According to CalMatters Housing, California families receiving federal summer food assistance for their children are running out of time to use their benefits before they expire. The state's SUN Bucks program provides eligible low-income families with electronic benefit cards preloaded with money to help purchase food during the summer months when school isn't in session. Each child on the program receives support, and the cards are mailed automatically to families whose children qualify for free or reduced-price school lunch or are enrolled in programs like Medi-Cal or CalFresh.
Here's the timing challenge: families have only 122 days from when they receive their card to spend the money, or the benefits disappear and return to the federal government. Because California mailed out these cards in batches throughout the summer, some families received theirs as early as mid-June and now have just weeks remaining, while the latest cards sent in late July won't expire until mid-November. According to CalMatters reporting, nearly 106 million dollars in SUN Bucks benefits remain unused across the state.
What makes this situation more frustrating is that it's a pattern. Last year, nearly a quarter of the summer food benefits went unspent, totaling about 118 million dollars. The reporting also shows that almost a fifth of the cards mailed last year were never even activated by the families who received them. While California tries to notify families through text messages and other outreach, many households still miss out on assistance they're entitled to receive.
The state's recommendation for families juggling multiple assistance programs is straightforward: if you're receiving both SUN Bucks and the regular CalFresh food assistance program, use the SUN Bucks first since they have the sooner expiration date. This way, families can maximize the support available to them during the critical summer period when school meals aren't available.
What I'm seeing locally here in the Bay Area and across the East Bay is that access to these kinds of support programs really matters for families trying to make ends meet. When we talk about affordability in our region, we often focus on housing costs, but food security is equally important to people's overall stability. The fact that so many eligible families aren't tapping into these benefits, whether because they didn't receive the notification, forgot about the deadline, or faced some other barrier, tells me there's room for better communication from the state about what families can access and when they need to act.
