Current Advocacy Campaigns
Montana Food Bank Network advocates at state and federal levels to protect and strengthen public nutrition programs and address root causes of hunger.
Federal Level
Ongoing Priorities
MFBN continues to advocate for the child nutrition priorities listed below:
- Connect more kids to free school meals by strengthening the Community Eligibility Provision.
- Close the child summer hunger gap by implementing Summer EBT nationwide.
- Permanently expand the Child Tax Credit (CTC). When it was expanded during 2021, the credit reduced monthly child poverty by close to 30%. Learn more here.
- Permanently expand the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), one of our nation’s most effective anti-poverty initiatives, helping low-wage workers keep more of the money they earn.
Sign up to be an Anti-Hunger Advocate to receive action alerts and policy updates as we work to secure improvements to school meals, Summer EBT, the Child Tax Credit and other anti-poverty priorities.
Child Nutrition Reauthorization
Child Nutrition Reauthorization (CNR) is a process used by Congress to update child nutrition programs, including the summer and after school meals program, school breakfast and lunch program and the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program. CNR is used to set policy and funding for these programs and is typically renewed every 5 years, although it has not been updated since 2010.
A number of marker bills have been introduced by members of Congress which begin the process of updating CNR. Click the images below to learn more about the marker bills we are watching.
State Level
Pandemic EBT
Pandemic EBT (P-EBT) is a federal program that provides resources to families who lose access to free or reduced-price school meals due to COVID-related closures or absences. Montana created and implemented a plan to issue P-EBT benefits for spring 2020, the 2020-2021 school year and summer 2021. In those rounds of P-EBT, the state issued $67 million to eligible families for them to spend on needed groceries. The state has recently established plans to issue P-EBT for the 2021-2022 school year and summer 2022. Read more at mfbn.org/pebt.
Before the state made a plan to issue the benefits for school year 2021-2022 and summer 2022, MFBN worked with many other organizations and individuals to advocate for Montana to administer these rounds of P-EBT. As a result of this advocacy and the state’s plan, Montana families will receive an estimated $36.6 million in food assistance.
Montana State Legislature
The 2021 State Legislative Session closed on April 29, 2021. MFBN supported bills to help provide stability for struggling Montanans, and opposed bills that would do the exact opposite. With the help of Anti-Hunger Advocates and community partners across the state, we came through the session with some important successes. We stopped bills that would have added new barriers to SNAP (SB100 and HB339). In addition, we passed HB235, providing $95,000 in state funds for Montana’s Double SNAP Dollars program (Governor Gianforte then vetoed the bill).
Additional details on MFBN’s 2021 Montana Legislative priorities are here.
Montana’s next state legislative session will take place in 2023.
