PA Navigate & Union-Snyder Community Action
Interview with Rachel Herman and Nicole Peterson, Union-Snyder Community Action Agency
1. What services does the Union-Snyder Community Action Agency (CAA) provide, and what communities do you serve?
Union-Snyder CAA serves individuals and families living with low income through assistance programs and case management services. The key services and programs offered include food assistance, housing assistance, energy assistance, veteran affairs, and free tax assistance.
Union and Snyder counties are rural counties in the central region of the state with a combined population of approximately 82,000 people. In 2024, CAA served 2,360 unduplicated individuals with 14,300 services through our food programs, including emergency food assistance and monthly food pantries.
List of services Union-Snyder CAA provides
2. How has PA Navigate helped Union Snyder CAA connect with your community?
PA Navigate is becoming increasingly valuable for connecting our neighbors in need with our services, especially those we are not already reaching. Many referrals from PA Navigate are new customers to our agency, so it's helping us to connect with more community members who need our help.
PA Navigate is also helpful because it's a digital tool. Over the years, we've found that paper handouts with program details can quickly become outdated when food distribution schedules or other program details change. Online platforms offer real-time, accurate information.
PA Navigate has strengthened the connection between our agency and local healthcare providers by giving them a reliable resource to reference, especially in the context of connecting food-insecure patients to nearby food programs.
This tool also gives us the opportunity to strengthen our agency's working relationship with healthcare organizations by simply increasing our communication and opening opportunities for us to collaborate more.
3. What trends are you seeing related to food insecurity in your communities? What opportunities and challenges are you having right now with the food pantries you work with?
Over the past five years, CAA’s food pantries have served an increasing number of households each year. When you compare our numbers today to what we were serving
in 2020, there’s been a 37% increase in the total number of households served across all our food pantries.
In addition to the food pantries that CAA administers, we work closely with the 40+ food access programs operating in our community through the Hunger Coalition. Through this work, we’ve heard that, across the board, food pantries are serving more households, and they struggle to find reliable funding and food sources to meet this demand.
In addition, CAA recently performed a Community Hunger Mapping Project in partnership with the Central PA Food Bank and Central Susquehanna Opportunities to study food insecurity in our region. This report provided key data and recommendations to help guide our region’s food security work in the months and years ahead. For example, the report found that over half of families using a food pantry have a diet-related chronic health condition, like diabetes. Knowing this, we can prioritize distributing diabetes-friendly foods at local food programs and explore partnerships with the healthcare industry.
4. What are you hearing from your clients and the community you serve about the importance of having access to a local food bank/food pantry right now?
We know that our clients are increasingly relying on their local food pantry as they struggle to make ends meet between increased costs at the grocery store, increasing housing and utilities costs, and insufficient household income.
5. What role does the federal government play in your organization’s ability to provide food in your community?
The federal government’s primary role in CAA’s food programs is through the Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP) which acts as one our agency’s key sources of food for distribution.
Through TEFAP, the U.S. Department of Agriculture purchases a variety of nutritious, domestically sourced and produced food, making it available to state distributing agencies. States provide the food to their local agency partners at no cost, which in turn distribute the food directly to the public or to local organizations like food pantries.
CAA is the local agency that receives and distributes this free food through its food pantries in Union and Snyder counties.
6. What role does the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and other assistance programs play in your organization’s ability to provide food to your community or in clients being able to feed themselves and their families?
SNAP is a key assistance program that our food team often refers customers to so that they may increase their household’s food security.
Our food pantries are funded to distribute food packages representing 2-3 days’ worth of food, so SNAP and other nutrition programs are crucial in helping cover a family’s food needs for the rest of the month.
This is especially helpful for households that are facing dietary restrictions and may not be able to access the foods they need to be healthy at a food program. The family can use SNAP benefits to purchase the foods their family needs.
From our point of view, participation in SNAP helps relieve the strain that food puts on a household’s overall budget. When a family can use SNAP to cover some of their food costs, then that money can be dedicated to other necessities like rent or healthcare costs.
7. Do you have relationships with local farmers and food vendors/retailers? What role do they play in your organization’s ability to provide food for your community?
Yes, the Food Hub provides a centralized location for local farmers, community gardens, and food retailers to donate their products to be redistributed through the network of local food programs.
During the growing season, the Food Hub receives fresh produce donations on a weekly basis from about 5 different local farms and community gardens.
The Food Hub staff and volunteers aggregate these produce donations, re-package them, and then distribute them through a weekly distribution of free produce at the Food Hub, called the Pop-Up Produce Stand. These produce donations are also re-distributed through our local network of food programs
Through partnership with the Central PA Food Bank, the Food Hub also receives retail donations from local grocery stores on a weekly basis. These items are perishable goods like produce, dairy, prepared foods, and deli items that are redistributed to food programs, reducing food waste at the grocery store and providing additional foods to distribute for food programs.
8. What would you tell someone who might need help from a food pantry but is hesitant to reach out? What kind of support do you need from your community to continue to provide services (ex: donations, volunteers, etc.)?
Whenever someone is hesitant to reach out for help, I like to remind them that the food pantry is here for people just like them and that more people than you think need help at some point in their lives.
Community members can support us by making food or monetary donations, volunteering at the Food Hub or another food access program or helping spread awareness of what food resources are out there! CAA maintains a Food Resources Calendar to advertise distribution details for area local programs and make it easier to find a local food distribution.
Terminology:
Searches: A search is an activity that indicates a user is trying to find a program.
Connections: Connections are any activity that indicate a user contacted a program, which could be an electronic referral or appointment (for oneself or for someone else), direct contact by clicking the phone icon or email, or an external connection by clicking through on a program that has its own application form or scheduling.
Referrals: Referrals are connections that are tracked on the site, including logged referrals, screeners, and appointments.
Closed Loop Rate: A referral is considered closed when the receiving Community-Based Organization updates the status to reflect the completion of work. Such statuses include Got Help, Referred Elsewhere, Couldn’t Contact, Not Eligible, No Capacity, Couldn’t Get Help, and No Longer Interested. The Closed Loop rate is calculated as a percentage of referrals only.
Got Help Rate: A Got Help status indicates that the Community-Based Organization was either able to resolve the patient’s need or referred them to another Community-Based Organization to resolve their need. The Got Help rate is calculated as a percentage of referrals only.
