Congress gave the IRS the job of sending out coronavirus rescue checks. But the underfunded agency is struggling, while for-profit companies like Intuit have started circling, hoping to convert Americans in need into paying customers.

by Justin Elliott and Paul Kiel April 15, 5 a.m. EDT

Congress has approved billions of dollars of checks for Americans hard hit by the biggest round of layoffs in U.S. history. But millions of Americans will have to wait months for that money — and millions more may never get the money at all.

That’s because the rescue legislation left it to the IRS, an agency gutted by Congress, to organize the complex logistics of delivering the money to those entitled to it. As the IRS has struggled, for-profit tax preparation companies, notably Intuit, the maker of TurboTax, have stepped in with websites to help people get their checks.

But Intuit is not just acting as a conduit: It is also misleading unwary Americans by steering them to paid services that they could otherwise get for free.

The job Congress gave to the IRS in its $2 trillion CARES Act is seemingly straightforward: Identify the Americans who qualify and send them money. This turns out to be far more complicated than it sounds.

Tens of millions of Americans have not provided the IRS with their banking account information, if they have one. Some of these people have filed taxes, so they should eventually receive money but will have to wait weeks or even months for a check to come in the mail.

Another group of Americans did not file taxes because they make so little money. Getting stimulus checks to them, an estimated 6 million households, is challenging. They now must file a new form online notifying the IRS who they are, or the tax agency has to find them. If they don’t, these people will never get the checks of $1,200 and up.

The CARES Act, passed in late March, did not provide any mechanism to reach many of these low-income Americans. So far, the extent of the IRS’ public outreach has been the creation of what the agency calls “e-posters,” to be circulated online, describing the program and letters written by the commissioner to several nonprofits encouraging them to get involved.

Intuit has had a much more nimble approach. On April 4, the company rolled out a new “stimulus registration product” as part of its new Coronavirus Tax Center. But the site, marketed as “free,” sometimes steers customers into products that cost money, in the same way ProPublica hasdocumented over the past year. What’s more, customers who use it are signing away their personal data to the Silicon Valley firm, which the company can use to pitch third-party financial products to their customers.

The coronavirus rescue checks are yet another manifestation of a problem that has existed for decades. As ProPublica has documented, the IRS has long deferred to private industry instead of creating its own tax preparation and filing apparatus. The result has been that millions of Americans have paid billions of dollars to corporations for tax preparation they should have been able to get free of charge. This year, anyone who made under $69,000 does not need to pay to file; they are eligible to file taxes for free through an IRS program called Free File.

Now, Americans who desperately need checks to help cushion the coronavirus crash are being targeted by companies all over again.

“This vulnerable group of Americans might end up having to pay for tax prep that they could get for free,” said Dennis Ventry, a tax law professor at University of California, Davis. “And this is a treasure trove of data for Intuit. The company can harvest the personal data of people who previously made up a universe of Americans that the tax prep companies didn’t interact with.”

Intuit trumpeted its program as a user-friendly way for people to get their money. “In partnership with the IRS,” the company’s press release announced, “TurboTax volunteered to create an innovative solution to help this group easily get their stimulus payment.”

But the people coming to the site do not merely enter basic information that would be sent to the IRS in order to get their check processed.

Instead, the site invites users to try TurboTax’s paid tax preparation products with multiple buttons to “Start for Free” — even though the products may charge fees of $100 and up.

In recent days, people who used Intuit’s product to register for the stimulus were bombarded with a series of marketing emails with subject lines such as “E-file with direct deposit for your fastest refund and stimulus check.” The emails push users to TurboTax’s paid tax prep products.

Intuit said this was done in error. The company’s spokesman said, “When we realized those creating accounts specifically for the Stimulus Registration product were receiving this general new account email it was turned off.”

One thing missing from Intuit’s coronavirus page is a link to the IRS’ Free File program. To use it, taxpayers have to find the IRS’ Free File page, which then sends users through to special pages operated by the tax prep companies. The Free File site is a collaboration between the IRS and these companies, which, led by Intuit, conceived of the program as a way to keep the government from building its own system.

Asked why Intuit is steering people toward its paid products on its coronavirus site, a company spokesman said that those looking for the Free File option should go to IRS.gov. The spokesman also pointed to a press release that says: “TurboTax volunteered to create an innovative solution to help this group easily get their stimulus payment — the TurboTax Stimulus Registration product was designed to help millions easily file a minimum tax return with the IRS.” The IRS did not respond to questions.

Things got even more confusing on Friday, when, a week after the TurboTax site launched, the IRS announced a separate IRS.gov tool for people who don’t need to file their taxes to register to receive their checks.

Users reading the fine print on the IRS tool would find that it, too, was created by Intuit.

Even though the same company created both tools, they look very different. The TurboTax version created by Intuit offers a slick design and user-friendly Q&A to enter personal data, along with multiple digital off-ramps to paid TurboTax products.

The IRS.gov version, also created by Intuit, is a clunky PDF-style form filled with jargon and small type. It is titled, “Non-Filers: Enter Payment Info Here.”

An Intuit spokesman said the company “volunteered at no charge to deliver a solution” for the government. The spokesman did not respond to a question about why Intuit launched the TurboTax tool a week earlier than its IRS.gov tool.

“This crisis has highlighted the consequences of a decade of IRS budget cuts,” Sen. Ron Wyden, the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, said in a statement to ProPublica. “The IRS should be less dependent on private companies to distribute refund payments to millions of Americans. Over the long term we need to ensure that the IRS has the resources to more quickly respond especially in an economic downturn.”

Last year, ProPublica reported extensively on Intuit’s and other companies’ efforts to downplay the Free File program, including by blocking Google from indexing their Free File pages. The coverage led to a lot more focus on Free File by Congress, state attorneys general and the rest.

That additional publicity seems to have boosted Free File usage. Through late March, according to an internal IRS report obtained by ProPublica, Free File usage was up 26% compared with the prior year, a jump of about 400,000 people. It’s a significant increase, but, given that over 100 million Americans are eligible for the program and fewer than 3 million actually used it last year, not transformative.

The logistics of getting almost $300 billion in COVID-19 payments out to Americans were always going to be challenging and the details confusing. For that, thank the U.S.’s maddeningly complex tax system and the IRS’ limited capacity.

The easy part is sending money to people who have already given their bank account information to the IRS.

Many Americans file taxes but don’t give the IRS their bank account information and it’s a group that tends to earn less income. According to a ProPublica analysis of tax filing data, 20 million households in 2018 received a refund but didn’t use direct deposit, and most of them had income below $25,000. Many of these people don’t have a bank account at all.

If they take no action, those households will have to wait for the IRS to mail them a paper check. Taxpayers who have shared their bank information with the service started receiving money this week. Others could wait months for postal delivery. The process of sending checks will start in May and continue into August, according to Rep. Steven Horsford, D-Nev., who sits on the committee that oversees the IRS.

For those people, the IRS has promised a different solution: a portal that will allow taxpayers to provide the agency with updated bank account information. This tool, distinct from the non-filers portal already launched, will be up by this Friday, the IRS said in a press release.

And then there are people who didn’t file taxes. They fall into two broad groups. First, there’s those who should have filed but did not. That group numbers in the millions, but the exact number is hard to pin down. It has likely grown in recent years because of lax enforcement by the IRS, which has cut its investigations of nonfilers to a small fraction of what they were.

Tens of millions of poor Americans don’t have to file because they don’t have taxable income. Most of them, around 20 million, are on Social Security. They were a key focus in the CARES Act.

Because the Social Security Administration regularly channels money to these people, lawmakers specifically stated in the CARES Act that the government could send those people money the same way — without them having to file a tax form.

But a couple days after the bill passed, the IRS announced that these people would, in fact, have to file a tax return. The Social Security Administration is not in charge of the CARES payments. What this would mean then, is that the IRS would have to sort through Social Security data to identify people who had not already filed their taxes. After an outcry, however, the IRS reversed itself, saying that these people did not have to file after all.

Actually, the best advice is more complicated, experts say. If these people want to see their CARES money as fast as possible, they should file their taxes. They can do so through the IRS’ Free File program or via the new portal the IRS set up just for the CARES payments. If they don’t file, it will take the IRS a while to figure out how to send Social Security recipients money.

The final group of people who are owed CARES money is the hardest for the IRS to reach: those who didn’t file for taxes because they earned income, but too little to require filing (for a single person, that’s under $12,200; for a married couple, under $24,400). It’s a group that numbers in the neighborhood of 6 million, according to an estimate by the nonprofit New America.

These people will not receive a CARES payment at all unless they file something with the IRS. Maybe some will find their way to the IRS’ Free File page or the agency’s “Non-Filers: Enter Payment Info Here” site. And maybe some will find themselves on TurboTax’s Coronavirus Tax Center page.

Hannah Fresques and Will Young contributed reporting.

by Erica Hensley, Mississippi Today
April 14, 2020

Anna Wan has built a career out of making math come alive. The assistant professor and self-described tinkerer at University of Southern Mississippi has just pivoted from hands-on math labs for future teachers and students alike, to medical mask-making. The common thread: her 3D printer and duel “makers” hub-research lab in Hattiesburg. 

For the Inform[H]er newsletter, Mississippi Today spoke with Wan last week about her approach to getting creative during a pandemic that led to a new medical mask innovation, as she was driving around town delivering said new masks to Forrest General Hospital and the Hattiesburg Clinic. Like many innovations, her design was partly due to chance and a hunch at 2 in the morning. 

Upshot: She’s a “math licensure” faculty member at USM, meaning she teaches future math teachers. Her motto about teaching through making (and the perfect pivot to mask-making): “What other way to make it more real than to actually have the tools to make the precise thing that you want to make and make math come alive.”

Her team has made at least 1,600 masks in a few weeks (from initial concept to prototype to first product) that have been sent directly to health care workers on the front lines in Hattiesburg. Asked about full capacity production, she says the team is making one mask per two minutes per machine currently with three machines, adding, “You do the math.”

This piece was originally published in the Inform[H]er and updated with new information this week.

Q: What is your background that you were able to pivot so well and quickly to pandemic mask-making?

A: Part of my research is incorporating digital fabrication (laser cutting, 3D printing) into teaching mathematics, because what other way to make it more real than to actually have the tools to make the precise thing that you want to make and make math come alive. So, a lot of my work is to take some of the maker-constructivist activities into a formal education and tying it to the standard so that kids can learn creatively without loss of time, both teacher preparation and classroom time — we know that education doesn’t occur in isolation.

I’ve always done kind of crazy things. My husband is in a wheelchair and wheelchair attachments are pretty customized to the wheelchair user. I’ve also had a 3D printer since 2015, and I created an education makerspace (a workshop that encourages hands-on learning) at my previous institution at Columbus State in Columbus, Georgia. I’ve always done these tinkering kind of things — I was always fabricating something for somebody somewhere somehow.

Q: How did you end up pivoting to this mask? (Editor’s note: the mask is simply the device to attach medical-grade anti-viral filters to health care workers’ faces. The hospitals she has partnered with already have the actual filter with a nozzle. The idea to strap the filter to the face with a mask was a brainchild of a quick conversation with medical professionals. Hospitals are low on disposable N95 masks due to supply chain chokes across the country. She’s working with Mississippi Polymer Institute to source more scalable, sustainable plastics. They’re currently using the same soft plastic of Coke bottles.)

A:  We looked at thermoforming as a way to make a mold for something else — you heat up a sheet of plastic and you form it over your mold. (Also good for cookie and chocolate molds, she says). So I thought we would thermoform over this mask into a solid brick of this mask sheet and I’ll create plaster molds or something to pour silicone in.

That was the original intent — this was an intermediary step to make something harder to push plastic through. But, after I thermoformed it and cut the shape out, I put it to my face. I was testing it for the suction to my face — when you test a mask for suction you take a deep breath — it stuck me right away and I choked. It was that good of a suction to the face and I thought, ‘Wait, this could be a final product!”

We’ve also published it for people to recreate on their own, and local sewers have sewed and contributed straps for the masks.

Q: What does this moment mean to you as an innovator and what lessons can we take away from it?

A: I honestly hate the backdrop in which this is occurring because it’s really an exciting time in a sense that this is a global hackathon. It’s really cool and a really exciting time to create, if it weren’t for the virus. I’m seizing the moment to create things and, honestly, I feel like the N95 mask really needed to be rethought. (Editor’s note: The N95 mask is not made for all-day, repeat wear, unlike Wan’s. With N95s, breaths in and out are dispersed throughout the entirety of the mask, where as with hers, the breath in and out is channeled through that spout so you get a fuller breath in and a fuller breath out, and there’s not as much as the C02 build up.)

We have to rethink the way we’re using these N95s. Just by purely stating that 3M is going to ramp up production of these things, I don’t know that that is necessarily helpful (for the long-term), especially in this day and age of the fact that these are so disposable.

See more about the mask and Wan’s work here: https://www.eaglemakerhub.org/hubmask/

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

by Kayleigh Skinner, Mississippi Today
April 14, 2020

Mississippi students will not return to the classroom this semester.

On Tuesday, Gov. Tate Reeves announced that school buildings would remain closed for the rest of the year to prevent the spread of coronavirus. Reeves added that he had hoped to reopen schools but that data did not justify doing so.

Reeves’ decision follows those in other states to close schools for the rest of the semester or, in some cases, until further notice. Some of Mississippi’s contiguous states have already made the decision to keep school doors closed for the remainder of the year. Alabama and Arkansas announced in March that schools would close for the rest of the semester while Louisiana and Tennessee have both shuttered schools until late April.

Reeves said districts may turn to summer school or early fall classes if necessary, but doing so would not be required.

“We’re going to work with our local superintendents,” Reeves said. “It’s going to depend on how much distance learning actually occurred. In some districts… they may feel very comfortable with where the vast majority of their students are. We look at it not as a mandate but as an option. It’s something we ought to be thinking about.”

The closures come as the state is under a shelter in place order, and the number of confirmed cases continues to climb. To date, Mississippi has 3,087 confirmed cases and 111 deaths.

To most, the closures do not come as a surprise. Schools were already closed until at least April 17, and the state board of education took action in March to cancel end-of-year state testing. Students will still graduate and be promoted to the next grade, as State Superintendent Carey Wright recently referred to the 2019-20 school year as a “hold harmless year” due to the disruptions caused by the coronavirus and school closures.

Some educators question why the decision was not made sooner. Reeves announced on April 8 that he would make a decision about what to do with schools by April 14.

“Educators are concerned about that,” said Mississippi Association of Educators president Erica Jones, ahead of the governor’s announcement. “Why are we prolonging this? Why hasn’t there been leadership on when schools are returning? Arkansas made their decision, Georgia made their decision.”

“Here in our state we have teachers that are literally having panic attacks because we have a governor that has not made a decision on schools. Some groups of educators are preparing lessons to be taught in a classroom for a return date on April 20. And then others are thinking, ‘Should I be planning out some type of distance learning?’”

While there will be no state testing, seniors still need to meet their school district’s requirements and earn 24 Carnegie units, which are used to equate hours of class or contact time with an instructor over the course of a high school year. Districts will determine how to award credits for courses in the current school year, and the state board gave local school boards the authority to change their graduation policies as long as they still comply with state standards.

How schools provide instruction during the closures is up to each school district. Last month, the Mississippi Department of Education released guidance with resources to use during the pandemic and warned against immediately pivoting to online learning because of the challenges that come with access and equity.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

‘The bottom just fell out’: Small, rural businesses grapple with COVID-19 crisis

by Kelsey Davis, Mississippi Today
April 13, 2020

CLEVELAND – Small business owners did not see the COVID-19 fallout coming. It wasn’t like a hurricane, where there’s time to board up the windows and evacuate. Coronavirus crept into communities, grounding business to a screeching halt. 

“All of a sudden, it’s just like the bottom fell out. It wasn’t a slow thing. It happened in just a couple of days,” said Matty Bengloff, manager at Delta Meat Market.

Gov. Tate Reeves issued a shelter-in-place order to go into effect April 3, which meant that restaurants could no longer serve dine-in meals. The Meat Market had transitioned into only offering to-go meals and curbside pickup weeks before the order was announced. 

As those changes were being made, Delta Meat Market laid off almost their entire staff –around 50 employees – and is now doing approximately one-twentieth of the business, owner and operator Cole Ellis said. 

The Delta Meat Market, an eatery mainstay and community anchor in Cleveland, Mississippi, opened as a butcher shop in 2013. It grew into a restaurant, mostly serving lunch but on Friday evenings turning into a bar with a thriving happy hour. Then, in July 2019 it moved into a new location connected with the Marriott owned Cotton House Hotel, which included a rooftop bar and restaurant upstairs and a separate restaurant downstairs serving three meals a day (except dinner on Sundays). 

“We felt like we were finally kind of hitting our stride after opening the new operations,” Bengloff said. 

They’ve since transitioned back into a butcher shop and small grocery as well as offering meals to go. 

“But it’s not really sustainable without the restaurant piece. That’s compounded by the fact that a small but still significant percent of our business was that the hotel had a lot of guests who would come to eat with us for certain meals. Now the hotel has very few if any guests,” Bengloff said. 

Aside from that, the Meat Market had events and weddings lined up to cater, which have now all been canceled. 

“Basically like all of the incoming cash is turned off but we still have these bills we are paying from two weeks prior,” Bengloff said. “You can’t just cut off your ordering and be OK.”

Of course, the Meat Market is not alone in what most businesses across the country are suffering right now. But in a small town populated with small businesses, it feels different. It’s more personal. The social landscape of an urban area likely will not radically change if one bar or restaurant shutters. If somewhere like Cleveland (the most populated town in Bolivar county with around 11,000 residents) loses just one of the restaurants that are at the core of community gathering here – the town will feel fundamentally different. 

“The scary part is yeah, it’ll end, but it just doesn’t end. It’s still going to be in your mind. To me, I think, ‘Well, will people want to go to trivia? Or are they out of the routine of going out into social environments?’ That’s another unknown. We could get out of it in June, but when do the people start coming back? Or do they come back?,” said Justin Huerta, owner and operator of burger restaurant Hey Joe’s and Mexican restaurant Mosquito Burrito.

Hey Joe’s hosts weekly trivia on Wednesday nights, brings in live music most weekends and puts on festivals in Cleveland throughout the year. Huerta says the two restaurants have lost 80 to 90 percent of their business since the coronavirus crisis erupted. 

“The big chains are scrambling so you can only imagine the mom and pops that don’t have a social media presence, that don’t have an advertising campaign or marketing people or anybody. If it’s just you and your wife doing that stuff, that’s hard,” Huerta said. 

Again, the financial fallout of COVID-19 means something different for small town economies. With fewer employment opportunities, there are fewer places to look for work whenever a round of layoff or furloughs comes. 

“A lot of small towns have gone under if they have a factory that closed and a lot of people were laid off. That would be a normal thing for a rural area depending on maybe a single source employer that closed,” said Judson Thigpen, Executive Director of the Cleveland-Bolivar County Chamber of Commerce. “So if you put that in perspective of what we’re going through now, we’ve got a large number of employers that are closing, albeit hopefully temporarily, but they’re closing.” 

CARES Act confusion

Meanwhile, there’s a strong sense of trepidation around the CARES Act – the stimulus legislation meant to provide financial help for businesses during the coronavirus outbreak. 

“These bailouts are not geared toward restaurants. They’re not geared toward the hospitality industry,” Ellis said. 

In order for Delta Meat Market to qualify for the loan forgiveness that the CARES Act provides, they would have to hire their staff back by June 30. 

“If we hire back our entire staff we don’t have anything for them to do because there’s no demand for food. We don’t want them coming in every day because again we want to practice social distancing, being good stewards,” Bengloff said. “And there’s just so much uncertainty so you’re so scared to take out these loans or apply for these grants because if you don’t meet these terms at the end you could be on the hook for all of this money.”

Other business owners in town did apply for the forgivable loan, but said they encountered challenges because the application changed multiple times. 

“I was redoing the paperwork at 5 in the morning because it was due last Friday, and they changed the form overnight after everything was complete,” said Haley Kelly, owner of the women’s clothing store H Squared. 

Like many other business owners, Kelly has had to swiftly reorganize the entire way her business operates. With Easter, graduation, proms and formals in the Spring, this is usually the time when Kelly’s business is booming. Since retail is not considered essential, she’s closed the doors to her brick and mortar store and moved everything online. 

“We’ve been doing pretty good with our online orders. All of my friends have been ordering clothes online like crazy which is so sweet and so nice. But now this week has kind of been brutal … our sales are horrible for April. I would say we’re 90 percent down,” Kelly said.

As dire as everything is, the community is coming together to do what it can. One community member sends regular checks to Delta Meat Market for recently laid-off employees who are supporting their families. The Meat Market also gives all of the tip money they make to those laid-off workers. 

Jimmy Williams, part-owner of Country Platter, spends at least an hour every day delivering leftover food to elderly shut-ins and food insecure children. 

There is a palpable, concerted effort on behalf of the community to support local businesses. That’s reciprocated by the restaurants who are trying to provide affordable food in a safe way back to the community. 

“There’s hope, and we’ll get through this I know,” Huerta said. “The world will move on, but right now there’s just so much unknown.”

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

by Aallyah Wright, Mississippi Today
April 11, 2020

On a recent Wednesday morning, Chelesa Presley and one volunteer packed double the amount of menstrual products and infant diapers into brown paper bags and plastic wrap to distribute across the state. With jobs lost and schools closed due to COVID-19, the demand for these items are high, especially for some communities in the Mississippi Delta. But the supply is getting low, said Presley, executive director of the Diaper Bank of the Delta.

The Diaper Bank, a nonprofit addressing diaper needs along with period needs and childhood poverty in North Mississippi, has stored more than 50,000 items — tampons, pads, liners, baby wipes, and infant diapers, to name a few. The organization provides an essential service in Mississippi, where nearly 20 percent of the state lives in poverty, according to U.S. Census data. Now, there is another issue impacting women already struggling to make ends meet — coronavirus has caused thousands of Mississippians to lose their jobs, and with the state under a shelter-in-place order until at least April 20, Presley isn’t sure how long this batch of supplies will last.

“With our normal demand, it would serve us six months. Last year we served over 300 families and each of those families averaged two children each (30 diapers) — that’s a lot of diapers,” Presley said. “(They) are calling and saying, ‘Hey, the casinos are closed. We don’t have money. We can’t get these items and … are not covered by food stamps or WIC.”

The coronavirus pandemic has led many shoppers to resort to “panic buying,” where people buy food and household items in bulk, leaving grocery and convenience stores with empty shelves. What’s missing out of the larger conversation, women and children advocates say, is the scarcity of hygiene products for low-income women and children.

In the United States, women comprise half of the population. However, nearly two-thirds of low-income women couldn’t afford feminine hygiene products like tampons or pads during a survey. This phenomenon is an extension of  “period poverty,” or the inadequate access to menstrual hygiene tools and education due to lack of access or income. 

Advocates argue menstrual health isn’t just “a woman’s problem, it’s everyone’s problem.” Researchers cited consequences that affect employment, finances, education, and self-esteem issues. A recent study led by St. Louis University researchers found 36 percent of women missed days of work due to a lack of adequate period hygiene supplies. It also found 21 percent of 200 low-income women surveyed couldn’t buy feminine hygiene products on a monthly basis. Nearly half had to choose between buying food or period-related products. 

This is the reality in a state where poverty “is very much real,” said Laurie Bertram Roberts, co-founder of the Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund, a Jackson-based nonprofit that provides financial and logistical access for abortions and advocates for reproductive health justice. 

“You don’t want someone using tampons too long. You don’t want people taking apart pads and making their own. It’s unsanitary. I love the fact we’re so scrappy and such survivors but it’s so not what we want from a public health perspective,” she said in a phone call with Mississippi Today.

In her own reproductive health work, Bertram Roberts saw the need for low-income families in the Jackson area. So, in 2018, the organization opened a diaper closet and opened a period supply closet a year later. The closets include baby wipes, baby diapers, adult diapers, pads, tampons, and more.

Mississippi isn’t the only state seeing shortages in feminine hygiene products. Other organizations have tripled their supply. I Support Girls, an international nonprofit that collects donations of feminine hygiene products and bras for shelters, prisons and people in need, donated 900,000 menstrual products this March compared to under 200,000 last year around the same time, The New York Times reported.

In regards to baby items, Moms Helping Moms Foundation, a New Jersey baby supply and diaper bank, gave out more than 9,000 diapers in one week in comparison to a normal 4,000 in a week, NJ.com reported. 

Similarly to the Diaper Bank, Bertram Roberts has a small staff that is only able to support a little more than 10 families. In order to reach more people, organizing around this issue should be a priority, she said.

“I’ve seen pushes to get everyone fed, but I haven’t seen conversations around toiletries except for when it comes to people that are houseless … but not everyone who needs those things are houseless.”

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.