We are two freshman who participated in a Service-Learning course at St. Joseph's University. During our time learning and immersing ourselves at service, our eyes were open to the harsh realities families across the United States have to endure. We discovered that government welfare programs (ex: SNAP, TANF, CHIP, etc.), programs that were designed to help this suffering demographic of people, are failing to provide basic necessities to help those who are facing food insecurity, lack of housing, and social and economic injustices survive day-by-day.

To put it in perspective:

-40% of Americans are living under the federal poverty line.

-The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families only assisted 23% of people living in poverty during the year 2016, those who are receiving assistance are still living in poverty.

-individuals assisted by the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, SNAP, on average are only receiving $31.50 weekly.

-Housing Assistance is another large program that only serves 1.2 million units.

-To put that into perspective, roughly 85,000 people are awaiting housing assistance in Chicago and nearly 265,000 people in New York.

With your signatures, we can elevate this pressing and alarming issue to the national scale and push for this issue to be added onto the agendas of many presidential candidates in the upcoming 2020 Presidential Election.