South Carolina is not among the 41 states facing a cutoff in Head Start funding.
That doesn’t stop Hafeezah Yates from worrying.
“This is a wake up call,” Yates, South Carolina’s manager of Save the Children Action Network, or SCAN, says. She says that as federal lawmakers have stalled funding for programs like Head Start amid a monthlong shutdown, the cracks of the system that we thought we’ve had are starting to show through the system that we actually have.
“Now we understand that federal funds are not guaranteed,” she says. “They can be halted at any time.”
For workers in the nonprofit, advocacy, and social safety net space, fears over what is happening today, what might happen tomorrow, and what could be on the horizon 12 to 24 months from now are exhausting – mostly because of how interconnected social needs are, and how tied to federal assistance so many of them have become.
“ Think about just your day-to-day ways of living,” Yates says. “If your family runs out of food, everybody is not thinking clearly. A parent has to take the child to, say, a Head Start program; they get there, the program's closed. We're noticing a trend that, most times, parents [are] not told in enough advance to really shift to another option.”
And so if this parent's plan was to drop their child off to a Head Start program and go to work, Yates says, that parent now has to contact their job, maybe take a day off, maybe without pay.
“If they're missing pay, they can't pay their bills,” she says “Now that parent may have to contact their landlord because they may be renting. It's all connected. It's a never-ending cycle.”
And Yates doesn’t think we're talking enough about the mental health aspect of all this.
“The mental health of, and the trauma that circles around not being able to live with your basic needs – these changes impact the mental health of South Carolinians,” she says.
No mental health numbers
There is no data from the South Carolina Office of Mental Health on whether residents are seeking more mental health services in connection with how the shutdown is affecting them. The office did send a statement saying: “OMH is accepting new patients at its 16 outpatient Mental Health Centers that serve all counties in South Carolina. OMH has a 24/7/365 toll-free statewide SC Mobile Crisis line for mental health emergencies at 833-364-2274, where anyone can call to speak with a mental health clinician.”
Data or not, the toll some residents are feeling is real.
Columbia resident Simone Pack has been navigating this year’s federal budget realities with a wary optimism and by planning for possible bad outcomes. She was halfway through nursing school at the University of South Carolina when a grant she was attending on was cut for pursuing DEI – diversity, equity, inclusion – initiatives.
To finish school, which she since has, Pack had to run up debt, exactly at a time when her husband, a military veteran, hurt his Achilles.
The only money coming in for a few months was $2,000 per month from the Veterans Administration. This was the Packs’ budget to operate the household for two parents and three children.
Pack says she was pointed to 180 Place, a homelessness intervention nonprofit organization in Columbia that is not, importantly, funded by federal dollars that are on hold. Without 180 Place, she says, “we’d be homeless.”
Pack also qualified for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, which she took. But when she got her job as a nurse, the money she made almost disqualified her. Being the planner type, Pack says she was already looking at tighter times ahead.
“ Me and my husband, we have what I call meetings once a week,” she says. “ I was actually planning before the government shut down. I had a sit-down with my husband and we kind of planned out how are we going to get by.”
The Packs pay about $600 per month to feed a family of five. They needed to pare that food budget down to $400 and then supplement from a food bank.
“Within those $400, we said we was going to go to Harvest Hope Food Bank,” she says. “We've been doing that and that has been helping us a whole lot.”
But the mental gymnastics to keep ahead of what-ifs, including an eroding sense of security around federal assistance dollars, have her feeling the realities of the day almost physically.
“I'm just in a period where … You know how you float on your back in water and like the water's right here?” she says, holding her hands next to her ears. “And then I'm just like right here. Just enough to get oxygen.”
She laughs a little. “I will be all right. But in the meantime, we’re going to maintain and we'll survive it.”
Past, present, future, and narratives
In The Tempest, William Shakespeare wrote that is past is prologue. Four hundred-odd years later, many who work in and with South Carolina’s nonprofit sector say they are concerned that budget freezes that have the potential to disrupt SNAP are prologue to what will become a bigger version of the issue over the next two years.
That’s when cuts to SNAP, under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, will start taking effect.
Essentially, OBBA zeroes in on cutting down fraud in the SNAP payment system, despite that SNAP, historically, has had an extremely low fraud rate. But the policy will shift the burden to pay for food assistance more to states.
How much more is unclear, but states will have to address the changes in their 2027-8 budgets under OBBA.
“ We all know that SNAP … will be a state issue in the coming year, year-and-a-half.,” says Libbie Cheek, coordinator of the Live Healthy Cherokee Coalition. So her advice now is “to reach out to your local leaders, to just let them know how impacted your family is.”
Cheek says that leaders need to know lived experience. Sue Berkowitz, former executive director of Appleseed Legal Justice Center, adds that most leaders at the national level, making decisions on policies and budgets that affect people much further down the economic ladder, probably don’t understand the day-to-day choices getting made.
“Even if [SNAP benefits] get turned back on, people may not get them for, you know, five, six days,” Berkowitz says.
In South Carolina, EBT cards for SNAP are refilled between the first and 10th of the month.
“What if their rent is due the first and now they have to make a decision?,” she says. “Do I feed my child or do I pay my rent? Those are the real-life decisions that hardworking people have to make, that senior citizens have to make, that those who have disabilities have to make.”
For Hafeezah Yates, this all circles back to the narratives surrounding people who use and rely on programs like Head Start and SNAP – people such as Maya Pack, whom she knows, and who is a working mom with a decent salary, a veteran husband, and an inability to breathe easily.
“Think about the mom or the dad who can't go to work because they don't have childcare services,” Yates says. “They could be working in a bank. Folks who receive these programs have good jobs, they just don't make enough to really thrive without that supplemental support.”
Yates says that amid the mental stress of the moment, it’s also important to know that individuals don’t need to feel helpless in trying to change the future.
Signing online petitions or action alerts, such as the types that SCAN has on its website (they look to broaden the conversation around funding for social safety net programs) can help, she says.
“The action alerts are timely because we know everyone can't fly to D.C.,” Yates says. “Lawmakers want to hear from those who can vote them in and out of office.”
