I think it's important to remember, as a rule of thumb, if you take advantage of a social service, it actually makes it easier for other people who need that service to access it. Most of the time, when these services get cut, it's because politicians will look at usage and say "see, no one is really using this thing, we can afford to trim the budget for food stamps by at least half". Whereas if you decide to step up and use these programs, even if you feel like you "don't really need it", at bare minimum it's another data point advocates can use to say "hey, look, people are using this thing, this is an important service we are providing, do not cut our funding".
I work at a nonprofit, and it is absolutely wild explaining to folks that being part of a program that reduces their energy bill actually helps us get funding to help even more people get energy bill savings.
You aren’t taking resources from anyone by using programs you qualify for. You are making a case for those programs being important enough to continue to exist and (in many cases) grow.
We live in a world so controlled by the idea of resource scarcity that we reason "If I get help, that must be taking help away from someone else!"
The thing I learned in the social services sector: Nobody gets all the help they need just handed to them. I don't know if there was ever a time or place where they did, but it's definitely not now.
I'd see people coming into a shelter with all their worldly goods stuffed in a laundry basket, listen to their tales of devastating and horrific abuse, hand them a plastic bag of toiletries, and help them sign up for government assistance that wouldn't even cover their rent. They'd leave and I'd pray that they'd find a good job fast, and not have to move back into their abusive house because they couldn't afford to live alone.
When I was a kid I used to think that if I had cancer, my problems would suddenly be "bad enough" that I'd be showered with love and support. And now I've heard from so many cancer survivors about how getting sick meant losing a lot of their social lives, because a lot of their friends checked out when the going got tough. How a lot of them went bankrupt, because cancer treatment drained every resource they had.
When I worked a crisis phone line, I had to coach people: "The people who work for government assistance are paid to be assholes and turn down as many people as possible. It's not personal. It's designed to make you give up, where "you" means "everybody." What they need is for you to call every shelter in the city, and I'm gonna give you their names and numbers. We share information so I know they're full up today and can't help you either. Your job is like a bingo card that racks up no answers, where every rejection is actually good. Once you've gotten a rejection from all six shelters, you can take that bingo card back to government assistance, and then they HAVE to fund you a hotel room for the night. If it's feeling rough and you need some encouragement, call back, because even when I can't help you, you still deserve that help."
Now that I'm on government benefits, I can see things that tip the political scales and it usually isn't the health and wellbeing of citizens in need. The government decided they didn't like paying out September's money on August 28, because it made the accounting untidy. They switched it to payments on September 1.
This was a terrible move for several reasons, but do you want to know the major thing that made them undo it?
Landlords. These poor widdle landlords, you see, kept having trouble collecting the rent on the 1st of the month, because if there was any difficulty about benefits being paid out, a lot of people only noticed when the money didn't appear in their bank account. They'd have to call their worker and wait three hours on hold to learn what the holdup was, and if it got fixed on the 1st, that money wouldn't get through until the 3rd, so the landlords had to do all the work of writing up and handing out 14-day eviction notices on the same day people paid their rent and rendered the eviction notice null.
And that was so much work for the landlords, because SO many of their tenants were on government benefits, and the conservatives in power didn't want the landlords to feel all stressed and sad and do lots of work for no reason, did they?
So they changed it to five days before the end of the month, not because they finally remembered compassion, but because they were screwing with a class of people so large, it made a serious dent in the economic prosperity of the rich.
Help doesn't come easy. Nobody gets as much as they need. Sometimes, our only power is our numbers.