GRAY, Tenn. (WJHL) — More than 50,000 Northeast Tennesseans benefited from federal SNAP disbursements in September, with the total issuance amounting to $10,489,278.

Those figures come from Tennessee's Department of Human Services and were provided by Second Harvest Food Bank of Northeast Tennessee in a news release about the upcoming activation of its emergency SNAP plan.

Second Harvest, which urged Northeast Tennesseans to "contact their lawmakers, state and federal, to advocate for the release of all SNAP funding," will begin emergency mass food distributions in Northeast Tennessee's eight counties on Monday.

The data cited by Second Harvest shows that 52,419 people, almost exactly 10% of the region's 526,376 population, were in families receiving SNAP benefits last month.

Nearly on

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