As a single mother, Cinthya Garcia used to receive about $600 in monthly Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits to support herself and her six children living with her in Commerce City. With the SNAP funds, Garcia could buy meat and fresh produce to make nutritious meals for her family.
“We were very good at managing what we were buying,” Garcia said. Even though the money wasn’t quite enough—Garcia had to turn to food banks to fill the gap by the end of each month—the SNAP contribution was beneficial for her family, the 40-year-old said.
Garcia, who works as a certified nursing assistant and runs her own language interpretation business, lost that support after receiving a pay raise. The income boost disqualified her from SNAP because she now made about $100 per month too much.
What should have been a financially beneficial milestone increased her family’s food insecurity (defined as having limited or uncertain access to adequate food).
“All around, it’s so difficult,” Garcia said of her situation. “It feels like a boot on our neck all the time.”
Garcia’s story highlights a reality that continues to affect hundreds of thousands of Coloradans: people who make too much to qualify for SNAP but still struggle to get enough to eat.
In 2023, an estimated 48% of Coloradans experiencing food insecurity did not qualify for SNAP, according to data compiled by Feeding America, a national network of food pantries. That equates to roughly 350,000 Coloradans who are food-insecure and do not qualify for SNAP.
A yet-to-be-published report by the Colorado Health Institute (a Colorado Trust grantee) found that 13.4% of Coloradans who earn between two and three times the federal poverty level—just above the SNAP eligibility cutoff—experience food insecurity. For a family of four, that equates to an annual income of up to $96,450. And 11% of Coloradans making three to four times the federal poverty level—up to $128,600 for a four-person family—also struggle to access adequate food.
This data underscores the “cliff effect” in food insecurity—essentially, that the SNAP income eligibility cutoff leaves people struggling without government support.
Volunteers Jeff Harris, Ronnie Weiss and Awaz Mobarez (from left to right) stock bins, shelves and coolers with canned goods and fresh produce at Metro Caring on March 18 in Denver. The market is restocked daily. (Armando Geneyro, Special to The Colorado Trust)“People tend to think that food insecurity only affects those who are very economically disadvantaged,” said Chad Molter, executive director of Harvest of Hope Pantry, a food pantry in Boulder. “This is not actually the case.”
The cliff effect reveals that “food insecurity can happen to a lot more people than we think,” said Brandon McKinley, marketing specialist with Metro Caring (a Colorado Trust grantee). The Denver-based nonprofit provides groceries and other anti-hunger resources, including nutrition and cooking classes, as well as assistance with applying for SNAP and other government assistance programs.
Hunger Free Colorado (a Colorado Trust grantee), a statewide nonprofit focused on increasing equitable access to nutritious food, recently hosted listening sessions where single-parent families in Colorado shared their experiences with food insecurity. Attendees described turning down job offers or crying when receiving a promotion at work because they realized the increased income would trigger the loss of their SNAP benefits, said Mariah Guerrero, senior public policy manager at Hunger Free Colorado.
“Especially in a state like Colorado, where we have rising cost of rent, child care, health care and food prices, a lot of families become financially worse off when they lose SNAP, even if their income increases on paper,” she added.
McKinley said such binary income-related policies have created barriers in the public benefits system that aren’t helping people “grow their lives.”
The existence of the food cliff, said Gina Plata-Nino, SNAP director at the national nonprofit Food Research & Action Center, shows that “people are working and they want to work hard. They’re just not making livable wages.”
This resonates with Garcia.
“I am not lazy, just sitting on the couch waiting for food stamps to come,” she said. “When I’m not using the food stamps, I am putting into the [economic] system.”
Indeed, Harvest of Hope Pantry’s clientele includes people working multiple jobs, students from middle-class families and older adults on fixed incomes who are relying on a food pantry for the first time in their lives.
“There is no one face to hunger, and there’s no one story to hunger or food insecurity,” said Monica Buhlig, chief impact officer at Food Bank of the Rockies, a nonprofit (and Colorado Trust grantee) serving Colorado and Wyoming.
There has been a steady increase in the number of people experiencing food insecurity since the pandemic-era emergency SNAP allotments expired in 2023, according to Food Bank of the Rockies. In 2022, an estimated 1 in 9 Coloradans in the organization’s 32-county service area experienced food insecurity. In 2023, that figure rose to 1 in 8. More recent data are being collected, but Buhlig said all signs point to the current rate being even higher.
“It’s an essential safety net,” she said of SNAP. “Yet it isn’t reaching everyone right now.”
Given the rising cost of living and lingering inflation, “there are so many people who aren’t able to make ends meet on a monthly basis,” Buhlig said.
Lawrence Appell looks inside a refrigerator as he shops at Metro Caring’s food market on Wednesday, March 18, 2026, in Denver, Colo. Appell often picks up food for an immigrant family in his neighborhood that’s afraid to use programs available to them because of safety concerns over their legal status. (Armando Geneyro, Special to The Colorado Trust)According to a recent CNBC analysis, Colorado’s cost of living is fourth-highest in the country, behind only California, Hawaii and Florida. SNAP helps alleviate some of this strain, providing $120 million a month to 614,000 Coloradans, but many are still left behind.
“We are the wealthiest country on earth, and the fact that we have such high rates of food insecurity and that we have a program [SNAP] that is not easily accessible to individuals should be quite alarming,” said Plata-Nino.
Carol is a single mom in Lakewood to a 13-year-old son. (Carol requested she only be identified by her first name for fear of losing her government benefits.) She also has two adult children who do not live with her.
She received SNAP benefits for several months in 2025. Having SNAP, Carol said, provided “a little more breathing room.”
Carol works part-time as a medical assistant because her son has special needs and requires daily therapy appointments. “I have to be very flexible with work because of that,” she said.
When she had SNAP benefits, Carol could buy healthier food for her son—including fresh fruits and vegetables—and she didn’t have to worry about going to food pantries. However, in September, her benefits were terminated without warning, and she was informed that she had to repay the roughly $800 in benefits she’d already received over two months. That amount, she estimated, equates to about 160 meals.
When Carol first applied for SNAP benefits, several employees told her that child support didn’t count toward her income. She later learned that was incorrect. According to SNAP eligibility rules, she is “over income.” But between her take-home pay and all the bills she owes, “there’s no way I’m over income anywhere,” she said. “I’m actually negative.”
While McKinley noted that there is a lot that could be improved with SNAP, one beneficial component is that the program allows people to visit the most convenient grocery store and select the foods their family needs.
“There’s no figuring out what nonprofits are open or hoping that the food pantry that they go to has items that fit their diet,” McKinley said. “SNAP is effective in giving people that agency and that choice.”
This is something Coloradans impacted by the cliff effect miss out on.
“As much as we try to create a welcoming, nonjudgmental space, people are not here because they want to be here,” said Molter, of the Boulder food pantry. “People want to be shopping at grocery stores.”
Carol has begun relying on food pantries again since losing her SNAP benefits, where she mostly finds canned produce, and she also brings home free lunches provided at work for her son to eat for dinner. Though she’d like her son to eat healthier, especially given his special needs, “at this point, we get what we can get,” she said.
Molter said that when speaking with people who visit the food pantry, he regularly hears that they would like to eat healthier but can’t afford to. Food insecurity is linked with various physical and mental health issues, including heart disease, type 2 diabetes and depression.
Jocelyn Miller, a 63-year-old Arvada resident with type 1 diabetes, gets groceries from Metro Caring’s fresh foods market about once every other week and sometimes visits another local free food market. She said she’s been relying on these supports for the past four or five years, when inflation and the rising cost of living first started affecting her budget.
Miller does contract work as a Pilates teacher, a diabetes support group host and as a diabetes educator at Metro Caring, so she earns variable income every month. Because of that fluctuation, she hasn’t applied for SNAP recently. She isn’t sure if she’d qualify, and even if she did qualify, she doesn’t want to risk the benefits being rescinded if her income were to temporarily go up, as it sometimes does.
“I don’t want to have it be where one minute I qualify, the next I don’t qualify,” she said. So instead, she finds ways to “make stuff stretch” by freezing items from the food markets and making low-cost meals like soups, she said.
Many food pantries are experiencing a surge in demand. At Harvest of Hope Pantry in Boulder, for example, visitation has increased at least 20% year over year since 2020, with some years seeing even higher spikes, Molter said.
And the number of people needing food pantries is expected to increase even more as new federal regulations take effect May 1, making refugees, asylees, parolees and most other non-U.S. citizens ineligible for SNAP benefits.
Without SNAP, Garcia relies more heavily on local food banks. She also sometimes volunteers with a nonprofit social-justice group that offers fresh food in exchange for her time, “which is what helps me the most,” she said. That’s because it allows her to cook low-sodium, low-sugar meals for her kids—several of whom are on specialized diets due to medical conditions.
Policy changes remain hard to come by. McKinley said the focus needs to be on the root causes of hunger and that food pantries alone are not the solution. Guerrero, for her part, said that addressing affordability and the increased cost of living in Colorado is “one of the most practical and durable ways to support Colorado families” facing the cliff effect.
According to an Urban Institute report, nearly 300,000 Colorado families are expected to lose some or all of their SNAP benefits due to cuts and eligibility restrictions imposed by H.R. 1, which was signed into law by President Trump in July 2025. Some of those changes, including eligibility restrictions, have already gone into effect, and others will be implemented by late 2028.
As Garcia sees it, “food should be a universal right. We should not have people going hungry.”
Freelance journalist Jenny McCoy wrote this story for The Colorado Trust. It first appeared at coloradotrust.org on April 21, 2026, and can be read in Spanish at collective.coloradotrust.org/es. The Colorado Trust is a philanthropic foundation that works on health equity issues statewide and previously funded a reporting position at The Colorado Sun.
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