September can be a tough month for a lot of people. Finding the money to pay for school supplies and activity expenses is tough, let alone purchasing healthy food to feed a family.
Roughly 40 million Americans use some form of government food assistance such as SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance) to make ends meet when times are tough.
This program is essential to many Americans, but finding fresh food can be hard to do because there are so many inexpensive packaged options and programs like SNAP typically only work with grocery store items.
But thanks to a relatively new state-wide initiative called FAB (Fresh Access Bucks), you can trade-in your snap benefits at farmer’s markets and produce stands across the state of Florida.
Here’s how it all works.
SNAP for Fresh Food
The FAB program matches or discounts the amount of money spent through a SNAP card. To access these points, swipe a SNAP card at a participating farmer’s market or produce stand and get the same amount of FAB points.
For example: SNAP $20 and get an extra $20 in FAB points to spend. FAB will match up to $40 per day. If a market does not offer FAB points, many offer a 50% discount on fresh produce and other locally-grown items.
FAB points also work with seeds that can be used to grow edible produce. If you happen to have an urban garden space (or want to create one), you can purchase seeds with your FAB points.
Local Options
There’s a very good chance that either someone you know or someone in your network is using government assistance to make ends meet this September. However, they may not know about this program. Therefore, I’m asking everyone to please share this article to help your neighbors find fresh healthy food from local sources that is inexpensive and can be accessed using SNAP cards.
