In Florida, a food-stamp recruiter deals with wrenching choices
By Eli Saslow, Published: April 23
FORT PIERCE, Fla. — A good recruiter needs to be liked, so Dillie
Nerios filled gift bags with dog toys for the dog people and cat food
for the cat people. She packed crates of cookies, croissants, vegetables
and fresh fruit. She curled her hair and painted her nails fluorescent
pink. “A happy, it’s-all-good look,” she said, checking her reflection
in the rearview mirror. Then she drove along the Florida coast to sign
people up for food stamps.
Her destination on a recent morning was a 55-and-over community in
central Florida, where single-wide trailers surround a parched golf
course. On the drive, Nerios, 56, reviewed techniques she had learned
for connecting with some of Florida’s most desperate senior citizens
during two years on the job. Touch a shoulder. Hold eye contact. Listen
for as long as it takes. “Some seniors haven’t had anyone to talk to in
some time,” one of the state-issued training manuals reads. “Make each
person feel like the only one who matters.”
In fact, it is
Nerios’s job to enroll at least 150 seniors for food stamps each month, a
quota she usually exceeds. Alleviate hunger, lessen poverty: These are
the primary goals of her work. But the job also has a second and more
controversial purpose for cash-strapped Florida, where increasing
food-stamp enrollment has become a means of economic growth, bringing
almost $6 billion each year into the state. The money helps to sustain
communities, grocery stores and food producers. It also adds to rising
federal entitlement spending and the U.S. debt.
Nerios prefers to
think of her job in more simple terms: “Help is available,” she tells
hundreds of seniors each week. “You deserve it. So, yes or no?”
In
Florida and everywhere else, the answer in 2013 is almost always yes. A
record 47 million Americans now rely on the Supplemental Nutrition
Assistance Program (SNAP), also known as food stamps, available for
people with annual incomes below about $15,000. The program grew during
the economic collapse because 10 million more Americans dropped into
poverty. It has continued to expand four years into the recovery because
state governments and their partner organizations have become active
promoters, creating official “SNAP outreach plans” and hiring hundreds
of recruiters like Nerios.
A decade ago, only about half of eligible Americans chose to sign up for food stamps. Now that number is 75 percent.
Rhode
Island hosts SNAP-themed bingo games for the elderly. Alabama hands out
fliers that read: “Be a patriot. Bring your food stamp money home.”
Three states in the Midwest throw food-stamp parties where new
recipients sign up en masse.
On the Treasure Coast of Florida,
the official outreach plan is mostly just Nerios, who works for a local
food bank that is funded in part by the state. She roams four counties
of sandbars and barrier islands in her Ford Escape, with an audio Bible
in the CD player and a windshield sticker that reads “Faith, Hope and
Love.” She distributes hundreds of fliers each week, giving out her
personal cellphone number and helping seniors submit SNAP applications
on her laptop.
On this particular morning, Nerios pulled into the
Spanish Lakes retirement community near Port St. Lucie, Fla., and set
up a display table in front of the senior center. She advertised her
visit weeks in advance, but she can never predict how many people will
come. Some events draw hundreds; others only a dozen. Her hope was to
attract a crowd with giveaways of pet toys and hundreds of pounds of
food, which she stacked high on the table. “What person in need doesn’t
want food that’s immediate and free?” she said.
She watched as a
few golf carts and motorized scooters drove toward her on a road lined
with palm trees, passing Spanish Lakes signs that read “We Love Living
Here!” and “Great Lifestyle!” The first seniors grabbed giveaway boxes
and went home to tell their friends, who told more friends, until a line
of 40 people had formed at Nerios’s table.
A husband and wife, just done with nine holes of golf, clubs still on their cart.
An
84-year-old woman on her bicycle, teetering away with one hand on the
handlebars and a case of applesauce under her other arm.
A Korean
War veteran on oxygen who mostly wanted to talk, so Nerios listened: 32
years in the military, a sergeant major, Germany, Iron Curtain, medals
and awards. “A hell of a life,” the veteran said. “So if I signed up,
what would I tell my wife?”
“Tell her you’re an American and this
is your benefit,” Nerios said, pulling him away from the crowd, so he
could write the 26th name of the day on her SNAP sign-up sheet.
She
distributed food and SNAP brochures for three hours. “Take what you
need,” she said, again and again, until the fruit started to sweat and
the vegetables wilted in the late-morning heat. Just as she prepared to
leave, a car pulled into the senior center and a man with a gray
mustache and a tattered T-shirt opened the driver-side door. He had seen
the giveaway boxes earlier in the morning but waited to return until
the crowd thinned. He had just moved to Spanish Lakes. He had never
taken giveaways. He looked at the boxes but stayed near his car.
“Sir, can I help?” Nerios asked. She brought over some food. She gave him her business card and a few brochures about SNAP.
“I don’t want to be another person depending on the government,” he said.
“How about being another person getting the help you deserve?” she said.
***
Did
he deserve it, though? Lonnie Briglia, 60, drove back to his Spanish
Lakes mobile home with the recruiter’s pamphlets and thought about that.
He wasn’t so sure.
Wasn’t it his fault that he had flushed 40
years of savings into a bad investment, buying a fleet of delivery
trucks just as the economy crashed? Wasn’t it his fault that he and his
wife, Celeste, had missed mortgage payments on the house where they
raised five kids, forcing the bank to foreclose in 2012? Wasn’t it his
fault the only place they could afford was an abandoned mobile home in
Spanish Lakes, bought for the entirety of their savings, $750 in cash?
“We made horrible mistakes,” he said. “We dug the hole. We should dig ourselves out.”
Now
he walked into their mobile home and set the SNAP brochures on the
kitchen table. They had moved in three months before, and it had taken
all of that time for them to make the place livable. They patched holes
in the ceiling. They fixed the plumbing and rewired the electricity.
They gave away most of their belongings to the kids — “like we died and
executed the will,” he said. They decorated the walls of the mobile home
with memories of a different life: photos of Lonnie in his old New
Jersey police officer uniform, or in Germany for a manufacturing job
that paid $25 an hour, or on vacation in their old pop-up camper.
A
few weeks after they moved in, some of their 11 grandchildren had come
over to visit. One of them, a 9-year-old girl, had looked around the
mobile home and then turned to her grandparents on the verge of tears:
“Grampy, this place is junky,” she had said. He had smiled and told her
that it was okay, because Spanish Lakes had a community pool, and now he
could go swimming whenever he liked.
Only later, alone with
Celeste, had he said what he really thought: “A damn sky dive. That’s
our life. How does anyone fall this far, this fast?”
And now SNAP
brochures were next to him on the table — one more step down, he
thought, reading over the bold type on the brochure. “Applying is easy.”
“Eat right!” “Every $5 in SNAP generates $9.20 for the local economy.”
He
sat in a sweltering home with no air conditioning and a refrigerator
bought on layaway, which was mostly empty except for the “experienced”
vegetables they sometimes bought at a discount grocery store to cook
down and freeze for later. He had known a handful of people who depended
on the government: former co-workers who exaggerated injuries to get
temporary disability; homeless people in the Fort Pierce park where he
had taken the kids each week when they were young to hand out homemade
peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, even though he suspected some of
those homeless were drug addicts who spent their Social Security
payments on crack.
“Makers and takers,” Lonnie had told the kids
then, explaining that the world divided into two categories. The
Briglias were makers.
Now three of those kids worked in law
enforcement and two were in management. One of them, the oldest, was on
his way to visit Spanish Lakes, driving down at this very moment from
Valdosta, Ga., with his wife and two kids. Lonnie placed the SNAP
brochures in a drawer and turned on a fan to cool the mobile home.
His
son arrived, and they went out to dinner. Lonnie tried to pay with a
credit card, but his son wouldn’t let him. Then, before leaving for
Valdosta, the son gave his parents an air conditioner, bought for $400.
Lonnie started to protest.
“Please,” his son said. “You need it. It’s okay to take a little help.”
***
The offer of more help came early the next morning. Nerios reached Lonnie on his cellphone to check on his interest in SNAP.
“Can I help sign you up?” she asked.
“I’m still not sure,” he said. “We have a lot of frozen vegetables in the freezer.”
“Don’t wait until you’re out,” she said.
She
was on her way to another outreach event, but she told Lonnie she had
plenty of time to talk. She had always preferred working with what her
colleagues called the Silent Generation, even though seniors were
historically the least likely to enroll in SNAP. Only about 38 percent
of eligible seniors choose to participate in the program, half the rate
of the general population. In Florida, that means about 300,000 people
over 60 are not getting their benefits, and at least $381 million in
available federal money isn’t coming into the state. To help enroll more
seniors, the government has published an outreach guide that blends
compassion with sales techniques, generating some protests in Congress.
The guide teaches recruiters how to “overcome the word ‘no,’ ”
suggesting answers for likely hesitations.
Welfare stigma: “You worked hard and the taxes you paid helped create SNAP.”
Embarrassment: “Everyone needs help now and then.”
Sense of failure: “Lots of people, young and old, are having financial difficulties.”
Nerios
prefers a subtler touch. “It’s about patience, empathy,” she said.
While she makes a middle-class salary and had never been on food stamps
herself, she knows the emotional exhaustion that comes at the end of
each month, after a few hundred conversations about money that didn’t
exist. Nowhere had the SNAP program grown as it has in Florida, where
enrollment had risen from 1.45 million people in 2008 to 3.35 million
last year. And no place in Florida had been reshaped by the recession
quite like the Treasure Coast, where middle-class retirees lost their
savings in the housing collapse, forcing them to live on less than they
expected for longer than they expected. Sometimes, Nerios believes it is
more important to protect a client’s sense of self-worth than to meet
her quota.
“I’m not going to push you,” she told Lonnie now. “This is your decision.”
“I
have high blood pressure, so it’s true that diet is important to us,”
he said, which sounded to her like a man arguing with himself.
“I can meet with you today, or tomorrow, or anytime you’d like,” she said.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m really sorry.”
“You don’t have to be,” she said. “Please, just think about it.”
***
She hung up the phone and began setting up her giveaway table at another event.
He
hung up the phone and drove a few miles down the highway to his wife’s
small knitting store. They had stayed married 41 years because they made
decisions together. She was an optimist and he was a realist; they
leveled each other out. During the failures of the past three years,
they had developed a code language that allowed them to acknowledge
their misery without really talking about it.
“How you doing?” he asked.
“Just peachy,” she said, which meant to him that in fact she was exhausted, depressed, barely hanging on.
She
opened the knitting store three years earlier, but it turned out her
only customers were retirees on fixed incomes, seniors with little money
to spend who just wanted an air-conditioned place to spend the day. So
Celeste started giving them secondhand yarn and inviting customers to
knit with her for charity in the shop. Together they had made 176 hats
and scarves for poor families in the last year. The store, meanwhile,
had barely made its overhead. Lonnie wanted her to close it, but it was
the last place where she could pretend her life had turned out as she’d
hoped, knitting to classical music at a wooden table in the center of
the store.
Now Lonnie joined her at that table and started to
tell her about his week: how he had been driving by the community center
and seen boxes of food; how he had decided to take some, grabbing
tomatoes and onions that looked fresher than anything they’d had in
weeks; how a woman had touched his shoulder and offered to help, leaving
him with brochures and a business card.
He pulled the card from his pocket and showed it to Celeste. She leaned in to read the small print. “SNAP Outreach,” it read.
“I think we qualify,” Lonnie said.
There was a pause.
“Might be a good idea,” Celeste said.
“It’s hard to accept,” he said.
Another pause.
“We have to take help when we need it,” she said.
Celeste
looked down at her knitting, and Lonnie sat with her in the quiet shop
and thought about what happened when he opened a barbershop a few years
earlier, as another effort of last resort. His dad, an Italian
immigrant, had been a barber in New Jersey, and Lonnie decided to try it
for himself after a dozen manufacturing job applications went
unanswered in 2010. He enrolled in a local beauty school, graduated with
a few dozen teenaged girls, took over the lease for a shop in Port St.
Lucie and named it Man Cave. He had gone to work with his scissors and
his clippers every day, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Saturdays and Sundays,
standing on the curb and waving a handmade sign to advertise haircuts
for $5. He had done a total of 11 cuts in three months. But what tore
him up inside had nothing to do with the lonely echo of his feet on the
linoleum floor or the empty cash register or the weeks that went by
without a single customer. No, what convinced him to close the shop —
the memory that stuck with him even now — were the weeks when old
friends had come in to get their hair cut twice. He couldn’t stand the
idea of being pitied. He hated that his problems had become a burden to
anyone else.
He wondered: Sixty years old now, and who was he? A maker? A taker?
“I’m not ready to sign up for this yet,” he said.
“Soon we might have to,” she said.
He tucked Nerios’s business card into his back pocket.
“I know,” he said. “I’m keeping it.”
© The Washington Post Company
