A few weeks ago I spoke at Ignite Boulder 17. My spark was ” V is for Victory Gardens.”
The more I volunteer with hunger organizations, the more I realize this is a policy not supply issue. Rather than tackling the economic and political reasons causing hunger in the US, I am focusing on what individuals can do to pitch in. Planting a garden to supplement your neighborhood food bank’s shelves is one easy way to help feed hungry people good food. If you need help getting your garden started, or finding a local community garden or food bank where your energies would be much appreciated, let me know. I’ll do whatever I can.
As for Ignite Boulder — my platitudes are sincere: a thoughtful team of wacky and creative folk who put this event together. They should be applauded for their community-mindedness and their ability to pack a theater. 850 people, 15 presenters (or so) and oh, so much fun. A great experience!
I attended a community meeting a couple weeks ago for an organization called Hunger Free Colorado. They are the lobbying arm of the Feeding America-fueled food banks in the state. They take direction from the five food bank leaders state-wide on what to lobby with local, state and federal officials to better meet the needs of hungry Coloradans.
As a food pantry volunteer, I was interested to hear about the systemic changes that this organization is working on for the state. I’d noticed more and more families coming into the pantry who were seeking sustainable food assistance. I’ve had this nagging concern the system at hand is failing because our “emergency” food boxes were becoming routine.
Something is obviously broken, and I’m no expert in any aspect of the policial or practical system of getting food to hungry folk. That said, any volunteer would notice many of the families coming to the pantry are stuck in a “job of being poor.” It takes a lot of time to access most basic public health services to keep a family fed. This may include visiting a food pantry or more per week — which is typically an all day affair when you are on the city bus.
If you’ve ever spent a day in a food bank, you realize there are far too many ways things could be better.
For example, how about these statistics:
1/4 of families in Colorado report not having enough food, via a Gallup poll
The typical recipient of “food stamps” (called SNAP in Colorado) are a family of 4 living on less than $12,000 per year.
The application for SNAP, until recently, was 26 pages long. On page 4, the applicant was asked if he/she spoke/read English. Apparently up until then, they were expected to intuitively know what they were being asked.
While more than $500,000,000 has been spent on Colorado’s SNAP and food assistance software system since 2004, it doesn’t work. The state of Maine spent $15,000,000 on theirs and it works fantastically. There is little political motivation here to change what exists, even though it doesn’t work and hunger experts testified to the fact beforehand, “because we don’t want to spend more money.” (To me that’s like not repairing the navigation system in the Titanic because the deck furniture cost too much. The system isn’t sinking. It sunk.)
All this said and done, the average Colorado family is on SNAP for less than 10 months.
It is daunting and entirely overwhelming to consider lobbying political issues, and yet — we are bucket brigading a huge fire that will consume Colorado if we don’t stop to install a fire department instead. (Not my analogy — one I heard in the meeting that I thought was rather apt.) And so, we continue bucketing as fas as we can and somehow muster the spirit and energy to create bigger, better change that stops the fire from starting.
I have to believe the basic steps we — those who don’t need food assistance — can all take, no matter where we live, look a bit like this:
1. Invite a friend over with a similar passion, or grab your roommate/spouse, and visit your neighbors. Go to each door around the block and introduce yourself. Take mental notes. Chances are, 1 in 4 of those houses you visit are hungry.
2. Invite your neighbors over for a potluck/bbq. Make it welcoming for those who can’t bring food, and get to know who these folk are. Chances are, you won’t like them all. And chances are, you’ll really like some of them. With certainty, the type of change I’m encouraging requires having civil conversations with both and recognizing public health issues — like hunger — don’t discriminate.
3. Plant a garden. Harvest it for yourself, your neighbors and your community food pantry.
4. If you can give time, volunteer. If you want to give to the food pantry — give money. They can typically buy 10 times what the average consumer can with the same amount of money.
5. Vote. Talk to local, state and federal politicians about how hunger is influencing your neighborhood. Make it tangible with stories you’ve heard and your experiences. For those in Denver, the way to communicate with such officials can be found here, here and here.
Community is a buzz word. Get a liberal in the White House and everyone starts talking about how “it takes a village.” I know, I know. You’ll be shocked to hear my all-loving liberal heart agrees.
Have you spent time with a child lately? Like a really little, totally needy child? A village doesn’t adequately describe the help needed to keep our young alive. Think of the farmer who grows the veggies, or the checker who rings up those veggies, or the pediatrician who makes sure that child doesn’t die of some weird carrot flu. Now, get more practical: the nurse who helped deliver the kid. The community health worker who put together the lactation campaign that taught the mom how to breast feed. The $8 an hour child care worker who eventually will watch the kid take his first step and nurture him to keep going when the second step lands him flat on his butt. “It takes a village” isn’t liberal commie code for “We are socialists! We should raise our babies together in yurts!” It means community is important to our fundamental well-being.
I’d say it takes a village to create a well-rounded adult, not just a child. (An example otherwise.)
Community for me often involves food. Perhaps it is my United Methodist roots — those which run deep in casserole-to-celebrate-everything-soil — or that I’ve been able to travel just enough to be truly bothered by hunger. For me, being in community with someone often includes breaking of bread.
Or baking of ginger cakes and orange chocolate scones. Or hosting a community dinner. Or swapping recipes with your neighbor over the back fence. It seems no two people have the exact same view on faith, life, money, sex or politics. But food? We all love food. Perhaps not the same foods — but we can agree that eating a couple times of day? Well, it’s a nice thing to do.
I listened to this podcast this weekend, as I do most weekends, walking around a lake with Nelson. I wasn’t just shocked by the story of children living in poverty in America. I was hurt. I am hurt. All the patriotic baloney I’ve swallowed over the years sat in the back of my throat as I listened to kids talk about how living in a sketchy motel is “better than the car. Anything is better than living in the car.”
Kids living in cars? I’m not so far removed from the daily grind to think this isn’t happening in America. But 25% of kids are living in poverty? One fourth of our children must miss at least one meal a day because of scarcity?
Aren’t we the nation of Neil Armstrong and Lance Armstrong? We put men on the moon. We cure cancer. We can’t feed our own people? What is going on here, America?
I don’t have any answers. But! I do have a couple of ideas and boundless optimism. To create community is to share with each other. It’s to give, sometimes until it hurts, and to be willing to listen to the same degree. It’s to gather up those around you — in your neighborhood, or say, on your blog — and suggest we have some serious sharing, listening and learning to do. Our country is fractured. We have the choice to sit around and complain about the current state of affairs, or pour our hearts into something that could wrap that break and help it heal to become even stronger.
Nutrition, hunger and community health are my public health passions. Putting these to work in my new community will involve:
finding a food bank where I can volunteer
understanding the local gleaning system and see how I can get involved
talking about hunger with my friends and family
and perhaps more practically, creating a bag of snacks I can give to the growing number of unemployed I see on our city corners
This is what you can do:
Define community. What does this word mean to you?
The greatest social movements start with a few boneheaded, optimistic loud mouths willing to give and listen until it hurts. I don’t want to live in a country where so many of our children are hungry from lack of adequate community building. (Because let’s face it, this isn’t about a shortage of food in America. It’s about power.) Wielding my tiny power and my loud mouth — I’m in. Are you?
I spent Saturday working in Nogales, Arizona. It has a variety of economic and health issues — none unique to this border town. Nogales, Sonora — just across the imaginary line — is regularly plagued with disease that you rarely hear of in the US. Cholera, scurvy, malnutrition, etc.
When it rains, the poor drainage mixed with houses that have been built on top of each other, cause a catastrophe. The top soil has eroded. The water table is corrupt. A healthy existence is not easily found in a town where 500,000 push against a wall, waiting for their turn to cross.
With a group of volunteers, I helped in a medical clinic. I served as translator and quickly realized my Spanish skills are rusty at best. I need to find a Spanish podcast to regularly listen to and get back to a conversation group.
That said, there is something about this sort of work that makes me feel at peace. I hold hands, I listen intently and I truly love trying to figure out how we can help others. It hasn’t always been this way, but I am so glad it’s where I’ve arrived.
“The measure of achievement is not winning awards. It’s doing something
that you appreciate, something you believe is worthwhile. I think of my
strawberry souffle. I did that at least twenty-eight times before I
finally conquered it.”
–Julia Child
Admiring the perfection of nature last night while cooking…
I was in a meeting this morning discussing the AmeriCorps Vista program — which puts incredibly community-minded folks in volunteer opportunities with nonprofits and other groups nationally — listening and pondering the goals of the organization. In contrast to the Peace Corps, AmeriCorps is in part geared toward ending poverty in America.
The speaker elaborated on Vista volunteers receiving a small stipend monthly that barely covers their cost of living. They are to live poor to be more motivated to work for the poor, in theory. In the Peace Corps, I was paid $56 a month and you wouldn’t believe how high that placed me on the social ladder. I had my own home, never went hungry and had plenty of pocket change for bus trips back and forth to the major cities. (The buses rarely ran and were a complete pain in the ass — think 20 people, animals and babies in an 8 passenger Toyota van — but cost wasn’t one of the challenges.) In all fairness, I probably lived a more secure financial existence on that $56 dollars a month in Cameroon (as short as this adventure lasted) than I did on the $124 of financial aid per month I made work for three years of college. I did go hungry. Scraping together enough money for Taco Bell learning to rely on friends was humbling, at best. Regardless, neither situation made me feel sincerely poor or without hope. I always knew I had an education, good health and a strong family on which to rely.
Fundamentally, that’s the difference between true poverty and temporary class experiments. While Vista volunteers may have to creatively stretch every penny they earn to get by, chances are they’ve seen a dentist, are up to date with their immunizations, have never gone days with hunger, and have an address book full of friends and family who would take them in and help immediately if given the chance. I always had the ability to pull the ultimate “uncle!!” card in the Peace Corps, which I did after just five months. I returned to the capital and demanded my return ticket to the US.
The poor are without financial legacy. Most children born into poverty in the United States are born to children. The cycle of poor education and health is yet again planted in the worst neighborhoods, only to produce seedlings who will one day bare the same fruit. We all know of the bootstrap stories of those who’ve pulled themselves out of this routine. President Obama, potential Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, and President Bill Clinton are in the minority. They had that je ne se quois to break through their environment for greater possibilities.
I’m not sure what we do to change these systemic flaws in American culture that keep certain sectors of society always planted in the same garden of despair. I admire the Vista volunteers working knee deep in the quagmire. Reminding those of the American dream — that you can be anything you want to be — must be far more complicated when dreaming itself is a luxury.
