MESA, AZ — On Monday, Arizona union educator and Creighton Family Resource Center manager Kelley Blakslee joined partners from Lutheran Social Services of the Southwest, the Arizona Early Childhood Alliance, and LUCHA (Living United for Change in Arizona) to call attention to the devastating impact of cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and demand the full restoration of SNAP benefits for Arizona families.
The Creighton Family Resource Center (CFRC), located in Phoenix’s Creighton Elementary School District, connects families to community resources, provides parenting education and support, and fosters opportunities for families to play, learn, and grow as they prepare children for kindergarten and beyond.
The CFRC hosts an on-site food bank in partnership with St. Mary’s Food Bank and received a $15,000 donation from the National Education Association earlier this year to expand its food distribution program. During Monday’s conference, Blakslee described how the center is working to meet surging demand following the Trump administration’s decision to pause full SNAP benefits.
In Arizona, more than 900,000 people — including one in four children — rely on SNAP for healthy, affordable food. The program is federally funded and administered through state agencies. In October, amid the ongoing government shutdown, the Trump administration reversed earlier plans to keep SNAP funded and announced that recipients would not receive benefits in November. After overwhelming bipartisan pushback and two court orders, the administration agreed to provide partial benefits — a move that still leaves many families wondering whether they will have enough food to make it through the month.
A full transcript of Kelley Blakslee’s remarks is available below.
Good morning, everyone. My name is Kelley Blakslee, and I'm the manager of the Creighton Family Resource Center in central Phoenix, which lives within the Creighton school district. I'm also a proud member of the Arizona Education Association union.
At the Creighton Family Resource Center, we support families in our community with tangible resources, classes, social supports, and connections to other organizations that can help.
Some of those tangible supports include food distribution twice a month, made possible through our incredible partnership with the St. Mary's Food Bank.
Now, we're not solving anyone's grocery bill. We know that.
What we offer is relief — a little breathing room when families are stretched thin. Many of the families that we serve work low-income jobs, and they benefit from federal programs like SNAP, but sometimes they still struggle to make ends meet.
With the recent pause and cuts to SNAP benefits, we’ve seen a serious uptick in need.
On a typical Monday, we give out about 60 food bags. Yesterday, we prepared 75 bags thanks to the extra support from Saint Mary's and our incredible volunteers, and they were gone in 30 minutes.
30 minutes.
We even had a few people come by later, so we put together another four emergency bags with some shelf-stable items and some other frozen goods that we had on hand. That tells you everything about the growing pressure on our families right now.
I want to give a big thank you to St. Mary's Food Bank for continuing to show up for our community and for so many other organizations across Arizona.
But I also want to be clear: we cannot replace SNAP.
None of us in these community-based organizations have the capacity to fill that gap.
And that's what worries me the most.
Families who rely on this program are now being forced to rely even more heavily on small, local efforts like ours, or just go without the services that they desperately need.
Before I close, I want to make a quick plug for Family Resource Centers. We are in one here today. They do incredible work across our state. You can find your nearest center at FamilyHubAZ.org.
If you need support, please reach out. And if you're able to support these centers, please do as they're a lifeline for many Arizona families. And if you're an organization that wants to connect, please reach out as well. I love showing folks around our center and expanding our partnerships.