Vision for Future WIC Program Essay

WIC

Visions for the Future of WIC

The Women, Infants, and Children program run by the United States Department of Agriculture, better known by its acronym of WIC, provides a much needed service to specific populations of citizens that are in the most dire need for assistance with some of the fewest resources available to them. By providing Federal grants to the individual States that enable the States to offer supplemental food products, certain types of healthcare subsidies and referrals, and nutritional education for low-income pregnant women, mothers, and their children under the age of five, some of the basic survival needs of these populations are met in a manner that promotes better lifelong practices and self-reliance (WIC, 2012). The following paragraphs detail certain visions for how WIC might be changed in the future to provide even better and more necessary services along these same lines to a wider and larger groups of individual women, children, and families in need of assistance.Sheer and absolute expansion of the WIC program is not called for and would likely not be desirable for a variety of reasons. While serving more women and children in need of nutritional and health support is of course ideal and a definite goal of future growth and development for the WIC program, simply trying to expand enrollment by easing or increasing eligibility requirements would lead to a host of practical problems that would ultimately limit the benefit and the efficacy of the program overall. There are some fairly tight restrictions on WIC eligibility for a reason, and any expansion of services must take into account the differences in expense that such an expansion would necessarily entail….....