FARM FAMILIES CAN HAVE FOOD SHORTAGES TOO. In the Bay Area, some of the very people stepping up to feed families cut off from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program are suffering the trickle-down impacts of the longest federal government shutdown in history.

On Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court granted President Donald Trump’s administration an extension to withhold SNAP benefits until Thursday at 11:59 p.m., while Congress worked out a deal to end the shutdown. The House of Representatives voted on a compromise to reopen the government that President Trump signed late Wednesday, but uncertainty remains as to when money will flow to states to restart food assistance programs.

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Ruth Dusseault is an investigative reporter and multimedia journalist focused on environment and energy. Her position is supported by the California local news fellowship, a statewide initiative spearheaded by UC Berkeley aimed at supporting local news platforms. While a student at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism (c’23), Ruth developed stories about the social and environmental circumstances of contaminated watersheds around the Great Lakes, Mississippi River and Florida’s Lake Okeechobee. Her thesis explored rights of nature laws in small rural communities. She is a former assistant professor and artist in residence at Georgia Tech’s School of Architecture, and uses photography, film and digital storytelling to report on the engineered systems that undergird modern life.