The Fight to Reverse the Food Stamp Ban for People With Felony Drug Convictions

Johnny Waller was turned down for food stamps when he was essentially living at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, as his two-year-old son Jordyn fought for his life against stage-four cancer in his stomach.

Given Jordyn’s fragile health, doctors told Johnny to prepare fresh food for him at the hospital. Money was tight since he had left his cleaning business back in Kansas City to care for his son. But that was temporary. Johnny just needed food stamps until he got back home and back to work.

Missouri state officials told Johnny not to bother even applying. He had a felony drug conviction, meaning he was banned for life from receiving food stamps, even though he was convicted at age 18.

It didn’t matter that Johnny had done his time – two-and-a-half years in prison – and left his old gang life far behind. It didn’t matter that he now ran a cleaning business that was creating jobs in his community. What mattered was he was an ex-felon carrying a conviction for drug possession. That meant he and his son were ineligible for food stamps.

Johnny didn’t need food stamps a few years later when criminal justice organizer Lora McDonald called asking for help repealing the lifetime ban. He was back at work, his son having lost his battle with cancer five days before his fourth birthday. Johnny still carried Jordyn with him wherever he went, his face etched in blue tattoo ink down his right forearm.

The two were together at Rockhurst University in Kansas City, where Johnny earned a 4.0 GPA while working full time as vice president of a nonprofit that helped ex-offenders transition from prison.

It’s rare that people like Johnny – people who have actually lived in poverty – shape the policies that shape their lives. They are left outside the halls of power – legislatures, city councils, mayors’ offices, governors’ mansions and the White House – where policies are made. And others, including their own advocates, work for them instead of with them.

So when Lora gave Johnny the opportunity to enter those halls – in this case the Missouri Statehouse – he seized it. And he told legislators why the food stamps ban didn’t make sense.

“Who knows it better than me? I’ve lived it,” Johnny said. “If I let it go, I am as wrong as everybody else.”

For Johnny, repealing the ban wasn’t only about food stamps. It was about everything he was told would be waiting to help him transition out of a Nebraska prison but simply wasn’t there.

“All these things they say you can do. No you can’t,” he said, recalling barriers he ran into because of his felony drug conviction. I “couldn’t get housing, couldn’t get a job.”

But a decade after his conviction, Johnny got the chance to remove one of those barriers when Lora listened to him.

Lora is executive director of the Kansas City chapter of Gamaliel, an organization that empowers ordinary people to drive political, environmental, social and economic decisions that affect their lives. The organization does this, in part, by listening. It doesn’t tell people what to say or why they should say it. Instead, it creates space where they can say it themselves.

It creates that space through training that helps people understand and identify what has oppressed them. Then they take calculated risks to confront symbols of that oppression – Johnny confronted the State Legislature – in structured ways. Gamaliel’s work is based on families owning, not simply telling, their stories.

“When you own your story, you have the courage to create something,” said Ana Garcia-Ashley, national executive director at Gamaliel, which has 44 affiliates in 16 states. “You are changing the hearts and minds by you having the courage to transform your own story.”

Gamaliel also connected Johnny to a broader movement of families across the country that was driving solutions to problems they faced every day. A big part of Gamaliel’s work is challenging the myths and misperceptions – often called the dominant narrative – that surround poor people, people of color, immigrants and youth. When policymakers are confronted with the reality of poverty, it is much harder for them to create policies based on myths.

When Lora McDonald took over as executive director of Gamaliel’s Kansas City affiliate, More2, she began gathering more stories like Johnny’s to challenge those myths. Together, families and Gamaliel’s leaders built a movement that fought to remove the food stamps ban as well as other barriers for low-income families, including lack of access to good jobs, reliable transportation, decent housing and healthy food.

Because it takes more than one story to dispel myths. It takes a movement.

“Who Has the Right to Label Me?”

It seemed like Christine McDonald had been written off much of her life. Then one day she sat in a Kansas City rehabilitation center and listened to a senior counselor pronounce her “unrehabilitatable.”

She had lost her eyesight in three days due to a rare disorder, after facing a terrible choice while pregnant. She could take medication for the disorder, but it posed a severe risk to her unborn child. She chose not to take the medication.