Drawing on the experiences of the Policy Academy, this toolkit provides practical guidance for state SNAP E&T administrators and Governors’ office staff.
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Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program Employment and Training (SNAP E&T) programs can be among the most effective tools states and territories have to connect individuals to economic opportunity. Strong programs help participants build skills that lead to employment and help align the broader workforce system. Delivering on that potential requires agencies that were not designed to work together to coordinate across separate systems, priorities and accountability structures while managing limited resources and changing federal program requirements.
From 2024 to 2026, six states participated in the Policy Academy to Strengthen SNAP E&T Delivery, a technical assistance initiative led by the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices in partnership with Third Sector and with support from Seattle Jobs Initiative. Across two cohorts, state teams brought different challenges, agency structures and levels of experience, but shared commitment to improving how their programs operate. Teams clarified roles that had been ambiguous for years, documented processes that previously lived with individual staff or teams and built internal structures that allow programs to scale while maintaining quality and consistency. Their experiences show that meaningful progress is possible from many different starting points.
This publication is organized in two parts:
- Policy Academy experiences (Part 1): Documentation of the Policy Academy’s two cohorts, including the challenges each state faced, the approaches teams took to improve their SNAP E&T programs, and the outcomes they achieved across both cohorts.
- Practical toolkit (Part 2): Tools, state examples and step-by-step guidance for state SNAP E&T administrators and staff in governors’ offices, organized around the challenges states and territories most commonly face. It includes a readiness checklist to help states assess the conditions that support improvement work, as well as a directory of state experiences organized by challenge type.
NGA thanks the state leaders who contributed their time and expertise to the Policy Academy and this toolkit, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) for its support of this project.
