Update From ConAgra Foods Foundation on Ending Hunger

"ConAgra Foods Foundation Nancy Pope wrote the 2010 New Mexico Plan to End Hunger to improve the state’s rating as the most food insecure in the nation. She succeeded by improving the rating from most food insecure to fifth and she’s still working. She’s also one of five Champions Against Child Hunger we’ll be featuring this week. Read Nancy’s ...full story and vote for a champion – we’re donating $1 to Share Our Strength for each vote.See MoreVote for a Champion Against Child Hunger - ConAgra Foods Foundation


www.championsagainstchildhunger.org"

Haiti Update from Partners in Health

Partners in Health announces Call to Action, Stand With Haiti Fund to media




On Friday, PIH held a conference call for national media outlets. PIH co-founder Ophelia Dahl and Chief Program Officer, Ted Constan, both of whom recently returned from a several days in Haiti led the well attended session, and took the opportunity to announce a call to action, hoping that other organizations will step forward and join us in our ongoing efforts to build Haiti back better. They also announced the Stand With Haiti Fund, which will support rebuilding efforts over the next three years. The Fund’s initial budget has been set at $125 million.

Starting on a positive note, Ophelia remarked that one of the highlights of trip was the graduation ceremony for the first class of Global Health Fellows, a cadre of Haitian physicians who have completed several clinical, managerial, and academic requirements over the last several years. Ophelia explained that this celebration of their achievements was planned long before the earthquake struck 7 weeks ago, and PIH leadership convened the ceremony despite the tragedy in part because it provided a much needed “pocket of hope.”

Ophelia and Ted both underlined the need for action by calling our attention to this “urgent humanitarian crisis that is getting worse by the day.” They were encouraged by partnerships with places such as the Albert Schweitzer Hospital in Deschapelles, Haiti which is doing prosthetic and rehabilitative work, and Ted emphasized the need for partners who can implement “specialized interventions.” By way of example, he explained that while PIH doesn’t have the expertise and/or resources to provide appropriate shelter and clean water to all the people who need it, we are eager to partner with those who do.

Answering a question about living conditions later in the call, Ophelia explained that one settlement of 7,000 people was laid out across an old playing field made of astro turf. The synthetic material was unable to absorb the torrential rains that fell last week, destroying many shelters constructed of only sheets and cardboard, making already dangerously poor sanitary conditions even worse. Ted also discussed the dangers of water borne disease in the settlements, citing a potential onslaught of such preventable illnesses such as typhoid and amoebic dysentery, and declaring that people would most likely still be living in these settlements for at least the next twelve months. He assured callers that PIH will continue to provide medical services and emergency referrals to the hospital in these camps.

A "race to the top" to end childhood hunger

On February 23 Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack presented key elements of the Administration’s strategy to end childhood hunger in a speech at the National Press Club. The centerpiece is a “race to the top” competition to create incentives for states and governors to implement creative plans for community collaboration to eliminate the barriers that prevent children from participating in food and nutrition programs for which they are eligible. More than a year ago Share Our Strength proposed just such a State Incentive Fund. We are delighted to see this type of partnership between the federal government and the states moving one step closer to becoming reality. We believe it is essential to our shared goal of ending childhood hunger by 2015. 

See entire post at Share Our Strength's No Kid HUngry blog @http://strength.org/blog/billy_shore/race_to_the_top/

Looking For the Light - The Hidden Life and Art of Marion Post Walcott

In 1992, while browsing a bookstore in Washington, D.C., I picked up Looking for the Light. On the back cover was a black-and-white photograph, taken in 1933, of a beautiful 23-year-old woman with mesmerizing eyes and a tomboy style of dress. I developed an immediate crush on her, a photographer named Marion Post Wolcott and the subject of the book.


Wolcott was a photographer for the Farm Security Administration during the 1930s, one of several photographers employed by the New Deal agency to document the impact of the Great Depression on the lives of Americans. Wolcott, along with Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks, and others, created some of our nation’s most iconic images. But Wolcott never became as famous as some of her contemporaries. That’s because, after taking several hundred thousand photographs over three years, she met a man, put her camera down to start a family, and did not pick that camera up again for almost 50 years.

Paul Hendrickson, the author of Looking for the Light, summarizes Wolcott’s life as “a story about an artist who stopped, who let go of that gifted magical thing inside her until it was too late and the gift was lost. And yet in spite of this fact she was able to make her survival a grace, not just a dour necessity.”

My work, as the founder of Share Our Strength, has focused on hunger and poverty, which is why I’ve always been interested in the era of documentary photography that did so much to bring those issues to public attention. The human drama that Hendrickson conveys about the choices and trade-offs that Wolcott made has universal relevance and was riveting, but what I really took away from the book was a new way to see.

 See my review of the book in Stanford Social Innovation Review @http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/bearing_witness/

Sharing our Strategy With the Nation's Governors

We had a great opportunity this morning to advance our strategy to end childhood hunger by presenting to a private session of Governors from about a dozen states including Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Iowa, Colorado and Maryland. They were in town for the annual meetings of the National Governors Association (and the Democratic Governors Association) and were headed over to the White House to see President Obama just after the session in which I presented. So the timing was good – especially because our message was that while the President has set a bold goal for ending childhood hunger by 2015, it will require bold action on the part of Governors, working with partners like Share Our Strength, to achieve it.


Governor Martin O’Malley told his colleagues about the progress that has been made in Maryland and Governor Bill Ritter described what a great deal our new partnership has been for Colorado. Following his comments the chair of the Democratic Governors Association, Delaware’s Jack Markell said “I think we can all agree that this is a no brainer.” The aides to several Governors came up after and asked if we can bring our strategy to their state.

A brief summary of my comments to the governors follows below:

Thank all of you for this opportunity here this morning. I have enormous admiration for your leadership at a time when our nation needs its governors to lead as never before. I don’t have to tell you that that these are extraordinarily difficult times politically, times that require courage and risk and fortitude

Though we may face many challenges that we are not easy to solve , such as unemployment, health care, climate change, etc, there is an important issue that is solvable and it is particularly dependent on you. That is ending childhood hunger in the United States.

As you know, one in four children in the U.S. are now on food stamps, for the first time in our history. A survey that Share Our Strength commissioned from Celinda Lake shows that 62 % of public school teachers identify hunger as a problem in the classroom and are using their own money on a regular basis to buy food for those kids.

But kids in the U.S. aren’t hungry because we lack food, we know that is not the case, and they are not hungry because of a lack of food and nutrition programs. That is not the case either. They are hungry because they lack access to those programs. And every time we increase access- to school breakfast, to summer feeding, to SNAP / food stamps, we increase the flow of already authorized and appropriated federal dollars into your state. Even increasing school breakfast participation from the 45% rate it is at today to 60% would bring $561 million into the states. More than a billion dollars are at stake when you consider all of the food and nutrition programs for which kids are eligible but not enrolled.

We have been working closely with Governor O’Malley and more recently with Governor Ritter to increase the participation in school breakfast, summer feeding, and the SNAP / food stamp program. When I told Governor O’Malley that we had an excellent meeting with Governor Ritter and that Colorado should be able to draw down another $70 million he e-mailed and asked “doesn’t this beg the intellectual question as to why we are not already doing this?”
It is exactly the right question. And the answer is that these kids don’t have representation, lobbyists or associations. They need our leadership. And this is not only right for our kids, it is also a way of showing those skeptical of government, often for good reason, that there are programs that work.

President Obama has advanced this cause by setting the bold goal of ending childhood hunger by 2015, but his Administration’s strategy for achieving that is not as bold as the goal itself. That frankly will depend on you. If you are tired of cutting programs you ran for office to support, if you are tired of budget realities that have forced you to make the most vulnerable and voiceless in your state even more vulnerable and marginalized, then we at Share Our Strength, along with many partners including Feeding America and the Food Research and Action Center, are eager to help.

The poet Nordahl Grieg once said: Rich is the earth, noble is man, where there is hunger or need there is betrayal. We know in our hearts and our bones that there is no excuse for hunger in America. Rich is the earth and there is nobility in those of you who have chosen to serve your state and country. We don’t need to betray children by leaving them hungry. That’s why we look forward to partnering in your state to increase participation in programs that have bipartisan support and that we know will work.

Moral Imagination - a post Haiti work in progress

I’ve been giving more thought to Bill Gate’s announcement, which I read about a few days after I returned from Haiti, of the largest philanthropic commitment in history: $10 billion over 10 years to develop and distribute vaccines for diseases like malaria, pneumonia, and tuberculosis. The burden of those infectious diseases on the poorest people in the world is every bit as crushing as the concrete rubble that buried so many in Port au Prince. Gates’ effort will catalyze a greater mobilization of talented medical professionals than anything we saw with Partners in Health. The lives of 8 million children will be saved by 2020 as a result. The $10 billion was a one day story.


The crisis in Haiti naturally trumped Gates as it did so much other news. For the media, nothing held a candle to the horrors being reported from Port au Prince, some so graphically that they became known as “disaster porn.”

Unlike in Haiti, the 3000 African kids who die every day from malaria die quietly and invisibly. That’s because they die routinely, year in and year out, in numbers too large to fathom. They die in the pages of medical journals, not in our living rooms on high definition TV. They don’t reach the threshold for Anderson Cooper. Or the 82nd Airborne. No rock concerts on MTV.

In reality there is nothing quiet about their deaths at all. They are painful, protracted, often horrendous. Perhaps worst of all, they are preventable.

This tension between the immediate and the long-term, between the personal and the abstract exists in every effort to create meaningful change. You and I have come up against it in virtually everything we do. It is human nature to be deeply moved by the drama in front of us, rather than what might be imagined for another time and place. You may have seen the Washington Post magazine story on new research that tries to explain it. Shankar Vedantam, a Washington Post reporter, wrote a book called "The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars and Save Our Lives.” In it he says “The reason human beings seem to care so little about mass suffering and death is precisely because the suffering is happening on a mass scale. The brain is simply not very good at grasping the implications of mass suffering. Americans would be far more likely to step forward if only a few people were suffering or a single person were in pain…. Our hidden brain -- my term for a host of unconscious mental processes that subtly biases our judgment, perceptions and actions -- shapes our compassion into a telescope. We are best able to respond when we are focused on a single victim.”

Vedanta reviews the experiments of University of Oregon psychologist Paul SLovic who told volunteers given a certain amount of money, about a starving 7-year-old girl in Mali. On average, people gave half their money to help the girl. Slovic told another group of volunteers with the same amount of money about the problem of famine in Africa, and the millions of people in need. The volunteers gave half as much money as volunteers in the first group.

As with the model trains of our youth, only engines of a certain scale fit our mental tracks. They are very narrow gauge.

The consequence, while explainable as above, perhaps even understandable, is a spectacular failure of imagination. When we focus on the one rather than the many, on the symptom rather than cause, on what oneself can accomplish rather than on what needs to be accomplished by the broader community, we neglect our greatest opportunities to do the greatest good. It’s equivalent to suffering a massive stroke that leaves one seeing only what is in direct line of sight, with no peripheral vision or sense of relationship to the larger, surrounding world.

There is no recourse to such failure of imagination but to recognize it, confront it, and struggle to overcome it as one might a crippling stutter.

It would be nice if there were a more concrete and guaranteed prescription, perhaps a handy checklist to tick through like those Dr. Atul Gawande describes for hospitals, pilots and engineers. But overcoming failures of imagination has less to do with following procedure, or tapping external resources, and more with looking deeply and expansively within. It requires intentionally challenging one’s imagination, questioning whether we have engaged it to the fullest, and especially pushing to contemplate and react not only to what we see but also to what we don’t see.

A few years ago the commencement speaker at Wellesley College made exactly this point, telling the women in the class of 2006 about the ingredient essential to fighting for whatever may be their cause:
“Adam Hochschild writes beautifully about one such cause: the abolitionist movement, in his book, Bury the Chains. He states compellingly that ‘the abolitionists succeeded where others failed because they mastered one challenge that faces anyone who cares about social and economic justice: drawing connections between the near and the distant.’ Linking our own lives and fates with those we can’t see will, I believe, be the key to a decent and shared future….
“Imagination will allow you to make the link between the near of your lives with the distant others and will lead us to realize the plethora of connections between us and the rest of the world, between our lives and that of a Haitian peasant, between us and that of a homeless drug addict, between us and those living without access to clean water or vaccinations or education and this will surely lead to ways in which you can influence others and perhaps improve the world along the way.”

The commencement speaker was Ophelia Dahl. She explained how being the daughter of writer Roald Dahl meant learning a lot about imagination at an early age. She implied that it served her well in helping to envision and create Partners in Health. After all, PIH has succeeded where so many others have failed precisely because of a leap of imagination. The leap was not that highly educated docs in Boston would volunteer to provide health care to Haitians in Haiti – though it would be fair to call that a stretch in its own right - but rather that with the support of partners from Boston, Haitians could create and deliver their own health care. That is where imagination really triumphed.

The enormity of Gate’s $10 billion risks eclipsing the impressive feats of imagination that were its catalyst. Gates was able to see both sides of a distant coin: the needs of African children outside the small circumference of the telescope, and the transformative impact of vaccines notwithstanding a long roller-coaster history that has repeatedly dashed hopes and in the case of malaria for example has yet to produce a single licensed vaccine.

It’s the same imagination the cathedral builders had in persuading their community to invest fortunes and centuries in something that on paper had to look like the most improbable of visions.

It’s the imagination of Timberland’s Jeff Swartz who says a successful business can mean commerce and justice, the imagination that says childhood hunger can be eradicated, that says a malaria vaccine is not a matter of scientific discovery but biotech engineering.

Since returning from Haiti I’ve been determined, as many of us have, to try to make a difference there in the limited ways possible from here: tracking down needed supplies, working to find and connect resources, and engaging others to help. The trip did not fail to reignite and refuel commitment, as I knew it would.

But ironically, for me at least, having witnessed the suffering in Haiti makes it more important to look beyond Haiti, not through it or past it, but beyond it, to find and fulfill one’s purpose. Anything less would feel like some tragic Greek myth in which we’d been warned that gazing too deeply into the eyes of Cite de Soleil’s children surging toward the back of the Yele food truck could permanently constrict our vision.

Compassion is both blessing and balm. But unless hitched to the power of imagination it can leave us one step behind the next tragedy, and the next, always a day late and dollar short. We’ll likely end up doing a lot of good, but not nearly good enough.

Moral imagination is supposed to be what differentiates us from the other species. But our boast is bigger than our bite. We remain only partially evolved, a work in progress to be admired and resisted both at once, or as Bruce Springsteen sings, we are “halfway to heaven and just a mile outta hell.”

If we hope to truly change the world rather than just the bits and pieces of it that drift in front of us, we must reach for more than the traditional tools stored in those drawers we glibly label “social entrepreneur”, “business leader” or “policy maker.” Indeed we must reach inside, not out, must shape our own evolution, with faith that the greatest value we can deliver may lie not in what we know but in what we seek to know.

Jim Ansara returns to Haiti with Partners in Health

Our friend and supporter Jim Ansara just returned to Haiti to help renovate hospitals.  The link to his blog is http://jiminhaiti.org/ and the following post from Jim can be found there:

Monday – Port Au Prince


February 15, 2010 by Jim

David Walton and I are heading to the PIH in St. Marc shortly with Patrice Nevil who is the Zanmi Lasante head of infrastructure and engineering. Patrice has been renovating the public hospital in St Marc for the last year working with the Haitian Ministry of Health who owns the hospital. ZL/PIH plays a major supporting role at the hospital which is well run but very antiquated for the last 18 months. The goal of our trip is to plan for a renovation of the operating room and add OR recovery rooms and a small isolation ward. The hospital has played a major supporting role to PAP since the quake as there is a good road between the cities and hundreds of badly injured people were brought to St Marc. For treatment. Tonight we will stay in Mirebalais and then Tuesday on to Cange. I will try to post pictures of St. Marc tomorrow.