According to Feeding America, for every meal provided by a food bank, nine meals are provided through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.
“On Saturday, more people will rely on the food banks, and the gap between nine and one is pretty significant,” says Kelsey Sanders, a grant program manager at Spartanburg Regional Foundation.
Sanders also is working with local nonprofit providers in Cherokee County on solutions for food and health insecurity there. “We're anticipating that there's going to be an increased burden on local food banks to provide [support],” she says.
At latest count from the South Carolina Department of Social Services, nearly 270,000 households in the state got SNAP benefits in September.
What that represented to South Carolina in just September was $104 million in SNAP funding that the state would have to make up for by the end of Halloween, if it would be able to cover SNAP costs in South Carolina for November. Which it cannot do.
On Tuesday, Gov. Henry McMaster said that the One SC Fund, begun as a state-administered charitable giving entity under Gov. Nikki Haley, would now be able to raise funds specifically to help fund food banks.
The essential premise behind the fund is that citizens step up to donate money that will go directly, at first, to the state’s four major food banks – Second Harvest, Golden Harvest, Harvest Hope, and the Low Country Food Bank – which then buy food and get it to a network of as many as 900 smaller food pantries and soup kitchens and distribution sites around South Carolina.
The announcement was met with cool caution among food aid workers in the state, who say that encouraging philanthropy among neighbors is at least something, but not nearly enough.
In the first 48 hours of opening One SC Fund to receive money for food banks, the Central Carolina Community Foundation, which oversees the fund, reported raising about $95,000 from donors. On Thursday afternoon, Duke Energy announced a donation of $100,000 to the fund.
At the same point in the fund’s existence for Hurricane Helene relief last year, CCCF President Georgia Mjarten told South Carolina Public Radio, the agency had collected roughly $1 million.
Erinn Rowe, CEO of Harvest Hop, addressed the problem with relying on private donations to pay for such a massive undertaking by saying, “$100 million dollars per month is not something that we've ever seen philanthropy raise in a week.”
Rowe added that it would take a much bigger state effort to help address food relief funding – which state lawmakers will almost certainly have to do in 2026, when SNAP cuts under the One Big Beautiful Bill kick in and the responsibility of funding food programs falls much more to states.
But short of state lawmakers calling themselves back to session to redirect funds for food relief, not much else can be done than ask the public to help feed people who will be turning to food banks – which could be far more than SNAP recipients. For example, federal workers.
According to the Library of Congress, 24,863 federal workers were employed in South Carolina in 2024. Today, many of them have not been paid since the shutdown began a month ago.
At the local level
In Cherokee County, what’s about to happen is that small food distribution outlets concentrated in Gaffney and Blacksburg will be trying to get food out to a county where one in five households receives SNAP benefits.
"The possibility of not having SNAP benefits awarded on November 1st has really caused us as an entire community to take a look at what resources we have that could possibly supplement,” said Libbie Cheek, coordinator for the Live Health Cherokee Coalition. “ And those resources are already stretched thin. So all of your food pantries, your ministries, your blessing boxes, all those things already exist, but they are mostly at capacity as they are now.”
And while Cheek says the looming SNAP crisis has already brought community members together to gather food for neighbors, a key point for food assistance workers in the state is the understanding that the system that helps prop up hungry residents under normal operations was already flawed.
And then there’s SNAP’s reach beyond food banks.
“Sixty percent of our clients do use SNAP,” says Teresa Spires, executive director of Know(2) in Gaffney. Know(2) is Cherokee County’s only Healthy Bucks retailer. Healthy Bucks, through the state DSS, allows SNAP recipients to use their EBT cards to buy FoodShare boxes for $5. These are boxes of produce that otherwise retail for $20.
If SNAP money becomes unavailable, sales for FoodShare boxes in Gaffney will be cash sales at full price, Spires says.
“ It's [still] a great deal,” she says, in that the fruits and vegetables usually are worth about $30 per box. But SNAP cuts will put a real dent in people getting fresh produce. “[FoodShare] feeds a lot of families in our community. We're running around 100 boxes or so every two weeks. So that's about 60 boxes that no one will be able to buy.”
And then there’s economic impact to the community writ large, which Spires also says will suffer. The US Department of Agriculture has previously said that every dollar spent on SNAP yields about $1.80 in return for the economy. The Trump administration has since taken that statistic from the USDA website. But Spires says that kind of return on investment portends a gigantic loss for the state’s economy.
“There's an economic impact to SNAP benefits to the things that the government helps people with in our community provides money that is spent in this community that pays for other people to have jobs,” she says. “It's … it's frustrating.”
