# 4.2	Ensure access to basic nutritional and economic supports.

The suddenness and severity of the pandemic’s impact on our economy, combined with the economic fragility of many families and communities and the ongoing challenges families face in navigating shuttered workplaces, closed schools and camps, and more, necessitates increasing benefit levels to meet the reality of the moment. We must also, carefully and explicitly, reduce the tradeoffs built into public benefit eligibility and structures. People’s situations are changing frequently, so it is necessary to bolster the human services infrastructure to rapidly respond to people’s changing needs, through not only the public health crisis, but the economic fallout as well. Key mechanisms that are already in place and should be built upon include: unemployment benefits, SNAP, EITC, WIC, Section 8 housing vouchers, child care. At the same time, people’s needs for these supports may in part be lessened by attention to other recommendations in this Blueprint.

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