Humanities & Cultures

Marcella Patino was hunched over a table at the South Salt Lake Community Center, her pizza getting cold and her nerves fraying. Patino is a single mom with three kids, and kid­like in her own way, tiny and sweet-voiced. When I met her, in the summer of 2024, she was 33 years old and earning $300 a week doing manicures and pedicures. To bump up her income, she had recently gotten a degree from aesthetician school, meaning she could start offering her clients facials and eyebrow lamination too. She would start making $450 a week soon—$23,400 a year, assuming she was able to work year-round with no breaks.

Her rent was $1,550 a month. Then she had to pay for electricity, heat, food, clothing, cell service, health care, child care, gas, and everything else. To keep Patino and her children out of abject poverty, the state of Utah was providing her with Medicaid, SNAP (benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, better known as food stamps), and $600 a month in cash assistance. “Is it enough?” I asked. She blushed, picking at her nails, hand-painted with miniature strawberries and lemons. She went to food banks, she said. Her mom and her neighbors pitched in. Still, she kept falling into debt.

Whether the help was enough was less of a pressing matter than whether the help would be there at all. A few days earlier, the state of Utah had dropped Patino from its cash-assistance program and SNAP. She didn’t understand why; her caseworker had been no help. That’s why she had come to Circles, a self-empowerment nonprofit that helps its clients boost their income to double the federal poverty line or more.

A Circles volunteer, Stephanie Burdick, hugged Patino and logged on to her account at the Utah Department of Workforce Services (DWS) website, as she had done dozens of times over the prior year. She reviewed the notifications Patino had received, read the emails between her and her caseworker, and looked at her pay stubs. “I can’t figure it out,” Burdick said. It was not the first time the pair had been stumped. Her benefits get “turned off all the time,” Patino told me. Because Utah was asking her to substantiate her poverty all the time.