IF ALL THE hungry people in the U.S. were gathered into one state, its population would roughly match that of California. According to the USDA, 40 million Americans are food insecure. This means 1 in 8 Americans lack sufficient food to live a healthy life.
Our children fare even worse. In the richest nation the world has ever known, 1 in 6 children will at some point this year be left with a growling belly, wondering where their next meal is coming from, and when. In South Texas, where Jeremy Everett works to end hunger, 1 in 2 children face such dire straits.
According to Everett, to tackle a problem as large and complex as hunger, individual trust, commitment, and community buy-in are crucial. They are not enough, though: Widespread collaboration is also required. Communities must join forces with other communities, nongovernmental organizations, businesses, and government at all levels. They must pool their resources and knowledge and coordinate their efforts.
Everett learned the importance of strategic collaboration from the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s woefully inadequate response to Hurricane Katrina—how FEMA scrambled to provide essential services to hundreds of thousands of displaced people. Desperate for help, it turned to NGOs, businesses, and community-based groups such as the Baptist social services agency where Everett worked. Despite FEMA’s last-minute collaborations, its response to Katrina was itself a disaster.
With FEMA’s failures in mind, Everett launched the Texas Hunger Initiative (THI), an organization that has formed strategic partnerships with the USDA and Texas state agencies, businesses, and communities. After 10 years in operation, it provides 100 million meals to Texans annually and has helped set up more than 5,000 meal sites to feed children in the summer months, when they don’t have access to free school lunches.
While THI’s efforts have been largely successful, Everett doesn’t pretend that success comes easily. Collaboration requires openness and trust, which in these hyperpartisan times are in short supply. Plus, NGOs don’t always work well together, often because they are competing for the same funds. And the relationship between the business and public sectors can be contentious, especially when government doesn’t defer to business interests.
I Was Hungry calls us to leave our politics behind, to lead with actions rather than ideology and seek common ground for the common good. It calls us to live up to the gospel we proclaim, heed the need in our communities, and feed the hungry in our midst. In short, it calls for fundamental change—in ourselves and how we fight hunger. Such change will not come easily, but millions of Americans are hungry for it, hungrier than most of us can imagine.
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