11/03/2025
It never fails. I’m cooking dinner, we’re thirty minutes from sitting down at the table, and one of my children comes out of the corners of the house saying that he is hungry asking for a snack. Almost in unison with my husband, I say “No” and he says “Yes”. And thus my kid ruins his appetite right before dinner and barely touches his supper. It’s not that my husband is undisciplined. It’s because, like so many Americans, his family relied on food stamps to feed their family and he remembers times when he went hungry. He never wants his own kids to feel the hunger pangs he still vividly remembers. So I wrap up the leftovers and eventually they get eaten.
This week, too many families locally and nationally are headed for a cliff, losing the benefits they rely on to feed their kids, and devastated at the thought of their children going hungry. In Schoharie County more than 3600 families rely on food stamps, in Delaware it’s over 4500 families, in Otsego it’s more than 5800 families and in Sullivan County, more that 16% of residents - over 13,000 - rely on SNAP benefits to feed their families. These are our friends and neighbors, our children’s classmates, our community members.
Republicans in Washington are holding children and poor families hostage by denying emergency SNAP benefits, trying to force a choice between families going hungry and families losing their healthcare. As I saw one woman put it recently, are we really choosing between kids dying of hunger and kids dying of preventable diseases? These are not choices we should have to make in America!
We’re doing what we can as a family with 11 chickens by donating eggs every week to our local food pantry. But we, as a community, need to do more. We need to elect Democrats who will keep our kids safe from hunger pains by supporting food benefit programs at all times, not just when the Republicans want to use our struggling neighbors as pawns in order to continue to give tax breaks to Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.As a legislator, I will NEVER use hunger or healthcare as a bargaining chip because I believe that NO kid in New York, or anywhere, should go hungry.
While I always appreciate your financial support for my campaign, this week I’m asking you to donate to your local food pantry. We cannot fill the massive hole that the Trump Administration, Mike Johnson and John Thune are creating, but we can help. Please consider donating food, funds, or gift cards to your local food pantry.