically around template comment letters in a very similar fashion. NCRC produces both comment letters that we are submitting and inviting our members to sign on to, and as a particular campaign warrants, we’ll provide template language for our members to then adapt and use to be able to submit their own original comment letter. Yeah, I just wanted to bump that up because I think that’s also very, very helpful. There will be other opportunities to answer questions. So if you have more questions, put them in the chat. I’m going to turn it over now to our membership engagement specialist to talk a little bit about member eligibility, how to manage your membership, etc. Ralph, I will turn it over to you.

Cryus 27:05
Good afternoon, everyone. I’m Ralph Cyrus, the membership engagement specialist for NCRC, along with my colleague Diana Ashong, who’s the membership engagement manager. We are sort of the first point of contact, one-stop shop for members and prospects who are interested in getting to know about our resources and wanting to know how to how to get involved. We’re more than happy to help direct your membership journey.

So, what we’re going to do first is just go through overview of the membership webpage. You can visit it yourself at ncrc.org/membership and get to get started on at least the first point of contact when it comes to knowing more about what how to who’s eligible for membership and what resources are available. So first, this is our homepage. You would click the top where it says membership. It’ll take you directly to our membership page where you can join immediately. From there, you can from the membership page you can join immediately. You’ll see a list of benefits that are available to new members, whether it’s signing up for different resources or just getting something that’s on the website. If you ever have a question, feel free to fill out that contact us form at the top of the page, and then there you’ll have a benefits list that shows some of the opportunities and resources that are available for members. We also have a map that shows where all of our members are throughout the country. We’re going to review the member map a little bit later, so we’ll get back to that. And if you’re already ready to sign up, you can choose the membership tier that best reflects your organization. If you’re a nonprofit, you would choose the option that reflects your organizational budget, and you could sign up right there. We also have tiers for local and state government agencies, as well as research and educational institutions, as well. And then at the bottom of that page, we have a bunch of frequently asked questions about membership. How do I join? How do I access my account? What are the costs? What are the other benefits? That listing right there is pretty good because you have clickable links that you can use to explore the rest of our of our website, the the rest of our website as well. Some other questions that may be asked is how do I get reminders for renewal? Just as a heads up, renewal starts from your day of signing up. So, say you signed up for membership today, you will get a your renewal date would be this time next year. Just worry. You don’t. All you have to worry about is an annual renewal renewalship. So feel free to look through our frequently asked questions for any resolutions. And one thing we do want members to do is to give us an updated list of contact information, so you can either adjust. Listed on your member hub profile, or you can fill out this demographic form that we will share. That will let you know about who in your organization we should be contacting, a bit about your work, where you’re located, and things that you feel we should know about your organization. And we will be sure to update that and make sure that other staff members are aware of that information as well. Now we’re going to take a look at our member map that I’m really excited to show. I love sharing it with people. Anytime people want to know who our members are of the 700-member network throughout the country, can all you can always check out the member map on the membership page. When you’re reviewing it, you can click on any particular state and see how many members we have and where are they. We have members throughout the country and multiple levels of density. We even have members in Puerto Rico. We were recently on a meeting with them, learning about their great work.

We’ll use Jackson, Mississippi, as an example. Basically, you can zoom in and see all of the members there. And when you click on their name, either directly on the map or through that list on the side, it’ll take you directly to their website. We’re going to use the Housing, Education, and Economic Development team as an example, led by the great Charles Harris. You can also search in that profile for city and have it search through to see what members are available there, and if you ever want to get in contact with any of your fellow members, you feel free to reach out to the membership team. We’re happy to set up that connective tissue, or you can reach out directly from their websites as well.

And lastly, we’re going to show you what the member hub profile provides for you. It’s the member hub is a one-stop shop where you can add members, add team members to your subscription. You can update the pro the newsletter profiles that are available to you. You can see what your current team subscription is. Get a an invoice downloaded to you. You can all also sub make submissions yourself. So we’ll just take a quick look through what the member hub provides. So when you sign into your account, you’ll see up top the member. You should see my account. You can go into your settings, go to subscriptions, choose your subscription. If you copy that link right there and share with other staff, they’ll be able to create accounts under their email addresses for the organization subscription. You can also add – if you are the group manager, you can add or subtract staff as there’s turnover in your organization. You can also download an invoice directly from there for any of your financial records. And now we’re going to see what the member hub looks like.

One of the first things you can do on the member hub is go to update your newsletter subscriptions. If there are, if you’re not getting enough information from NCRC, or if you’re getting too much, you can add or or you could select or unselect the subscriptions that you’re getting. Discuss the topic of interest that are interesting to you, and you’ll you’ll get our our slate of emails.

We have a variety of research projects, blog reports. Some are a series like the Mortgage Market Series that is available for members, and then we have a calendar of up upcoming events, typically a summit conference, training courses, and then what we also have is what we call the field notes. So you can provide a story of your organization, some of your great work, and the field notes submission and our communications team will work with you to make a field notes member profile out of that, and a lot of members have said how amazing it is to have their work platform there. So if you have anything interesting that you’ve been working on, you want to share with us, please feel free to submit field notes, and we would love to platform it. So that’s just a little bit of what’s available on the member hub. I encourage everyone, when you have time, to just go ahead and do a scroll through our website. When you log into the member hub, see what resources are available. If anything is confusing, feel free to reach out to membership. You can email us at membership@ncrc.org to get involved.

Now, if you’re ready to commit today, I would encourage you to visit our website or scan that QR code to go to the membership page. Feel free to also reach out to us to schedule a call. We’ll kind of walk through that list of benefits and see which ones stand out for you, or we’ll discuss tools or aspects of NCRC that you’re interested in as well. And you don’t have to. You can be a current member, you can be a former member, you can be somebody who’s just learning, hearing about NCRC, and you want to know more. We’re more than happy to talk to you about your work and how NCRC can be a part of that. And now I will I will turn back to Caitie to finish us out.

Rountree 35:45
Thanks so much, Ralph. Really, the member map where we’re able to see where y’all are working all across the country, it is so cool, and so glad to be able to use that as a way to help y’all connect to each other more easily. One, just a I’ll do a double click on something that Ralph mentioned in the member hub. You can customize newsletters you receive from us. If there is one email that you read from NCRC every week, I suggest that you make it the member update that goes out on Wednesday mornings. We use this as a digest and highlights, so it’s not very long, but it will summarize the most important things that we think that members should be aware of that week, where you can see upcoming trainings and events, registration and information about those, opportunities to participate in our policy work, comment letters, breaking news that’s important related to our advocacy work. It’s where applications for funding are highlighted. Many times, those get their own dedicated emails with more information. But that Wednesday morning member update email should give you the the Cliff Notes guide to everything that’s happening to NCRC in that particular week. So that’s one to make sure that you look at every week. And if you have multiple staff who you think may benefit from engaging with NCRC, make sure that their accounts are set up so that they’re receiving that as well.

We’ve got just a couple more minutes here for some additional questions. One thing just related to the member hub question, I think Jocelyn answered directly, but I think it’s worth saying out loud. One of my dreams as a backend person is that eventually we will have single sign-in for all the different things that we offer to our members. But at this point in time, you need a different account to be able to log into the member hub, and a different account to log into our training portal. So, if you’re trying to log in one place, information, password, etc. from another, that might be why you’re having trouble. Either the training academy or the membership team would be happy to help sort you out. Just a heads up that those are different accounts, unfortunately.

Checking to see if there are any other questions that I can answer, folks, before we wrap. But I think this has been just a really informative conversation. Thank our my fellow colleagues for their presentations and information, and thank all of you. I just want to leave you with one final thought before we close. NCRC offers research, policy expertise, training, all these different resources to strengthen your organization’s work. But the reality is that being a member of NCRC is actually about something even bigger than that. It’s an invitation to join more than 700 organizations that are working together to improve how capital flows into communities, to expand opportunity and advance wealth equity. That’s not something that NCRC is doing for our members. It’s something that we’re doing with our members, and it takes all of us working together to do that. So we’re incredibly grateful for the work that you’re doing in your communities and for the work that you’re doing with us. We really truly believe that in order to solve the enormous challenges that this country faces, we’re going to need to do it in collaboration with one another. So we hope that you’ll join us. Grateful for your participation. Yeah, and look forward to helping to build a stronger movement for community development and wealth equity with you.

The Skilled Labor Gap in Construction Trades

The shortage of workers in the skilled construction trades–professions like carpenters, electricians, plumbers and HVAC repair–is not new. Since the last housing boom ended in 2007, employers in the construction trades have struggled to amass enough skilled labor to meet the steady rise of housing development across the country. The retirements of industry veterans, limited interest from young people in entering these professions and surging demand for construction labor have delayed projects, increased labor costs and raised pressure on existing workers to be more productive and cut corners to meet project requirements.

In May, there were around 298,000 construction job openings, marking the third month in a row of increased openings in the industry and around a 34% year-over-year increase compared to May of last year. Those opportunities do not appear to be slowing down, with the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimating that employment in construction occupations is expected to grow by 5.2% between 2024 and 2034, putting it among the highest growing industries over the next decade. 

However, this gap represents a major potential roadblock for supply-side housing solutions. Even before Congress’s historic action last month, residential home construction was being stymied by deficits in skilled labor. The National Association of Home Builders estimates this led directly to a reduction of approximately 19,000 single-family homes not being built in 2024 alone and an aggregate economic impact of over $10 billion lost due to longer construction timelines.

Furthermore, the industry faces rising demand from multiple angles. Skyrocketing investment in physical infrastructure, renewable energy projects and now hyperscale AI data centers are set to squeeze the construction industry even more in the coming years. If it persists, the skilled labor shortage could derail supply-side efforts to address housing affordability as well as broader ambitions to build in America. 

The Solution: Investing in Apprenticeships 

The deep-seeded labor challenges facing construction firms cannot be solved overnight, but one essential piece of the solution is to increase investment in the workforce development system, specifically for registered apprenticeships. Pathways to construction and skilled trades careers exist almost entirely outside of the four-year college/university degree system and typically involve some combination of classes, credentialing and on-the-job training that culminates in the completion of an apprenticeship.

Apprenticeship programs are critical not only for preparing people with the skills to work in the trades but also attracting people from diverse talent pools to the industry, educating them about the career outlook and providing support services that make participation possible. Partnerships between employers, schools and community colleges help to build established pipelines to these industries, providing employers with trained talent and workers with the opportunity to enter the field while getting paid and not taking on any debt. This improves workforce diversity, bolsters labor supply and provides the next generation with meaningful labor market opportunities. 

By the end of the Biden administration, there were more than 670,000 active apprentices, an increase of more than 100,000. The Trump administration has continued this trend of expanding apprenticeships, setting a goal of creating 1 million active apprentices. Yet, in the year since the announcement, the number has essentially flatlined, posting just 3% growth in new apprentices over the past year.

The stagnation appears to be driven by several factors including the current administration’s campaign against DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion), which has vastly limited the talent pool available to apprenticeship providers and employers. Women and people of color are vastly underrepresented in the construction industry, making them crucial for expanding the construction labor force and meeting the growing level of need. 

Apprenticeships could be a feasible and necessary pathway to achieving diversification in the sector. A 2023 Department of Labor report showed that there were higher proportions of women and people of color participating in apprenticeships than are present in the national construction workforce. Unfortunately, the Trump administration reportedly canceled dozens of grants under the Women in Apprenticeship and Nontraditional Occupations (WANTO) program. While women’s employment in the construction industry had been growing from apprenticeship participation, the administration has reversed that progress. Without diversifying the workforce, the construction industry’s labor shortages will continue. 

In addition to participation gaps, the lack of federal funding for supporting apprenticeship programs limits the number of people that can benefit from them. Apprenticeships for America estimates that the US would need to spend $5 billion, more than 17 times the $285 million currently allocated, to make a dent in the level of need and interest. Any strategy for addressing the deficit in skilled labor must double down on investments in apprenticeship programs and restore efforts to diversify participation from traditionally underrepresented groups.

Linking Economic Mobility and Affordability is Good for Everyone

The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act presents an extraordinary opportunity to alleviate rising housing costs while simultaneously promoting economic mobility. Apprenticeship programs alone may not solve the labor shortage overnight, but they are an important part of the solution. Restoring the housing supply will require expanded investment from Congress and strengthening oversight to hold the administration accountable for spending allocations made to registered apprenticeship programs like WANTO. Doing so will strengthen American capacity to build physical infrastructure across the board and help reduce housing costs all while promoting economic mobility for people from underrepresented backgrounds.

Simon Wang is the Economic Mobility Project Specialist with NCRC’s Economic Mobility team.

Photo credit: CONSTRUCCIÓN TOTAL via Pexels.

Want to better understand SNAP E&T eligibility and how referral partnerships work between agencies and service providers?

During this session, we covered basic programmatic requirements that third-party partners have and discussed approaches to overcoming common challenges that emerging TPPs face with their programs.

Strengthen your understanding of SNAP E&T eligibility and referral systems while gaining practical insights to support your program development.

Speakers

Andrew Schramm, Senior Consultant, the Seattle Jobs Initiative
Simon Wang, Economic Mobility Project Specialist, NCRC

Transcript:

NCRC video transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. They are lightly edited for style and clarity.

Wang 0:08
Amazing. Okay, I am going to go ahead and get started, and going to try to monitor the waiting room as we, as we move into things, but again, thank you everyone for joining us this afternoon for NCRC’s fourth of five webinars in our, in our 2025 series. Understanding your clients, estimating SNAP E&T eligibility and referrals is the topic for today, and just to kind of review some quick expectations and do some brief introductions every session that we’ve done before this can be found on our website at ncrc.org/snap. I’ll throw that in the chat. And next we’re going to be covering employer engagement strategies and some other things related to kind of once your program’s off the ground, how to, how to make sure that those career pathways are accessible and you have good relationships with employers and other folks in the business community. So, that’ll be covered next time in July, and we’re also super excited to be joined by one of our partners at the Seattle Jobs Initiative, Andrew Schramm. So, I’ll go ahead and hand it off to you, Andrew, to let you introduce yourself.

Schramm 1:26
Hi, everyone. Andrew Schramm, so good to be here with you today. Happy to see so many people on, so thanks for joining as well. So, I am a senior consultant with Seattle Jobs Initiative. I’ve been here for about two years, but I’ve worked in the SNAP E&T space for over 10 years now. And so Seattle Jobs Initiative is an organization that provides direct services, direct workforce services in the Seattle region, but also national consulting services on kind of data, and also snap employment and training. So we really enjoy working with states across the country and with providers like you across the country as well. So very happy to be here, and I’ll pass it back to Simon.

Wang 2:16
Amazing, thanks, Andrew. And because I didn’t introduce myself, my name is Simon Wang. I am the economic mobility specialist at NCRC. So I am on a team here of two – we’re too strong on the economic mobility team that have headed up NCRC work creating resources and opportunities for third-party providers to learn more about SNAP E&T and just get involved with the program and learn more about what steps are required and how to get involved with your state, so I’m super excited for today’s session. I’ll go ahead and also invite everybody to introduce themselves in the chat as we go. Feel free to use that space for conversation and questions throughout the session today. Just name, position, organization, and maybe what brought you here today to give us a sense of what you’re excited to learn about would be amazing. Going to the next slide here, just going to review a couple of housekeeping items. So we are recording today’s session, so that is currently being recorded, and we will also send out that recording with the slide deck for everybody afterwards. So, don’t feel the need to take any frantic notes throughout. We’ll make sure to send all of this to you afterwards in an email, and again, feel free to use either the chat, or I’m not sure if the Q and A feature is activated right now, but if it is, feel free to use any of the above ways to ask questions to do so. We highly encourage engagement throughout the session, and I’ll be monitoring the chat to make sure to pop in when there’s an opportunity to dive deeper into a question, but we’ll also have some time at the end to just discuss and hear any program-specific questions or other things that we didn’t cover throughout the session today. Cool. Okay, Andrew, I’m going to go ahead and pass it off to you, but before I do so, I’m going to launch a poll here just to get a sense of where people are at in their knowledge of SNAP E&T, so I launch that now, and you should see it pop up on your screen. I’ll give everybody a minute to just read all the responses, and then submit their answer choice, and then we’ll go from there. Awesome, thanks everyone for those responses. I’m going to go ahead and end the poll now. We have most of the people have answered, so sharing the results here, it looks like we have almost a perfect normal distribution of responses here, so Andrew looks like we’re working with some folks that have some knowledge here today, so we’re not starting from ground zero, and then a couple of experts in the room as well.

Schramm 5:12
All right, that is good to hear, and if you are any of the folks who are hearing about this for the first time, that is absolutely, absolutely okay. Feel free to ask questions, and if you know a lot about this program already, again, feel free to ask questions. Like Simon said, feel free to put those in the chat as well. Simon will be monitoring the chat, and I’ll try and keep my eyes over there as well, or just feel free to raise your hand and come off mute and can talk a bit, we’re also hoping to have some time at the end for Q and A discussion. Anything else that we can do to support, please feel free to save that for that time as well. So, what we’re hoping to get out of today’s session is first understanding some of the differences between SNAP eligibility and SNAP E&T eligibility, and kind of how to identify both, and how do they apply to your current participant population. Secondly, understanding those referral pathways and intake processes with your state SNAP administering agency, and again, both for SNAP and SNAP E&T, different processes, but absolutely connected. And then, lastly, thinking about your population, and thinking about how you’re identifying folks who are receiving SNAP and other public benefits, and how you may be able to estimate the potential enrollment number if you were to be involved with a SNAP E&T program. Ultimately, there are two things that I think would be great to come away with as well. First, every state looks different, so this is an overview generally on what is happening in the country, right, but each one of your states is going to have a bit of difference to it. We’ll talk about that again in a bit. And then, secondly, really knowing that difference between SNAP and SNAP E&T, and how they’re connected, but also how they really do work separately, and SNAP E&T really supports SNAP more so than the other way around. Next slide, please. Okay, Simon, I think I see a gray box. There we go. Great, thank you. So, just to start with SNAP eligibility, Simon, I think we have two questions that we wanted to just ask real quickly here. Does everyone know how to use the hand raise function in Zoom? I guess raise your hand if you know how to use the hand raise function. That might be a good way to do it. There we go. We see them. Great, great, great, great. Okay, so so the first question, if you can raise your hand if your organization serves individuals who are receiving SNAP benefits. It may be different names in your state, but those food benefits associated in your state. Okay, getting some responses here. Great, great to see. Okay, second question: Does your organization support individuals to apply for SNAP benefits, or encourage them to apply for SNAP benefits? Alright, great. Seeing more hands, more thumbs up, and for those of you who don’t, that’s okay too. But just want to make sure that we have kind of a baseline understanding of what this eligibility looks like, and you’re able to identify who at your organization may be able to benefit from SNAP. The way that I look at this program, and I’ve always looked at this SNAP E&T program, in addition to SNAP, is if individuals are able to receive SNAP, great, it’ll support them, especially if they make it into your SNAP E&T program, where they can get those workforce benefits, and you can be reimbursed for that, you know, investment that you have. If individuals you work with are able to receive SNAP benefits, and for whatever reason don’t make it into SNAP E&T, they’re still better off with those SNAP benefits, even however temporary that might be so kind of keep that in mind. This is a really great support for individuals.

So it seems like everybody has a good idea of what SNAP is, which is great, but looking at this just definitionally, right, for SNAP, the SNAP Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, it’s a federal program that provides nutrition assistance to low-income individuals and families, they can use it at a lot of places, including grocery stores, food farmers markets, and other places that sell food, so great benefit to individuals across the country, so for SNAP eligibility, as mentioned, every state does have nuances and a little bit different things that that they look at as far as SNAP eligibility, but generally it’s 130% of the federal poverty level. There can be some deductions that can free up additional eligibility, but also some states also look at resources or assets that individuals may have, and that may include, you know, savings accounts, or if they have multiple vehicles, or things like that too. So keep that in mind as well. I’ll say most states also have some sort of benefits calculator that you can go out and find for some of those other aspects beyond the income aspects, household size and applicant age matter, and dependent age matters, so those things will come into play, and then some people are also subject to work requirements, which we’ll talk a little bit more about in a bit. So at the bottom this is just the general chart of on the federal level of household size, gross monthly income, and net monthly income for individuals who qualify, so any single house, single-member household who has a gross monthly income of $1,696 or below is very likely to qualify for SNAP. Again, those other factors play in, and what I’ll say, having a lot of conversations with individuals who are, you know, SNAP eligible, potentially SNAP eligible, not receiving SNAP. Some of them are kind of surprised when they see this chart. It really is helpful. And if you go to the website at the bottom, that’s the federal website for SNAP eligibility. Each state has a state website for it as well. They might have slightly different charts than this, but that chart can be really helpful when you’re discussing SNAP eligibility with your participants in your programs. So, again, generally 130% but those other factors can play in. Next slide, please. So let’s transition to SNAP, SNAP E&T eligibility from SNAP eligibility. So to be eligible for SNAP employment and training, individuals need to be receiving SNAP in the month or months that they participate in a component, so that is very specific. They, if they apply in June, receive, start receiving benefits in June, they’re eligible for E&T in June. Individuals are sometimes on and off of SNAP, depending on their recertification periods or other things like that, so that verification is monthly to ensure that they’re, they’re receiving. So they need to be receiving SNAP in the month they participate, they need to not be participating in TANF, or kind of your, your cash assistance program. Again, states have different names for SNAP, different names for TANF, but if you have questions on what those are, we can look them up as well. But TANF has a very similar type of services to SNAP E&T in a lot of ways, so the federal government has drawn the line on receiving SNAP, not receiving TANF. And then, thirdly, it’s for individuals who are able to work upon completion of the E&T program. This is a work-focused program, and E&T has a lot of different ways individuals can participate, from kind of just a simple job search with the focus of being employed after that job search up to a two year college degree with the intent to work after. So that’s really what we’re looking at here, is individuals receiving SNAP, not receiving TANF, and kind of that ready, willing, able to work when they’re, when they complete. Next slide, please. Okay, so the next piece is work requirements, which is dense. I would say raise, use the hand raise function if you enjoy reading federal policy, but I don’t think we’ll see any pop up, and that’s okay.

So SNAP work requirements have changed since the passage of HR 1 last year. So we’re really focusing here for SNAP E&T purposes on a population that is categorized as able-bodied adults without dependents or ABAWD, a b a w d. As you would expect, these are individuals who are able to work, do not have a disability, and do not have dependents under which they’re receiving those SNAP, or with whom they’re receiving those SNAP benefits, right, who are approved in their household, there have been some changes. So, this is what it looks like today. So, again, these individuals are able to work. The age has expanded a bit, so it’s currently 18 to 65, and these are individuals who do not have a dependent under the age of 14. So, that 18 to 65 is expanded, dependents were 18, but now it’s under 14, so keeping that that in mind, individuals who are again able to work 18 to 65 do not have a dependent under 14 are eligible to receive three months of SNAP in a 36-month-span, unless they’re meeting an exemption, and so effectively anyone who meets that is considered an ABAWD, or an able-bodied adult without dependents, unless they are, you know, have an exemption for a physical or mental disability, and that doesn’t necessarily exclude them from participating in SNAP E&T, but that’s something we can talk about more as well, but that would exempt them from the ABAWD requirement, meaning that they could receive SNAP continuously, not for only the three months and the 36 if they are caring for a dependent under 14, and then there is another criteria for being a member of certain native nations, that information can be found on that eligibility website that Simon just posted, as well. There were a few other categories of individuals who were exempt prior to HR 1, including people with housing insecurity, veterans, and former foster youth, but those exemptions have been removed. Other exemptions included kind of geography-based, so if they’re, if they’re especially in more populated areas, if there are not enough jobs for the number of people who would be considered a bot, and so it’d be difficult for them to find work. Those were exempt, those are no longer exempt under HR one. So, what we’re seeing is really a greater need for these individuals to be served, and so participating in SNAP E&T, or another type of activity, work volunteering, going to some sort of training or class for a minimum of 20 hours a week is another way to meet that requirement. So again, work paid or volunteer participating in some sort of work program that can be WIOA, it could be TANF, it could be SNAP E&T, or some other work programs, and then any combination of that work and participation adding up to 20 hours a week can qualify someone to receive SNAP in months that are non-countable, right. And then there’s another piece called Workfare, which is a way to volunteer, and the amount, the amount of SNAP benefit they would get in a month, divided by the local minimum wage, would be the number of hours they would need to participate in workfare to maintain eligibility for SNAP moving forward. If an individual were to happen to lose eligibility because they use their three months, three countable months, they could regain their eligibility by participating at least 20 hours per week for a full month, and then they would potentially regain their eligibility. So it’s not completely done if they’ve used their three months, three countable months, but it is a little bit more difficult to regain them, right? So, so it really is beneficial for individuals to kind of get ahead of it and make sure that they’re participating or working or volunteering for that 20 hours before they use up their three countable months. This can get pretty dense, so I just want to stop real quickly to see if anyone has any immediate questions on kind of the work requirements and ABAWD status.

Audience question 20:11
You said these changes were effective as of 2025 last year.

Schramm 20:15
Yes, correct.

Audience question 20:16
Where can we be in the loop? What’s the best place to stay in the loop?

Schramm 20:24
Sure, that’s a great question. So, I would say you can sign up for updates from the USDA on the USDA website. They have newsletters and news updates, and you can choose whether you want nutrition-related ones or farming-related ones or things like that, so you can really get specific pieces there. That’s where I see most of those updates, so that’s where I would suggest starting. After we’re done here, I can try and find the link and see if Simon may be able to send it out with the email. Kathy, I see your hand up.

Audience question 21:02
Yeah, on the number of hours for work fair, it seems to me like the benefit divided by the minimum wage would be less than 20 hours a week. Am I, am I correct about that?

Schramm 21:17
Yes, that’s generally how that works in statute, they’re not able, and a bod who’s participating in the work fair is not allowed to go above that number of hours of volunteerism to qualify for workfare. So, yes, it’s likely it’ll be under that amount. Work fair can be a really good option for people, especially if they don’t have to do as many hours as they would otherwise, but where some individuals would rather participate in an E&T or a training program, they may get additional skills to be able to get a, you know, better work or more job skills than kind of the volunteer activity as well.

Audience question 22:01
Yeah, that’s very helpful. It’s just so hard to meet the 20 hours a week if they can’t find employment even after participating in the SNAP E&T program.

Schramm 22:14
Correct, correct. That’s a big challenge, and I, so I think some areas, some states are really looking into workfare quite a bit to try and support people in that way, which again is a really great option for a lot of people, but it may be it’s not necessarily building skills as much as those other types of activities, so it’s really kind of a one or the other situation, but again, if they can get some sort of kind of resume builder with that volunteering, or be able to get some work skills that they can transfer to employment, that can be really helpful as well. One other note, I apologize, one other note: able-bodied adults without dependence, or ABAWD. I’ve heard rumblings that that term is going to be updated federally, so it’s going to be time-limited participant rather than ABAWD. I haven’t seen an official change yet, but that’s just a flag to look out for, so that would be time-limited participant or TLP. So that’s what a lot of states may be going with as well.

Okay, next slide, please. So, what is this connection from SNAP to SNAP employment and training for participants, and what can your organization kind of look for and start planning for if you’re not already a provider? So first, you’re going to want to identify who you’re serving, especially in workforce-related programs that may align with the E&T. Identify who is receiving SNAP or potentially eligible for SNAP. So, if you have an application, if you have an intake process, an initial case management process, you can ask the question if they’re, if they’re receiving any public benefit or specific to SNAP, or if you’re getting any other kind of existing data on income, so and that data could be, I mean, just asking what their income is, asking what their work history is, asking where they currently work, if they’re participating in TANF, or recently were participating in TANF and no longer, if they’re being referred from a food pantry or another organization that you’re a partner with that you know is serving low-income people, these are all types of data you can look to identify and start to get an idea of what proportion of people you serve are receiving SNAP or potentially eligible, and that’s really a key number when it comes to applying as a provider. Again, if you’re not currently a provider, when it comes to applying as a provider, talking to your state agency about becoming a provider, they’ll have questions about what proportion of individuals do you serve on SNAP, how many people do you serve on SNAP, and that’s going to be a really key number for them to understand the scope of what you’re hoping to do as a provider as well. So, secondly, as I mentioned earlier, encouraging clients to apply for SNAP can be really beneficial for them, and if you are a SNAP E&T provider, increase the proportion of individuals that you serve receiving SNAP, and potentially increase the number, the amount of reimbursement that you could potentially be eligible for and receiving back to reinvest in your programs. So you know, it’s a good thing to know about, good thing to have in your pocket, and a good thing to support people with, so to get those individuals at your organization who are receiving SNAP to be, you know, participating in the SNAP E&T program, if you’re a provider, there are two ways. One is a direct referral from your state or county SNAP agency. And so here it says state or county. Again, I mentioned earlier that there are some differences state to state. Some states have their SNAP administration by county, some have it by state, so it may come from your state eligibility workers or a county eligibility worker. And that direct referral is an individual who has applied for SNAP and had an interview or had a recertification, generally that’s every six months to verify SNAP eligibility, and in the interview they are screened as to whether they are required to participate, if they’re considered an ABAWD, if they meet another work requirement, and are referred directly to SNAP E&T to help meet that work requirement. So these are individuals who generally must meet some requirement, and E&T being a very good way for them to do that, and that’s why they’re being referred directly to a provider.

The second way is for you, again, if you’re identifying the individuals coming into your organization who are receiving SNAP, maybe you have a workforce program, someone wants to take part in that workforce program, and you identify that they’re receiving SNAP. You can do what’s called a reverse referral, where you provide information to your state, saying this person claims to be receiving SNAP. They can bring in their notice of decision, or if they have their EBT card, or something like that, for you to verify, and your SNAP agency would check their eligibility to verify that they’re receiving SNAP, and then do that kind of official referral, check the box in their system to do the official referral to SNAP E&T, and then you can continue serving them and enroll them into your E&T program. A lot of third-party partners, as many of you may be, or may look to be, will depend primarily on those reverse referrals, where you are already doing outreach for your programs, you’re getting referrals from other community partners into your current programs, and then you’re identifying their SNAP eligible and referring them to the state for SNAP E&T. The direct referrals also may be picking up, as we talked about with ABAWD and time-limited participant requirements increasing for a lot of individuals are being identified for a lot more individuals. Those direct referrals we expect to pick up across the country as those get implemented and take effect across the country. So that’s generally how those work. Again, broken record, but every state, every county can look different, and so really understanding how that process works, what a timeline is, what those expectations are, is really important as you move forward.

Next slide, please. So, how do you learn some of this information? There is a report put out every year. We haven’t seen the 2026 one yet, but it’s called the State Options Report from the USDA Food and Nutrition Service. So, states have a lot of flexibility in how they put SNAP together, put SANP E&T together, including, like I mentioned, state versus county administration of the program, SNAP income and asset limits, the general work requirement, and the ABAWD or time limited participant requirements, whether they have broad based categorical eligibility, meaning if they’re able to apply for some programs, it applies to others as well, to kind of reduce that application documentation burden, and then other priorities, population, if there are certain populations the state wants to focus on, if there are certain areas of a state that are underserved or need additional attention from the SNAP E&T program. The types of partners they, they are looking for. Some states have a lot of colleges and are looking for community action agencies. Some have only employment social enterprise and want to move beyond that to training programs. So those are all different options that they have, and then the types of activities or components that they do. Some focus on work-based learning, some focus on kind of college or adult basic ed, but those can be updated, and they can change their program year to year based on those needs that they see in the state. So for more info on these types of things, check out that state options report. It has a lot of great information about your state. There are pages based on the type of option, but then there are also pages based on your state, so to see all the options at one spot, so really helpful to take a look at. Secondly, reviewing your SNAP E&T state plan, which is, if you’ve not seen one, a very big document that has a lot of things in it, but it will have all of the providers, or generally all of the providers in the state listed. It’ll have the types of activities that are allowed, or components that are allowed, the types of supportive services that are allowed for reimbursement, and a lot of times will have the state’s priorities, or a little bit of discussion on how they hope to expand over the coming years. Again, not universal. We’ll see pieces of those information in different state plans, but again, that’s a big document. So, if you have questions on what that state plan entails, or if you’re looking for a specific piece of information, feel free to reach out. We can help, I guess, translate what that looks like.

And then, lastly, for supporting SNAP, if you’re able to find your local SNAP outreach provider, or maybe some of you in the room may be a SNAP outreach provider, you may be able to get more information to support SNAP application info cards, or postcards, or you know, one pagers to kind of talk about SNAP, or promote SNAP posters to hang up to support SNAP, so that can be really helpful to have some of those conversations, or to, you know, introduce the idea of applying for SNAP to a participant, and saying, well, think about it, take this with you with a QR code to apply, but take this with you, think about it a little bit more, right? So that can be really, really helpful, potentially, even a SNAP outreach provider could have staff come and talk to your participants about SNAP application and what it means, so lot of options and a lot of resources here. Again, these are the first two can be pretty dense, so again, feel free to reach out. There’s a lot of information there, but it really can help frame up how you look at these programs.

All right, next slide, please. So now we come to the question of how many potential E&T participants does your organization have, and we have a lot of steps here, so we’ll go through them, but some considerations. Think about what kind of workforce and training-related programs that you have, job readiness programs, on the job training, work-based learning programs, and then think about your non-federal funding resources. So, with SNAP E&T, it is a reimbursement-based program in which third-party partners serve people 100% paid for by non-federal funding resources that they have, and on the back end they’re reimbursed at 50% and that 50% reimbursement could be reinvested, so again spending a. Percent upfront and being reimbursed at up to 50% and then think about who your clients are, who they are, from where they come to you, again referral sources, and what their goals are, if they want to be right into employment afterwards, or if they’re looking for something a little bit longer term for training or things like that too, so so to think about who may be, you know, just an estimate for for a and t participation in your programs. Start by looking at all of your clients, narrow that down to those individuals who are receiving SNAP, and you can project out a few more if you’re planning to encourage people to apply, right, but think about who’s receiving SNAP. Of those individuals receiving SNAP, how many are in your workforce programs or training programs or work readiness programs? I apologize, I see that that one’s twice. Maybe we’re just absolutely being sure that that’s correct. And then think about those SNAP clients who are in your workforce programs that are also funded with non-federal funds, and that may include staff, may include the actual services there, the activities that participate again, and it may also include the supportive services they’re receiving, and that is your SNAP E&T clientele, those who are receiving SNAP in a workforce program, and that workforce program being funded with non-federal funds, we’re really funneling down to what we have there. There are some ways to think about, you know, if you do this calculation, it’s a very small percentage again, increasing the SNAP proportion that you’re serving, maybe adding a workforce program, or adding referrals to workforce programs, or either applying for additional non-federal funds, or shifting around funds, so that you have non-federal funds to serve this population with workforce services, always to kind of think about maximizing your opportunity for SNAP E&T and SNAP E&T enrollment. And that’s our information for today, but I’m sure that there are some questions on, on, you know, how to look at this program, or SNAP, or SNAP E&T. So happy to hear any questions, or have any discussion, or if you have thoughts. If we can go over anything again, happy to do that as well.

Wang 37:45
I can hear everyone just digesting all of that information right now. I can maybe kick things off with a, with a starter question, while people start to digest and think through what they, what they’ve learned, but I guess one of the things that is important to drill in, and you’ve mentioned it a couple of times, but this difference between a SNAP-eligible population and a SNAP E&T eligible population. What does that look like in practice, like if you already are serving or think you’re serving folks who might be eligible and receiving SNAP benefits? What does it mean to, I guess, feel out how much promise an E&T program could have in your organization?

Schramm 38:29
Sure, that’s a great question. So, again, to begin with, a lot of programs serve low-income individuals, really, you know, unemployed, underemployed or individuals who are kind of looking for work, right? This doesn’t mean that they’re receiving SNAP, and it might not mean that they’re eligible for SNAP, but again, asking those questions, finding out as much as you can, and encouraging people to apply. Great, so really pushing to increase that proportion of SNAP individuals you serve, but now looking at, you know, those individuals who may move forward to SNAP E&T, I think some folks are a little wary because this program is based on them participating and you getting reimbursement, it can be kind of a tough conversation to have, but there’s a few ways to talk about it. First, if you offer additional resources for individuals who are participating in your SNAP E&T program, knowing that you’re going to get reimbursed for those services that can kind of increase participation rates, right. Secondly, and this is a conversation that I think could be tough for some, but has been really effective with a lot of people, is understanding that reimbursement is coming back and helping to serve more people, and that someone else may have participated in SNAP E&T previously, and the reimbursement for their services is now funding this person to receive more services. So that’s a really good way to talk about the program, and then just generally the connection that I can’t really say at like a average number of people based on how many SNAP participants you have, but really it’s looking at that alignment with the state or county program that you would be under. If you’re looking at the state plan, you can go to components overview and you can see what components are allowable in your state and think about how many individuals you serve who may fit under programs that may align with with those components, that’s really the best way to take a look at this and understand what what your availability, what your, what your potential for SNAP E&T enrollment could be.

Wang 41:08
Awesome. Thanks, Andrew. It sounds like people are still maybe thinking through things, so I will go ahead and maybe ask one more question that comes to mind for me, that might be applicable, just given what we saw with the poll results at the beginning, where people seem to have some knowledge of E&T already, and maybe are trying to figure out what next steps look like in terms of that interaction with the state, and so you mentioned, you know, SNAP outreach partners, and you know, the initial maybe stages of getting involved, could you maybe, I guess, give some insight into where eligibility falls into the conversation with the state office, and I guess some of those next steps for people that might not yet be engaged with their state office but are interested in kind of moving further along.

Schramm 41:57
Sure, that’s a great question. So, to start off with, if you want to talk to your state or county agency about potential partnership through SNAP E&T, if you look at the state plan right up at the top, there’s a contact, usually that’s the right person to contact, if not, you’ll likely be directed to another individual within the agency to support that kind of kicking off. A lot of states have websites with some information to kind of start exploring, exploring ENT partnership as well, and a lot of background information, some even have potential contract language, or like a handbook for third-party providers that you may be able to consider and review. Otherwise, if you look at that state plan and you’re able to see the contractor details, that’s kind of towards the bottom of the state plan, and find any other providers that are currently contracted as SNAP E&T providers that you know have partnerships with, and you can give one of them a call or shoot one of them an email and say, What does this look like? What does the opportunity look like for you, and be able to kind of understand it on a third party partner level that can also be really really helpful, because as you all know, I’m sure that you have participated in programs that are, you know, federal, state, county, and on paper, there’s all of this information, there’s directions, there’s, you know, reporting, there’s things like that, but then you know, actually, in person things don’t quite look exactly like they do on paper, so it’s a really good best practice to reach out to another provider locally or somewhere in your state to be able to just have a conversation about what this, what this program looks like, and ask questions like what did starting up look like, how many people are you, are you able to serve every year? How do you connect that, and what does that growth look like? Look like year one can be a challenge, but growth is really, really a focus of this program, because there are, I mean, with any new program, there are new administrative requirements, and and once those are are kind of captured, once those are incorporated into into the normal work that you’re already doing, then you’ll have more time to do outreach and more time to bring in those additional SNAP E&T clients and things like that too, right? So, so just kind of keeping in mind the more you know the better, right? And from the more angles that you can find that information, the better as well. And attending these webinars, right, Simon, always a good idea to learn a little bit more about the program this way.

Wang 44:54
Absolutely, yeah. No, thanks so much for that overview. I hope it’s.. I hope that helps people that are at that kind of. A decision point of thinking about whether or not it’s something that’s worth applying to or looking more into. We have lots of resources on our site, and our partners, like SJI and other folks, have lots of resources available online, and we’re happy to help you with that. I’ll use that as my transition into the kind of additional resources and ways to stay involved with the conversation, so I’m going to throw a link in the chat to NCRC’s toolkit, which we released not too long ago, just a couple months back, that does a pretty good job, I think, like consolidating most of the resources that are, have are out there and have been released over the years, and really walks you through, I think each step of the process. It is a long booklet, not meant to be a sit down and read in one sitting type of thing, but it has a lot of, I think, also like workbooks and exercises that you can, that you can use to kind of map out your potential involvement with E&T, its potential value to your clients as well as to your organization’s bottom line, and so we’re happy to help you walk through that toolkit, but it also, I think, as a standalone resources, is something that could really be complementary to the learning that you’re doing in these types of webinars. I’m also going to go ahead and throw my email in the chat as well, you can feel free to reach out to me anytime, and I’m happy to kind of connect you with resources or things that were discussed here. I can set up some follow-up time with anybody to discuss questions and maybe organization-specific things that weren’t ready for the entire group to be involved with, but my emails in the chat, and I’m always happy to chat, but it sounds.. it looks like we have a couple minutes here to hang out, so we are.. we are done the contents of this webinar, but Andrew, if it’s okay with you, I think we’ll stick around here for a couple of minutes, just in case anybody has any questions or wants to stick around to talk more about today’s session, but thank you everybody for being here. We really appreciate it, and I’ll give you 10 minutes of your afternoon back.

In the third webinar of our 5-part SNAP E&T series, NCRC’s Economic Mobility team explored how organizations can effectively fund and sustain their SNAP E&T programs through the 50/50 federal reimbursement model.

During this session, we broke down allowable costs, match requirements and financial reporting obligations, and walked through practical examples of budget development and revenue projections. Gain insight into how to maximize reimbursement while maintaining program quality and compliance.

Speakers

Jonathan Osei, Principal, Adage Ventures LLC, Minneapolis, Minnesota
Simon Wang, Economic Mobility Specialist, NCRC
Kathi Medcalf, Managing Senior Consultant, Seattle Jobs Initiative

Transcript:

NCRC video transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. They are lightly edited for style and clarity.

Osei 0:01
Today is the Funding For SNAP E&T program, 50/50 Reimbursement and Budget Strategy webinar, and we’re doing this in like a sort of meeting style, so hopefully it’s a little more engaging. So there’s going to be a little bit of content delivery, and then space for intentional discussion, conversation and questions, as well. I know folks are coming at this with a variety of different levels, as well. So, I see Gwen, oversees SNAP E&T programs at a regional level in Wisconsin, but if folks are coming in earlier on in their SNAP E& T journey from an organizational perspective, or even from a state perspective, we’re excited to have you here, regardless. So, our agenda for today is just a quick welcome and introduction, then a overview of the funding and alignment for SNAP E&T, and then assessing potential reimbursement, and then a budget strategy and case making example, and then we’ll share a bit of best practices and tips at the end, and leave some space for questions and answer, and obviously, as you know, this is a meeting, so feel free to chime in in the chat, feel free to put your hand up, come off mute, love to hear from you, what may be the most relevant in terms of discussing SNAP E&T, so excited to have you on. So I’m Jonathan Osei – he, him, his pronouns. I’m a workforce element consultant working alongside Simon Wang, and have been engaged with some of the SNAP E&T work that NCRC has been leading, and excited to be here. Simon, who is the Economist Mobility Specialist at NCRC and I’ll pass the mic.

Wang 1:49
Yep, thanks, Jonathan. Thanks, everyone, for being here. This is the third webinar in our five-part series. You can find the other recordings to Webinar One, which kind of reviews some of the main basics, and a broad overview of E&T. If you’re just getting started, and then the second one as well, which kind of digs a little bit further into one of the other components. And today we’re just going to talk about budget. Stay tuned, and like Jonathan said, stay engaged in the chat and come off mute. We want this to be as engaging as possible, and as relevant to the questions and the experiences that you’re currently having with E&T. So, yeah, thanks everyone for being here.

Osei 2:30
And today we also have a special guest, managing senior consultant at Seattle Jobs Initiative, Kathy Medcalf. Kathy is a veteran consultant with over three decades of experience in the education sector, with a recent emphasis on SNAP employment and training programs and operations. For the past three years at SJI, Seattle Jobs Initiative, she has delivered expert technical assistance to states and colleges by managing and implementing national partnership grants. Her prior role as a program manager for basic food employment and training (BFET) program at Washington State Board for Community and Technical College involved overseeing operations for Washington’s 34 community and technical colleges. She’s a passionate advocate for developing multiple career pathways to help clients acquire the skills and resources needed for sustainable employment. We’re excited to have Kathy here today. Feel free to chime in, Kathy, but Kathy will be chiming in throughout this. So excited to have her

Medcalf 3:35
I’m a down-and-dirty practice-oriented person, so please ask any questions as we go through this. Budget and finances are kind of my specialty on our team, so any practical questions you have I’m the person to help answer those.

Wang 3:56
I’ll hop in here before we get started. I think most of you are probably familiar with NCRC, but in case there’s anybody that needs an introduction to our organization and some of the broader portfolio of work that we, that we work towards, we’re an organization really focused on economic justice and supporting a broad membership base for around 700 organizations around the country that are all focused on, you know, building a more just economy, SNAP E&T and workforce development are one of many things that we do, both to train our members, but also we do a variety of other supports, including research and advocacy around public policy. We do a lot of work around ensuring that private capital and investment from financial institutions flows equitably into underserved areas of the country, so if you’re interested in our broader body of work, definitely encourage you to visit our website, and let me know if you have additional questions, but excited to learn more about the budget process here for E&T today. I’ll pass it back over to you, Jonathan, for the objectives.

Osei 5:07
Awesome, awesome, awesome. So the objectives today, we have four objectives for today. First and foremost, understand the SNAP E&T 50/50 reimbursement model and identify allowable cost categories and match requirements. Number two is to develop a preliminary SNAP E&T program budget that aligns with program activities and service delivery. We may not be able to do it all an hour, but, like, hopefully, you’ve got some ideas about how it might look, or for folks who are popping in, like, can really, like, relate to some of the process that we’re talking through. And then three, project potential program revenue using the 50/50 reimbursement structure to estimate funding opportunities, and number four is communicate the financial case to leadership, demonstrating how SNAP E&T can expand service capacity while generating sustainable funding. So, before we get deeper into this, just have a quick poll question for you all. What SNAP E&T funding or budget topic is of the most interest to you and your organization right now? And this, this actually will help us help to guide the conversation to like what we like sort of lean in on and what we may spend less time in one, so please chime in. So I see, obviously, there’s only eight of us total on this right now, but this is helpful, at least, to get us going, though. So I see 50/50 reimbursement model being a key port for folks, and then non-federal funding sources. Okay, so we’ll talk, we’ll talk some about this, we’ll talk some about this, and please chime in with the questions as well. So, here’s a quick overview of the funding and alignment from SNAP E&T program. So, SNAP employment and training, E&T for short, is a federal program helping SNAP participants gain skills, training, and work experience, connects folks to training, education, and training job readiness and support services that reduce the barriers to work, and so also promotes longer-term economic stability, and then helps community-based organizations expand their reach and strengthen their existing workforce programs, and then the key keyword as an existing, we’ll talk a little bit more. So what makes a SNAP E&T third-party provider? So a third party provider, first and foremost, is an organization that delivers SNAP E&T, SNAP employment and training services on behalf of the state. So this is using the existing workforce or training programs to serve participants. So the there’s five key components that really make a strong provider, but for four, and then the fifth one is like this, the larger, broader context. So it’s mission alignment, so having an aligned mission with the SNAP E&T program, the capacity to actually track the services and costs, and then the ability to offer the trainings and support service. So, like, are you built for this essentially? And then stable non-federal funds for that 50/50 and we’re going to correct this – match is probably not the correct word we’ll use, but the 50/50 reimbursement, and then understanding of the state context, so really understanding where you are. So, I, I know somebody here was New York, somebody here in Wisconsin, so really understanding what that looks like from your state perspective. So, there’s a couple key considerations for the SNAP E&T alignment. Number one, does your organization have non-federal funding? Two, does your non-federal funding pay for training and work readiness programs for SNAP participants? Honestly, I would love to hear from folks if they, if they’re willing to chime in in the chat or even come off mute, like, do your organizations have, like, non-federal funding? Do your organizations pay for your training or workforce readiness for SNAP participants with that non-federal funding? There’s plenty of time to get engaged. Also, we’ll keep moving, we’ll keep moving. So I see, I see a response below. Our local matches include city funding, United Way, private foundation fundraising, etc. Awesome, awesome, that’s a good capital stack. Variety of different funding sources that are non-federal. Thank you so much, Gwen, for chiming in. So, here are a couple of key concepts for the SNAP E&T 50/50 model, so that 50/50 reimbursement structure, so the federal government reimburses states for 50% of the allowable SNAP employment and training program costs incurred by approved providers, so those third-party providers.

Number two, this 100% upfront funding, so organizations must provide eligible non-federal funding, so is that so that they can be reimbursed, so the funding has to exist prior, like there’s no way to get the 50/50 match, per se, and Kathy will speak a lot more about this, because I think the match language, even to me, was a little bit confusing until we had a brief conversation earlier. And then number three, allowable cost categories, so understanding which participant services case management training activities and administrative supports are tied directly to SNAP employment and training programming. And then the fourth, and like this is like the more ambitious one, is like the opportunity to potentially expand your programming that you currently offer through the 50/50 model, which really allows folks to leverage the federal reimbursement to sustain programming, and like Kathy and I spoke about this, is like this idea that be able to reinvest your reimbursed funds. She’ll talk a little bit more, probably about that in the later slides. And then here’s a quick visual to really help you all to see visually what it might look like, and I know that this may not be the most inclusive way to like showcase what this means, so definitely make sure that this goes out in the slide deck afterwards. So when folks are wondering, so your organization has the non-frontable funds to provide ENT services that initial investment of $1,000 so then you invoice to that SNAP E&T agency, you receive the 50% reimbursement, which is that 500 then reinvest that reimbursement, so you see the 500 being reinvested, it’s 250 so like this continuous idea of like reinvesting, so the SNAP E&T reimbursement funds can be reinvested to leverage additional reimbursement, so not necessarily having to put in additional funds, and like there’s knowledge that this reimbursed funds are like not something that you hold in your hand or hold in your, like they’re not physically existing until you actually leverage the $1,000 of the first place. So, having that upfront funding,

Wedcalf 12:32
Can I jump in here, Jonathan?

Osei 12:33
Absolutely.

Wedcalf 12:34
Because this is something I think, since this is a high priority, I want to make sure. So, the key here is that if you just take the funds you get back and replace them into the funds that you spent them out of, you are not taking advantage of the 50/50 program. You need to set your system up so that you can re-utilize that reimbursement, they came back to get reimbursed a second, third, fourth time. Okay, and so if you’re thinking about it as a match, and when the money comes back and you just replace it into the funds that you spent it out of, you are not going to have a sustainable model, because all you’re doing is replacing the money you originally spent. The idea is to reutilize the funds that come back, spend them again in the E&T program, get them reimbursed a second time, and eventually you’re building up essentially a stash of money that can be used for reimbursement and support the program independently of other expenses, but you still have to keep investing in the program every year. You can’t reduce the amount you’re investing at the beginning, because you need to build up that pot of funds in your reimbursement fund to be able to use it to expand your program, okay? And there’s a couple of tricks here, because people say, well, I’m getting reimbursed with federal funds, so how can I use that as a leveraged fund next time around, so because it’s a reimbursement program and you’ve spent 100% of your money up front, and you’ve spent it as non federal dollars, you’re getting reimbursed, and it becomes non federal, it loses its federal designation because they’re replacing the non federal dollars that you originally spent, okay? So you’re not even though it is technically coming from the feds, because it’s a reimbursement based on your actual expenditures, and you covered the expenses 100% upfront, the money comes back to you as replacement money. And it’s money that replaces the money you spent, and you spent non-federal dollars, so therefore they’re non-federal dollars when they’re returned to you. So it’s not money laundering, which is somewhat some people say, okay? So it’s really critical that you set up your system to be able to reinvest your reimbursement back into the E&T program. What that does is eventually, when you build up your reimbursement fund, you do have, you will have money outside of E&T to spend on other parts of your program, that money that you were using for E&T takes time, but it really can be a huge return on your investment.

Osei 15:49
Thanks, thanks for that breakdown, Kathy. Like that, like really shows the value of like this reimbursement model, honestly. And then this, this is just to reiterate a point that Kathy has made, even so, SNAP E&T funding is not a traditional grant. So, to receive the reimbursement or draw down reimbursement, you must be funding your employment program with services with non-federal funds first, and like we’re reiterating this intentionally, because there is no upfront funding for or from the E&T program, so your organization is reimbursed on eligible costs incurred. So this is like to keep thinking about that. And Kathy, feel free to chime in.

Wedcalf 16:32
I was just going to say, just know that you don’t have to 100% fund everything non-federally. You can braid your funding, okay? You’ll only get reimbursed for your non-federal funds, so if 50% of your program is funded non-federally or non-federally, and 50% is funded federally, you will get reimbursed for 50% of the cost of the program, because 50% is being funded, you’ll get 50% of 50% you know, basically, you don’t have to fund everything completely non-federally in order to be a part of the program.

Osei 17:09
So, thanks for that context, Kathy. So, now to assessing potential reimbursement, and some of the things that Kathy mentioned, we’ll reiterate again, because, like, they’re really key and important concepts too, so please chime in with any questions or even comments. Pop in the chat, raise a hand, come off mute. Yeah, so this visual is really a helpful way of seeing like that overall that up top organizational budget, which includes all those revenue, all the revenue and expenses that you’ll have, then your specific training program budget, so all of the associated revenue and expenses that go along with serving all your participants, then this like potential SNAP E&T budget, which includes the allowable SNAP E&T cost, and then at the bottom of this, like inverted pyramid, is all the expenses based on the projected share of SNAP E&T participants. Feel free to chime in as well, Kathy, to just get more in-depth on this piece as well.

Medcalf 18:19
No, you did great.

Osei 18:20
So the assessing your prudential reimbursement, so just another, another visual, honestly, to like, like we’re trying to just make sure it’s like it makes sense from like a visual from just the words we’re saying, but essentially that non-federal and the not federally matched funds are in and just recognizing that word matched as well, come through as revenue, it’s tied to the SNAP E&T the expenses and services that are tied to SNAP E&T activities, and then the participants who are SNAP E&T eligible, so really thinking along these four parameters, and then just the revenue, expenses, services, and participants as a key way of understanding what your potential universal might look like.

Medcalf 19:10
So their match is the proper word, because if you have other federal grants that you have to show that you’re matching your local funds to, you can’t use the funds, you can’t double dip the funds, so if you’re using your non-federal, some non-federal local funds to match a federal grant, you can’t also use those for reimbursement on E&T, because you’d be double dipping, because you’re using the non-federal money twice, so that’s what that means.

Osei 19:43
Thanks, Kathy.

Medcalf 19:45
Yep.

Osei 19:54
So we’re jumping back into this concept of the upfront funding, so it’s. I appreciate Gwen for chiming in earlier about the matches, city funding, United Way, private foundations, fundraising, etc. So it’s really important for folks to know the upfront funding sources that are available to fuel the program, so the program administration and operation costs the support staff salaries in the fringe as well, and then the supportive services for participants slash students, whether it be the books, fees, tuition, child care costs, and it’s really important to keep assessing this on a regular basis to ensure that your program is sustainable and has the ability to grow and expand. Okay, so just, just a bit of mention about some of the common non-federal funding sources, as well, state, county, city, and other local funds. Private donations were mentioned, foundation grants, and then the community development block grant. So the CDBG is like the only federal funding source that is eligible for reimbursement, so CDBG funds obviously coming down through outside, outside of, like, the USDA or Department of Labor funds as well, so potential to leverage those CDBG funds.

Medcalf 21:33
And it’s actually written in the statute for CDBG that it is eligible for ENT reimbursement. The other thing you want to be careful of is sometimes city, county, city, state, county, and city funds are federal pass-through dollars, so you need to make sure that the money that you’re getting from state counties and cities are not pass-through dollars, because pass-through dollars are not reimbursable.

Osei 22:05
Thanks for that context, Kathy. Okay, so okay, so here’s here’s one of like the practical examples of what Kathy had spoke of earlier. Would love Kathy if you could run through this and like help folks understand like how it functionally works in this like programmatic budget.

Medcalf 22:22
So this is a sample of how you might look at what your SNP E&T reimbursement potential is. So, if you have a program that’s receiving some federal donations and or some federal money that’s helping to fund your program, and then a bunch of other funds that come in, you would want to look at all the funding sources at your organization that are funding your workforce program, and so in this example we owe a dollars are funding it. Then you have private donations, foundation grants, and some CDBG funding. The total is $397,000 for your workforce programs budget, but in reality that top $200,000 is federal funds, so you have to take that out of your potential for reimbursement, and we always say potential, because everything’s based on actual expenses and getting reimbursed. You can’t look at that 197,000 and say, oh, I’m going to get half of that back, so about 200,000 about $100,000 back, you only get back what you actually spend of those non-federal dollars. So this is how you kind of narrow down what the potential is at your organization for reimbursement.

Osei 23:35
And then we have a couple examples of some of the upfront funding sources too. So these examples come from, like, Kathy’s experience leading this work, so let Kathy chime in to share a little more context on these as well.

Medcalf 23:48
Yeah, these are a lot of colleges, and I think most of you are community-based organizations, but you want to think about any non-federal funding you get to cover supportive services for your clients, any non-federal funding you get to, and it could be from anyone, it could be from the city to support returning citizens or recovering addicts, you know, there might be certain funds for homeless people that are coming into your programs to help support low-income people that need a leg up in their workforce development training, so any of those kind of funds are the funds you want to be looking for to support you in this ENT programming, and oftentimes for community-based organizations it is the foundation grants or local funds that you’re getting from the United Way from Goodwill. All other community organizations, some of the smaller organizations. When I worked in the state of Maine and ran an E&T program, we got donations from the smaller organizations in our community, like the Rotary Club and the Kiwanis Club and other service organizations that would cover the cost of transportation for our clients coming to and from our adult education program, or the cost of books, or something that they could specifically tie to knowing they were helping the community directly, the low-income people in the community, so you know, and then you can take a story back that’s so critical when you can go back and say, you know, you gave us $1,000 last year, that $1,000 provided, you know, 20 people transportation to get to their training, and of those 20 people, 10 of them now have jobs. You know, and then it’ll probably be a recurring donation every year. You know, those, those are the things you want to look at. So, in the colleges, a lot of it is scholarship funds that are used for lower income students, so like Washington has a specific state grant for low income students and dislocated workers that can be used for reimbursement, Iowa and Nebraska have funds for non Pell eligible training for the colleges, when we were working with Delgado Community College in Pennsylvania, or excuse me, in Louisiana, the person I was working with went to their business office and said, Can you tell me what non-federal funding sources we have to see what I can tap into for this, and the person was like, well, we get this $80,000 fund from PepsiCo, which is in Louisiana, and they never did anything with it, because they didn’t know what to do with it, so they gave the $80,000 to the E&T program for reimbursement for supportive services. Many Minnesota and Illinois specifically have training funds that can be used by CBOs for supportive services for low-income people. So there’s oftentimes sources out there that you don’t think about when you’re thinking about what you can use for SNAP E&T. Questions, thoughts? And the thing to think about is it doesn’t have to be a huge amount of money, since you can use the money over and over again, if a program like a smaller program, like a Rotary or a Kiwanis, gives you $500 That $500 if they do it every year, the first year it’s $500 The second year, that $500 plus the 250 reimbursement you got the first year, now you have $750 to spend on SNAP E&T supportive services, and the next year that 750 becomes 500 plus half of 750 so 375 plus 500 Do you see how that’s the whole point of the program? Because you can leverage if that $500 keeps coming in, you’re not asking for any more, but that $500 keeps building every year for your amount of reimbursement that you get to put back into your program.

Osei 28:53
Thanks for the breakdown, Kathy. Awesome. And then the next piece will be, we’ll talk about this, is I think this is most fun for Kathy. This, we could think about, we did a little example with the table, and I think this is like a more practical understanding of like what braiding funding could do for your SNAP E&T-funded programming.

Medcalf 29:16
Right. So part of making this program work is looking at your funding sources and see what things you might be able to reorganize to maximize your reimbursement, so if you have federal funding and right now you have maybe a case manager that is 100% funded with a federal grant and you have a way to maybe cover 20% of their staff of their salaries and fringe benefits with non federal funding, then you could at least get reimbursement for 20% of their salary and benefits if they’re spending 20% of their time with ENT clients. So they can still have 80% of their salary and benefits paid for with federal funds, but you’ve just upped amount of reimbursement you can get for the time they’re spending with ENT clients, so you can use the example, the best example, I was an adult education director, I mentioned that before, and we got Title Two funds, which are funds to fund the adult education program from WIOA, and my organization was a nonprofit, said, you know, you have to spend all your grant money first, we have to make sure we use all of our grant money? Right, well, we always ran out of our grant money before the end of the year, so I could only get reimbursed in the last quarter for the percent of my ENT percent of my students in adult education that were ENT, and they said to my budget director, I said, “Look, if we can spread the grant funding out over the whole year and have a 20% non-federal funding through the whole year, we can maximize the reimbursement we get, rather than one quarter of 20% reimbursement, we can have 20% reimbursement all year and generate more funds for the program. I had the data to show, I mean, for years we always run out. There was never any question that the last quarter was always locally funded, so you know, why not? If we can get reimbursement all year, generate more funding for my program. Why not allow us to spread that out? Because we have the data to prove it, right? So that’s one way, because you don’t have to fund any position 100% non-federal or 100% federal. The other thing is that if you are using positions that are federally funded, that’s fine. You just don’t get reimbursed for them. It’s okay to use them in the ENT programs. It’s no big deal. It’s just you don’t get reimbursed. So, looking at ways that you can rearrange some of your funding to maybe increase your reimbursement is what you’re looking for in your breeding funding kind of thoughts. It’s a process. Terry, do you have a question? I get done. It’s okay, unmute if you want to ask it.

Jackson (attendee) 32:31
Yeah, Kathy, that’s that’s huge. And I’m sorry I joined late, but that’s a huge thing for us to consider when we’re doing this, so we’re, we’re just now getting ready to apply for our first EBT, but that is with you explaining that, that was just for me, and I don’t understand, I think I understand how to do it, but I’m definitely going to be in touch with you to make sure as we’re doing this that that I fully understand that, because I think that’s really important in terms of those reimbursements, and we’re doing 100% yeah.

Medcalf 33:17
It is, it absolutely is, and it really is critical to maximizing your reimbursement and running the program in a way that will really help you bring those reimbursement dollars back in. The other thing is to look at your overall programs, that kind of maximizing students or clients. Sorry, I’m an educator at heart, maximizing your participants that might be, they can be dual enrolled, you can have them enrolled in your federal programs and enrolled in SNAP E&T, and so, like, if you have a WIOA program, the WIOA always runs out of supportive service money, they have plenty of training money, they don’t have supportive service money, so they can cover the cost of the training, you can do your supportive services through your program, and then WIOA doesn’t have to support the supportive services, you can get reimbursed for all the supportive services you provide, and then they can use, they can, then WIOA can use their supportive service money for people who aren’t on SNAP.

Jackson (attendee) 34:19
Okay.

Medcalf 34:20
So if you have clients in your program that aren’t on that don’t qualify for SNAP, they can get their supportive services through WIOA, but you can provide the supportive services for your SNAP E&T student clients, people, and get reimbursed for those, so you bring more money in, because we owe is not getting reimbursed for anything, let them use the money on the students that you can’t, or clients that you can’t get reimbursed for, and you get reimbursed for the ones that you can support through SNAP E&T with non-federal funding. Is this helping Terry? That’s a positive nod?

Jackson (attendee) 35:02
Let me ask you this, Kathy, is there how many people do, as we’re getting ready to get into this, like in a staffing perspective, to be able to administer and to, to understand that, how many people, how many people should we be thinking about in terms of administering this program?

Medcalf 35:31
Okay, well, that’s a loaded question, without knowing how big. Excuse my cat, he wanders through these things all the time, How big is your program?

Jackson 35:46
Talking maybe a couple of 100, a couple of 100 participants a year.

Medcalf 35:54
What percentage of those are E&T? Will you think with be a SNAP employment and training?

Jackson 35:59
We’re gonna say I’ll say, let’s call it 50%.

Medcalf 36:06
Okay, so you’re gonna have 100. Let’s just say you’re gonna plan to serve 100 people.

Jackson 36:12
Yep.

Medcalf 36:12
Okay, so you have case managers, career navigators, something like that. What’s their normal case load?

Jackson 36:22
Yes, they’re taking care of the whole 100, so we only have one each, like case manager and navigator.

Medcalf 36:30
Okay, so they would – would one person be doing with their full-time job be serving the E&T students? Or, I mean, this is what you have to do. So, what I’m saying, like

Jackson 36:42
This is…

Medcalf 36:42
If you have 200 clients and you have two one navigator and one case manager, then 50% of their time would be spent with E&T students.

Jackson 36:50
Yep.

Medcalf 36:50
and 50% would be spent with non-ENT, so 50% of their salary essentially would be reimbursable salary and fringe for the time they’re spending with ENT students for both the career navigator and the case manager,

Jackson 37:04
Gotcha.

Medcalf 37:04
So those two would definitely be on. You need to know, you need to make decisions like who’s going to be doing all the data intake, the intake orientation, who’s going to be doing all the data entry, what state are you in?

Jackson 37:18
We have that, we have the program administrators, who’s doing all of the data in

Medcalf 37:23
What state?

Jackson 37:25
Oh, I’m sorry, Colorado. We’re in Colorado. Okay.

Medcalf 37:30
All right. Lucky you. Colorado is a complicated state. The reason I said that they, they have some idiosyncrasies with the way you invoice, so just one, but you want to look at who’s going to touch the ENT clients, alright, so you’ve got business office people who will be doing invoicing and stuff.

Jackson 38:04
Yep.

Medcalf 38:04
They’re going to be touching the clients, so they can directly track their staff time, how much time they’re spending on ENT over the course of the year.

Jackson 38:14
Yep.

Medcalf 38:15
Okay, so go through, kind of take a client from the minute they walk in your door to when they exit, and think about how many people touch them.

Jackson 38:29
Okay.

Medcalf 38:30
If the amount of time over the course of a week is more than you know, 10% then it’s probably worth figuring out if it’s worth the time and effort to put them in the budget.

Jackson 38:46
Got it.

Medcalf 38:47
Or the other option is this first year you focus on the main positions, your program manager, your case manager, your navigator, maybe some supportive services in your business office, and then you track data the first year to see who else touched the ent clients, because then you can add those people in the next year.

Jackson 39:09
Okay, okay, I like that.

Medcalf 39:13
Okay and I will share my email in the…

Jackson 39:20
In the chat?

Medcalf 39:20
…and I’d be happy to talk to you.

Osei 39:26
So, appreciate, appreciate the live workshop. In this, this is what we’re out for, y’all. So, thanks so much, Terry, for asking the great questions too. And also, excited, excited for you as you start to develop and get ready to apply to have a SNAP E&T program. This is exciting. Okay, so one piece, so one last piece before we get into, I guess, more of that workshopping led by Kathy is just this allowable cost piece. So, and then we’re going to talk about budget and invoice, and we’re gonna get into it, but so this is an example. Of Kentucky’s allowable costs, so every state defines what allowable costs will look like for their program, so please understand that you must look at the context for your state, so in Kentucky, so the administrative cost side, salaries, fringe benefits, administrative services, building space, such lease and utilities, the non-capital equipment, you know, travel, indirect costs to the NYCRA, and then the contract training, and the participant costs, training fees, books, supplies, childcare, uniforms, transportation. So this is going to be heavily contextual based on whichever state that you work in, and then when it comes to the relationship of budget and invoicing, so this invoicing is tied directly to your SNAP E&T budget, so your organization’s SNAP E&T budget is projection of the reimbursement you intend to request based on the estimated number, and Kathy kind of, Kathy kind of just broke this down, like the estimated number of 72 participants, the service intended to be provided with the non-federal funds, and then so directly related administrative expenses. So, what that person touches, that business person who is doing the invoicing, you know, so it, so you can invoice for service services, staff administration expenses, and can write those into your budget, so you can only invoice up to your budget reimbursement total. So, you will effectively have two budgets, one for reducing services and one for administrative citizens.

Medcalf 41:33
And the reason it’s said that way is because, based on federal regulations, you can’t move in a lot of budgets, you can move money around, you cannot move money from participant reimbursements to administrative costs or administrative costs to participant reimbursements in this grant. So, the best thing to do is, and let me tell you, that E&T budget forms from the states are ridiculously complicated, and you really need to set up a plain budget, which I, I can give a sample that we can send out to the participants today, but that sets up a very kind of normal budget and then you can go from there to put it into state budgets that usually require you to separate it out by component costs, so but if you don’t do the original budget first, because that’s actually what you invoice to, it’s very confusing.

Jackson 42:39
Okay, yeah.

Medcalf 42:44
The other thing to know is you do not put an E&T budget in your actual general ledger, because this is a projected budget, you’re only getting a reimbursement at 50% and you’re leveraging the other funds that you’re spending, you are not having a budget, you have a budget outside of your GL, because you have to tie, you have to leverage all of your non-federal sources you’re already spending, so you have to either track time for your staff of what time they’re spending on E&T, or you use a cost ratio method, so for a position for position like your for positions like that are direct service staff, you can use a ratio, so say they’re teaching in class or a career case manager, like we were just talking about, if their case load is 100 people, and each month you check the eligibility, and 40 of those, and this month 40 of those people are E&T. Then 40% of their salary that month can be reimbursed. The next month it might be 60, and so that month 60% of their salary can be reimbursed, because 60% of their case load was that way you use that same ratio for administrative costs. If you have rent for a building for your program, and 60% of your clients are E&T, 60% of your rent that month can be reimbursed. That’s an administrative cost. Your insurance costs, your utility costs, all of those things can be billed at the ratio of your E&T clients to your overall clients in your program. If you need to buy sets of training materials for your program, choose a month that you have a high ratio. if like September is your highest month, because that’s your busiest month, then that’s the month you want to buy training materials, because if you buy it that month and you’re at 60% you get 60% reimbursement of your training materials that month, same thing goes for. Computers or other equipment that you’re investing in for your program, or if you need to buy a computer for your case manager, a new computer, buy it at a month that you have a high ratio.

Jackson 45:13
Okay.

Medcalf 45:17
And I know I’m, you’re asking all the questions, but I’m hoping this is helping other people when they’re listening as well, but so those are the two, you know, so like your budget person would probably be a direct billing where she, he or she would keep track of their time that they’re spending doing invoicing for SNAP E&T, because that would be a separate job than the regular invoicing they’re doing for the rest of your program, so they would track their ent time on like a time and effort sheet, and then you would bill based on how many hours they spent that month, what percentage of their fte that was, so you kind of, so when you’re talking about people, you have to think, am I going to cost ratio this person, am I going to direct bill this person, and how many of them I know it’s complicated once you get it set up the first time, the first year is the hardest, and so for instance, your program manager, whoever that’s going to be, you probably will put more time in for them the first year, because they’re going to be spending a lot of time making sure all the processes get set up, that everybody knows what they’re doing. After the first year, they probably don’t need as much time. Yeah, you’ll get reimbursed, but put more in for the program manager that first year, because they probably are going to spend more time getting the program set up, and you might as well take advantage and get reimbursed for all the time they’re doing.

Jackson 46:52
Gotcha.

Osei 46:55
Awesome, awesome. Thanks so much, Kathy, for the insider breakdown. And then Terry, thanks so much for all the great questions. So, okay, so I want to do like a time check, but also a temp check. So, our next section is a budget strategy in case making. So, if you all have additional questions that you want to ask, we may like leave time for that. If not, we get, we get right into like the example that where we use like either direct billing or this like client participant ratio method that Kathy just mentioned, so I just want to check with y’all, like, what’s the feel, what’s the vibe? I know nine minutes left, either way will be an informative experience. Terry, you’re off mute. You could chime in, like folks could chime in the chat, like, yeah,

Jackson 47:50
yeah, yeah. I’m open to go through the budget strategy. I’m getting ready to switch to my phone. I’m on my way to another meeting, but I’m going to switch to my phone, but I’m here,

Attendee 48:05
And I don’t have a preference either. I think I’m open, I’m very new to this, so whatever knowledge you have to share, I’m, I’m willing to hear.

Osei 48:17
Let’s do it, Kathy.

Medcalf 48:19
All right, um, do okay, so especially, especially when you’re starting out, staff salaries and benefits will probably be your largest reimbursement line, because it takes time to get all this stuff set up, and it’s your, your training costs, so staff time has to be tracked in order to get reimbursed. Okay, I mean, you have, so you either do it by actual time, which is called direct billing, or by allocated time, which is the client ratio method, and so for direct billing it’s usually time sheets with the participant ratio, you just have to calculate the ratio each month, or that of your ENT clients versus your overall clients in the particular program that those staff members are serving, so like the business person, it would be complete all of the clients in your program that you’re serving in the workforce development program versus ENT clients in a training program, if it’s a specific, if a case manager assigned to this particular CDL training course, then it would be the clients in that CDL training course, if that’s only their job, the percentage of time they’re spending on that particular training.

Next slide, so with direct billing, it’s simply, you know, the number of hours spent on the allowable activities each month. Times their wage and fringe hourly rate, which is unique to each staff, right, and then that’s how much you can charge each month to get the reimbursement, so you figure out their hourly rate, which your business office probably does all the time anyway, because they have to do it for everything else, and then, so you have to estimate on your budget what percentage of the FTE you want to put in for reimbursement, and I would strongly suggest that when you’re doing this for the first or second time that you give yourself some wiggle room of 10 to 15% because you don’t know until it actually happens, and this is a projected budget. It’s your best guess. You’ll get better each year when you do your budget, because you have data from the previous year to set up your next year’s budget. One of the great things about ENT is that each year you can add staff, take away staff, add things, take away things, you know, you can really adjust your budget, and the first year you’re going to be way off. There’s no question, which is why we strongly suggest that you don’t put any of your reimbursement money into your actual program revenue for the first year, don’t set yourself up. Okay, the revenue should not, don’t assume that you’re going to get all of the revenue you put in your budget and put that into your revenue for the very first year you’re doing ENT, okay? Because you can’t guarantee that, and if you put that in there and something happens, and you don’t get, because you’re not guaranteed that money, it can really put your organization at a disadvantage. So that’s why you don’t put a full budget for ENT into your GL. You really just need a revenue account and expense account. Don’t put a budget in. Budget is secondary in your GL, okay? Does this make sense? All right, so I will send this out. Why? No, we don’t have time to go over all of this, the client ratio method I kind of went over, but you take the time spent on ENT allowable activities each of their jobs, so if you have a job defined for a case manager, you would go through their job responsibilities and figure out which of their responsibilities are ENT activities. For instance, if they do any mental health or counseling that has that deals with health and mental health, that is an ill and not eligible expense for ENT. So, if 20% of their time is spent working on mental health, then 20% of their time isn’t eligible for ENT, so only 80% of their time is spent on ENT eligible activities, so you can only start their salary or start their percent time at 80% and then you look at the ratio of clients each month, so if 10 out of 20 of your clients are ENT, then 50% of that 80% is reimbursable, and then you multiply by their total wages for the month, and you can figure out what you’re charging, what you can get reimbursed for, so okay.

Next slide. And this is kind of what I just said. Here’s a career coach. If this is what it says in their job description, they’re doing employment coaching, job search, job development, and health and wellness. The health and wellness doesn’t count, so only 75% of their actual job is eligible for ENT, and the ratio is, you know, if to look at all of your, all of your clients, the It’s in this case, you have a total of 60 clients that are served, 35 are ENT participants, 14 are receiving TANF, and 11 are not receiving SNAP at all. So, you’ve got 35 students out of a total of 60, so that’s 58% is what you can bill that month for SNAP E&T client ratio, and that’ll change every month, because people come on and off SNAP, as you know, and we’re at time, just about, okay, let’s. The next slide, so this takes you through the calculations for that job. The person is 75% so 45% of their salary is eligible. 58% of the clients is eligible for, so 58% of that $45,000 is eligible for reimbursement, so 20-6250 is what that person’s salary on average would be eligible over the course of the year for reimbursement, which would bring a little over $13,000 back to your program.

Osei 55:43
Thanks, thanks so much, Kathy, for the in-depth breakdown. And, as Kathy said, we’ll be sharing out these slides afterwards as well. We just want to thank, like, Kathy once again for popping in and really giving, like, the deep dive into budgeting, invoicing. Like, Kathy is really an expert when it comes to SNAP E&T budgeting. So grateful to have her here, and like Kathy put her email in the chat. We’ll also make sure that we send a slide deck and everything afterwards, just let you know that we are a resource, NCRC is a resource when it comes to SNAP E&T and supports in that way. And we do have a best practices and tips slide, so we’ll save that for a little like preview after the fact, so y’all can look through, but just want to, as we get near our time, just want to thank you all. Thank you all for popping through today for a great conversation and a great webinar. Really thankful for both Simon and Kathy for leading this work. And stay tuned for our next one on May 20, 2026. So, understanding your clients, estimating SNAP E&T eligibility and referrals. So, this might be relevant to some of y’all who are newer in your process as well. I don’t know, we may have another guest, a special guest back for this one as well, but thank you all so much, and hope you have a great rest of your, what day is it?, Wednesday, and stay tuned for all of the follow-up materials.

One of the most troubling developments in recent months has been the rapid decline in the number of households receiving Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits. Based on the US Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) most recent data, the number of households enrolled in SNAP has declined by nearly 2 million, which means that roughly 4.1 million are no longer receiving the support they had a year ago. 

This steady decline in enrollment is shown in the figure below: 

Previous research from the USDA shows that 79% of households participating in SNAP include at least one person who is a child, elderly adult or person with a disability. This translates to more than two thirds of the individuals receiving SNAP benefits. As enrollment drops, the most vulnerable members in society are at the greatest risk of losing support to put food on the table. 

Reporting from NBC News illustrates this reality for families in Arizona, which has seen a near 50% drop in enrollment since July 2025, when the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) was signed into law. Administrative “sludge” has long been a major component of the costs of poverty that many people experience when navigating the public benefits system. 

As a result of the OBBBA, those problems are getting worse for people like Tiffany Hudson (profiled in the NBC News article) who have faced a new wave of restrictions and hurdles preventing them from even proving they are eligible for benefits. Across the country, every state except for Alaska and Hawaii saw a decrease in year-over-year enrollment, marking a concerning nationwide pattern resulting directly from the changes made last year. 

Below is the percentage change in SNAP enrollment for every state from January 2025 to January 2026:. 

Amidst the withdrawal of federal support, the cost of food and other basic necessities is climbing. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) latest estimates, prices across the board went up 3.8% in April compared to last year, largely driven by spiking gasoline prices that have risen 28.4% over the past 12 months.

Food prices are also rising. In April alone, the price for meats, poultry, fish and eggs increased 1.3%, beef prices rose 2% and prices for fruits and vegetables increased 1.8%. Over the past year, prices for eating at home has gone up 2.9% and dining out has increased 3.6%, demonstrating the declining affordability of the most basic necessities.

From the continued effects of the OBBBA and illegal tariffs to the unresolved conflict with Iran, working people are bearing the brunt of federal policy choices. Preliminary results from the University of Michigan’s Survey of Consumers suggest that the war with Iran has weighed especially hard on consumers’ personal finances and overall economic outlook. 

Consumer sentiment overall dropped 11% in April, extending a decline that began with the start of the Iran conflict. About 54% of consumers surveyed mentioned that high prices were eroding their personal finances, up from 47% last month and 38% a year ago.

Congressional Democrats have made several attempts to ease the burden of food prices on everyday Americans. Senator Bernie Sanders and Rep. Ilhan Omar introduced legislation to create a universal school meals program that would provide free breakfast, lunch, dinner and a snack to every student in America regardless of their family’s income. Nearly 40% of SNAP recipients are 18 or younger, making the need for this program more critical than ever as children are especially at risk of losing access to benefits.  

Rep. Frank Pallone, the ranking member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, announced a new inquiry into corporate surveillance pricing – a practice where companies use the personal data of consumers to charge different prices for the same goods. Recent research from Groundwork Collaborative, Consumer Reports and More Perfect Union has shown how companies like Instacart experiment with prices, charging consumers completely different prices for the exact same products to drive up their profit margins. 

The Federal Trade Commission previously testified to the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation about the rise of fraud and price gouging during the COVID-19 pandemic. They also released initial findings from a market study on surveillance pricing, revealing details as granular as cell phone location and browser history are frequently used to target consumers with different prices for the same goods.

This much is clear from these reports: there are many who relish the opportunity to take advantage of others during moments of uncertainty and desperation and will go to great lengths to squeeze people for every last penny. With the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau effectively sidelined by the Trump administration, those threats to consumers are heightened right now for some of the most vulnerable members of society. 

As foreign conflicts drag on and the implications of this administration’s actions continue to actualize over the coming months, the stakes could not be higher. People across the nation are going hungry, losing access to health care, struggling to fill their gas tanks and pay rising electricity bills. By all accounts, the chance of realizing economic mobility and building a secure financial future is looking increasingly out of reach, exposing people to exploitation and coercion amidst an uncertain financial future.

Simon Wang is the Economic Mobility Project Specialist with NCRC’s Economic Mobility team.

Photo credit: Tara Clark via Pexels.

Although these mandates are often viewed as compliance requirements, that perspective overlooks the broader purpose and opportunity of the CRA. In practice, the CRA shapes how banks manage risk, allocate capital and expand their footprint. Banks should not view CRA as a compliance requirement but rather as a strategic opportunity that can shape growth, capital allocation and risk management.

The CRA, enacted in 1977 as part of the Housing and Community Development Act, was designed to address the adverse effects of historic redlining and other discriminatory lending practices in banking. In response to decades of these practices, the Federal Reserve, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency were given the responsibility of evaluating how well banks meet their CRA obligations to these communities. 

Today, federally insured depository institutions are assessed under a four-tier rating system: Outstanding, Satisfactory, Needs Improvement, and Substantial Noncompliance. The practical consequences of a poor CRA rating include regulators using the rating as a determining factor when deciding whether to approve mergers and acquisitions, branch openings or applications to engage in new financial activities. 

Because these outcomes are tied directly to regulatory approval, many banks treat CRA as a compliance requirement rather than a strategic opportunity, which can limit how they approach growth and expansion. However, a bank that approaches CRA from a checklist perspective loses the broader strategic advantages that CRA compliance can provide. 

Instead, banks should view CRA as a strategic framework that, when used effectively, can inform market expansion, relationship banking and product design for local communities. Through the CRA, banks can identify underserved customers and communities, then reconfigure their offerings in ways that reach those customers before competitors can, creating a first-mover advantage in untapped markets.

CRA should function as a strategic framework and operating model for how banks grow by connecting core business lines such as mortgage lending, small business lending and branch strategy. This includes using data to reach new markets in underserved geographies, building partnerships with community lenders and creating products that meet the needs of local borrowers. CRA lending is not lower-quality. These investments can create new and profitable opportunities when approached strategically.

The core issue is that CRA responsibilities have not fully kept pace with changes in how banking actually operates. Today, there are many communities, especially in high-poverty and rural areas, where banks operate in practice but are not fully accountable under the CRA. This gap in coverage leaves those communities underserved. Also, in 2023, regulatory agencies updated the CRA’s regulations on reviewing loans that banks make outside of their branch networks, but last year the agencies announced their plans to reverse this critical update. As a result, banks may overlook profitable customer segments that fall outside traditional assessment areas. 

These gaps undermine the purpose of the Community Reinvestment Act by failing to reach those most in need, while also causing banks to miss meaningful opportunities to build relationships and expand long-term value in these markets. Banks should not treat CRA as another compliance requirement. Banks that leave these opportunities on the table risk missing growth in valuable markets that remain overlooked.

The CRA is about addressing unmet demand. That means going beyond where banks are already comfortable operating and thinking more intentionally about how to reach underserved communities. It also means building products and relationships that last, rather than treating CRA as a short-term commitment requirement.

At the same time, the CRA itself needs to catch up with how banking operates today. The current framework still relies heavily on physical presence, which creates gaps as more activity moves online. If those gaps are not addressed, the same communities the CRA was meant to support will continue to be left behind. Banks that move ahead of that curve and take this seriously now will be in a stronger position going forward, both in the market and in the communities they serve.

Joshua Barclay is a Graduate Intern with NCRC’s Economic Mobility team.

Simon Wang is the Economic Mobility Project Specialist with NCRC’s Economic Mobility team.

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Last month, the Trump administration released its National Legislative Framework for Artificial Intelligence (AI), informing Congress of his policy priorities for the industry for the coming year. The proposal comes as data centers and fears about AI-driven job displacement, particularly amongst white collar workers and recent college graduates, continue to mount. With a new class of college students preparing to walk across the stage and find employment this spring, the outrage over AI may grow.

But it’s not just younger, college-educated people who are concerned about AI. Data centers continue to be a unifying force amongst communities across the country who have organized to block projects and, more recently, mounted efforts to pass outright bans or moratoriums on data center development. Unfortunately, the Trump administration’s legislative proposals fall short of what the country needs to protect workers from labor market disruptions due to AI while actively working against the interests of communities fighting data centers. 

The Trump administration’s overall approach to AI has largely focused on meeting the needs of Big Tech leaders rather than harnessing federal power to protect the interests of workers and consumers. Part of this effort is establishing an air of inevitability around AI across all sectors. However, the actual impact of the latest round of AI tools on the broader economy remains unclear.

In the midst of technological change, it has been difficult for experts to parse out what claims are corporate grandstanding to attract investments or fire workers and the real effects of these tools on overall productivity. Regardless, generative AI tools like ChatGPT are undoubtedly changing the ways people work, learn and think.

The impacts of AI are especially salient in educational contexts as children and young people may be particularly vulnerable to the cognitive consequences of unregulated AI use. One of the more troubling aspects of the administration’s legislative framework is “Section VI: Educating Americans and Developing an AI-Ready Workforce,” which asks Congress to “incorporate AI training” into education programs and create “AI youth development programs.” 

Early research about the cognitive impacts of generative AI on high school and college students suggests that these tools foster dependence and limit the development of important brain functions like critical thinking and writing. Pushing to rapidly integrate AI into educational settings before clear scientific consensus emerges about its effects on students and safe ways to introduce the technology into the classroom could have negative consequences.

Although the first section of the legislative framework is about “Protecting Children and Empowering Parents,” this push to reshape schools and universities without intentional efforts to develop an evidence base and establish clear safety standards endangers the cognitive development of millions of children. 

The ramifications of prematurely integrating AI into the education system may only exacerbate existing educational inequities and worsen the long-term effects of AI displacement. The result could be devastating for economic mobility efforts, which has been built on the fundamental idea that building skills and expertise – whether that be through college, trade school or an apprenticeship – is rewarded in the labor market. Without the cognitive foundation to effectively learn new skills, allowing AI to enter the classroom without clear guidance and support for educators to implement it safely puts an entire generation’s career prospects in jeopardy. 

Data Centers Continue to Divide Washington and the Nation

When it comes to data centers, the administration’s legislative proposals are similarly concerning. The framework seeks to “streamline federal permitting for AI infrastructure construction and operation” as well as “preempt[ing] state AI laws that impose undue burdens,” making clear attempts to supersede state laws regulating AI. In the same breath, the framework also calls for the codification of the “ratepayer protection pledge” and restrictions on federal preemption over state zoning laws. 

On the one hand, the administration appears to be pushing to fast-track data center development past community interests while also endorsing several policies that would benefit communities. While the latter would be welcomed by many, the contradictions in the framework cloud the administration’s intentions, creating further confusion for communities trying to navigate the opaque process of data center construction. 

In the absence of federal leadership, states are stepping up to fill the regulatory gap. Maine recently became the first state to pass a statewide ban on data centers, which would pause development until November 2027 with no exemptions. The bill passed both chambers of the state legislature but was vetoed by Governor and US Senate candidate Janet Mills. 

Outside of Maine, there are at least 12 states (Georgia, Maryland, Michigan, New Hampshire, New York, Maryland, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Vermont, Virginia and Wisconsin) who are considering data center bans. Last month, the first data center ban ballot referendum was passed in a small town in Wisconsin. The Trump administration may not have a coherent legislative framework for responsibly stewarding the buildout of AI infrastructure in the public interest, but states are filling the void and responding to the resounding voices of their communities. 

Sanders and Khanna Join Forces to Take on Billionaires

In other news, Senator Bernie Sanders and Congressman Ro Khanna introduced legislation in March that would establish a 5% annual wealth tax on the 938 billionaires in America. This move comes on the heels of a similar bill moving through California’s state legislature that is set to be decided by ballot referendum in November. The Sanders-Khanna bill would use the funds raised from the wealth tax to deliver direct payments of $3,000 to every adult and child in households making $150,000 or less in its first year. 

This means a family of four with two parents and two children would receive $12,000 in the first year. After that, the estimated $4.4 trillion in revenue raised from the tax over the next decade could be used on projects that support working families. As the nation faces an ever growing affordability crisis, the bill could provide much needed short-term relief for families while also setting the stage for future initiatives to improve economic security for struggling Americans.

In the meantime, Congress has been held up with budget negotiations around Department of Homeland Security (DHS) funding, next year’s appropriations and the conflict in the Middle East. Looking ahead, Congress may move forward on the budget before the midterms to fulfill an emergency White House request for military funding to pay for the costs of attacking Iran. Notably, the Republican majority would have to make additional budget cuts to pay for the Pentagon’s requests not even a year after they drastically slashed the social safety net by cutting federal support for Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). 

The effects are already being felt by people across the country who are losing access to healthcare and cannot afford to eat. Fulfilling the White House request would mean additional cuts to the budget and even more pain and suffering for low- to moderate-income Americans all in order to pay for a war they had no say in. Affordability may have become a buzzword in American politics, but it is all too real for the millions of people struggling to make ends meet right now.

Simon Wang is the Economic Mobility Project Specialist with NCRC’s Economic Mobility team.

Photo credit: Ron Lach via Pexels.

Trump’s deal attempts to address widening concerns about the effect of data centers on utility costs, which has become a rallying flag for organizers and activists leading the resistance to data center construction. Data centers’ connection to increased energy bills have also sparked bipartisan efforts in Congress from Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) to prevent data centers from pushing utility cost increases onto residents.

Even as data centers’ role in raising utility rates has captured the attention of policymakers in Washington, the nature of their relationship is complicated and reveals broader issues with the nation’s energy supply and its aging electricity grid. As life remains unaffordable for many Americans, it is unclear whether Trump’s partnership with Big Tech will actually help to bring down electricity bills. 

Data centers have exacerbated and complicated underlying issues with energy markets and the electricity grid. Well before data centers entered the public consciousness, all three of the main segments of the electricity grid (generation, transmission and distribution) had been struggling with aging infrastructure for years. Largely built in the 1960s and 1970s, the electricity grid in many areas of the country desperately needs modernization and reliability upgrades. 

Many communities are already vulnerable to reliability issues, such as power outages, and as outdated power generation sites like coal plants have been retired, some have experienced declining power supply ,which can increase prices. As data centers have gotten bigger and require more resources to train AI models, support AI applications and cool servers, they have also entered new areas of the country, often introducing unprecedented levels of energy demand on already outdated local grids. Between 2017 and 2023, data center power demand more than doubled largely due to the growth in AI servers. 

Data centers’ unprecedented energy demands have coincided with historically high electricity prices in several regions of the country. To meet this increased energy demand, Trump’s proposed deal would require Big Tech companies to cover the costs of powering new data centers by building new generation capacity themselves or fronting the cost of doing so. If the Big Tech companies are able to stick to the agreement, then their commitments to bring more power sources online could help to prevent further increases in rates resulting from energy demand outpacing supply.

But, doing so will be easier said than done. Some of the key components of power plants are increasingly scarce, namely gas turbines, copper and other commodities tied to the data center boom. Without these materials, developers may not be able to complete data center and power plant builds on time or be forced to abandon projects altogether, leaving communities to foot the bill for the costs of preparing the grid. 

Even if Big Tech is able to overcome these challenges and hold up their end of the bargain, increasing electricity rates are not always related to constraints on power supply. Data center buildouts typically require improvements to transmission and distribution infrastructure as well, which can lead to increased prices across the market. Historically, the costs of making these kinds of upgrades to the grid have been shared and distributed across all ratepayers. 

However, data centers have led many communities and local leaders to revisit this policy as they reckon with what it means to give up their land for resource-intensive data centers in order to train a technology aimed at replacing them. Trump’s ratepayer protection pledge also fails to account for one of the most significant contributors to increased electricity rates: separate, opaque rate agreements between utility companies and data center developers. 

With hundreds of billions of dollars of data center investments on the table, communities have been competing to differentiate themselves from one another for investors and developers. This often looks like offers of numerous tax abatements or exemptions on the part of local government officials. But, it can also mean utility commissioners entering into favorable deals with data center developers to attract projects to their area. Without safeguards to ensure accountability and transparency between data center developers and utility commissions, residents may still see increased electricity rates. 

After months of backlash and resistance from communities, Big Tech companies have yielded on a number of concerns about the swift rollout of data centers. The Trump agreement mostly restates what several companies have already publicized. Although it might help to prevent rate increases in some areas with a more limited power supply, the agreement does not address the impact of transmission and distribution upgrades, limited supply of critical materials for constructing power plants or lack of transparency from utility commissions and developers with local communities. 

Furthermore, without a clear enforcement mechanism, it is no more than a handshake agreement with no accountability for companies that do not hold up their end of the deal. As the cost of living continues to constrain economic mobility and security for communities, Trump’s ratepayer protection pledge is a start but not a long-term solution. Federal and state actions in response to concerns about data centers must empower communities’ autonomy to set the terms of their own agreements with data center developers while also harnessing government power and capacity to enforce oversight, transparency and accountability where localities may lack the resources to do so.

More than 190 data center bills were introduced in state legislatures in 2025, with models like California’s Senate Bill 57 and Pennsylvania’s Load Forecast Accountability Act offering frameworks for utility commission oversight and cost-shift accountability. Future federal actions must build on these efforts without constraining communities’ autonomy. Congress should pass the GRID Act, authorize the Energy Information Administration to collect and publish data center electricity use data and require that utility contracts with data center developers be disclosed to the public rather than redacted from regulatory filings or hidden by non-disclosure agreements.

Communities cannot be expected to protect themselves from trillion-dollar companies when the terms of the deals shaping their electricity bills are kept secret. Without binding disclosure requirements and enforceable cost protections, communities will continue to bear the costs of an AI boom while the benefits flow to the top.

Simon Wang is the Economic Mobility Specialist with NCRC’s Economic Mobility team.

Photo credit: Claudio Schwarz via Unsplash.