Professor Susan De Luca and Adam Benden (MSSW ‘17) studied the impact of the Supplementary Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) Challenge on undergraduate and master’s level social work students taking social justice classes.
The SNAP Challenge is an innovative simulation designed to increase empathy by challenging students to adopt a SNAP food budget ($4.50 a day) for a week and record their observations. De Luca and Benden found that, as the week goes by, students progress from skepticism about the difficulty of the exercise to feeling fatigued, irritable, and stressed and finally to making connections among poverty, food access and overall quality of life. The article was published in the Journal of Poverty.