Many college students, immigrants and older Californians have particular trouble accessing food assistance. There are additional eligibility rules that can affect those groups, which complicate an already lengthy application.

Food assistance advocates say counties should be doing more to help qualified residents get on CalFresh, but beleaguered counties say they’re underfunded and understaffed. The state — following federal regulations — only pays county social services agencies based on how many people receive aid, not on how many apply. Critics say this means counties are not incentivized to help vulnerable groups go through the application process. 

Take, for example, mostly rural Yolo County just west of Sacramento. It has the state’s highest poverty rate in part because it is home to tens of thousands of college students at UC Davis.

After conducting extensive outreach to students and campus groups, the county’s Health and Human Services agency received double the applications each month for CalFresh from 2016 to 2021, said Nolan Sullivan, its director. 

Despite that, CalFresh households rose only 21% and the county’s funding went up only 6% in that time. That’s because college students have high rejection rates for food stamps, because the rules for them are so complex.

But getting more people on food aid includes walking them through the application, which is a time- and labor-intensive process. 

And when students ultimately are denied at the end of the process, Sullivan’s department doesn’t get any extra funding for the work it took to help them apply.

“It penalizes us for doing outreach to try to get students on,” he said. “I want every student to apply that thinks they might be eligible. But we get overwhelmed.”