A Ray of Hope for Kids in Results of Election?

It would impossible to overstate how pre-occupied all of Washington will be with the election results. The House will almost certainly be majority Republican and the conventional wisdom will be that there is much about which the country is divided. But one area where elected officials may find common ground is ensuring a healthy start for our kids.



The new political make-up of Congress and huge deficits will make it very difficult to start new programs, But Share Our Strength’s strategy for ending childhood hunger doesn’t depend on proposing new programs. Instead it depends on more effective use of existing programs like school breakfast and summer feeding.

Congress and the President will be forced to work together and fashion bi-partisan solutions. On childhood hunger there is a long track record of doing just that: working together to expand school lunch, school breakfast, summer feeding, and SNAP (food stamps).

There are many issues for which we may not yet have or agree upon solutions: job creation, climate change, threat of terrorism. But childhood hunger is not one of those. We know it is solvable and what works to solve it. This may be a chance to surprise the nation and get some big things done for our children.

Creating Community Wealth - The Next Generation

Yesterday I spent an hour via video conference with 25 students from the Honors College at the University of Alabama. Incoming freshman there are assigned The Cathedral Within to read over the summer and they wanted to have a discussion about finding careers in community service that would enable them to have the most powerful impact.

They had a lot of great questions about whether nonprofit work can sustain itself and get to scale, about what kind of investments nonprofits need to make in their own capacity, and about the organizational leadership required to create built-to-last organizations. They were all freshman, from all parts of the country, just beginning their education, and determined to chart a course of service and civic engagement but with real concerns about the sustainability of such a path.

It was a timely reminder that the consequences of Community Wealth Ventures' pioneering work go beyond the impressive results we get for our clients.  A new generation, as represented by the students I met with yesterday, is looking to us to make their hopes real – and to create possibilities that have not yet existed for them to change their communities and the world.

The politics of helping hungry kids

You’ve probably noticed that the media these past few days has been reinforcing the conventional wisdom with new polls and projections of Republican gains in both the House and among Governors races. The Cook Political report shows a near record 87 house seats that would be considered competitive or toss-ups.



I think almost any variation of this likely outcome in November means at least three things for our Share Our Strength’s childhood hunger strategy:


 To the extent that we have been political but not partisan, and reasonably moderate in our approach so far, our anti-hunger advocacy may be better positioned to succeed on Capitol Hill.

 In the next Congress when any initiatives that require new spending will face a very steep climb, and many programs will face cuts, our strategy of focusing at the state level and increasing access to existing food and nutrition programs may have more appeal than ever. Particularly as the impact if the recession lingers, Governors of both parties may be attracted to programs that bring badly needed dollars to their states.


 The Obama Administration will be forced to work more closely with the opposition party and because food and nutrition programs have a track record of bipartisan support, they may represent a common ground on which we can achieve surprising progress on behalf of America’s kids.

Child Nutrition Reauthorization: The Perfect and the Good

This morning I re-read the last chapter of Jonathan Alter’s book The Promise, about Obama’s first year in office. It is the story of how health care finally passed, and the struggle the White House had with the deeply disappointed liberal wing of the Democratic Party which wanted to include provisions like the public option and other measures which the White House philosophically supported but believed would have made the bill impossible to pass.

Though the health care battle was bigger in scope in every way, Alter’s account of the negotiations between the various advocacy groups and the White House and Congress reads exactly like what we’ve seen with the Child Nutrition Reauthorization (reflected in today’s New York Times story @http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/24/us/24food.html?_r=1&ref=us.)

The title of Alter’s chapter is The Perfect and The Good.

Sounds of Silence Greet Shocking New Poverty Statistics

Here's a philosophical variation of the "if a tree falls in a forest" question for you: if 44 million Americans fall below the poverty line, and no one hears it, do they make any sound?



Over the weekend the Washington Post published an article about how little reaction had been expressed over the shocking new statistics showing that 44 million Americans now live in poverty. One in five children are so classified. It is a level of economic suffering unseen in nearly 50 years. Yet it has been greeted mostly with silence from policymakers in both the Administration and Congress. Is anyone calling for bipartisan summit meetings like when the banks were in trouble? Emergency sessions of Congress or the Council of Economic Advisers? Don't hold your breath.


Read entire post on Huffington Post @http://www.huffingtonpost.com/billy-shore/child-nutrition-sounds-of_b_732412.html

A Layer of Vulnerability That is Almost Irrevocable

I had coffee yesterday with George Jones, the executive director of Bread For the City (to which Share Our Strength last year made a grant from the Weight Watchers Lose for Good campaign).


George told me that Bread For the City serves 5000 families a year and that their average income is $7000. 25% are families with children, and in many cases the children are living with a head of household who is elderly or disabled. Of the numerous services Bread provides – food, medical, legal, clothing, and social services – food is by far the largest and is utilized by virtually all 5000 families. Next to Catholic Charities, Bread For the City is the largest such service provider in DC.


“What people don’t get”, George told me, “is that there is a layer of vulnerability in this community that in many ways is almost irrevocable. Many of these families have members who are disabled in dramatic ways. We help them and their kids get benefits – some wouldn’t get benefits at all without our help – but the benefits are not enough. People keep asking how we lift our clients out of poverty. But for many of them that is just not going to happen. But that doesn’t mean we can’t make their lives better.”


I try to touch base regularly with George, who has led Bread For the City for 15 years, because he works at the community and street level and sees and serves those families and kids who are most vulnerable and who fall between the cracks and don’t fit neatly into most organizations’ strategic plans. I don’t see our grants to Bread For the City as something separate from or in addition to our childhood hunger strategy but rather as an integral part of a balanced and holistic child hunger strategy that goes beyond the easy victories to reach all of the children it would be necessary to reach to actually end childhood hunger.

Our fragile and interdependent political ecosystem

One advantage of spending part of the summer in Maine is that you not only learn but actually live the interconnectedness of all parts of the ecosystem. A storm in Cape Cod, more than 100 miles to the south, leaves huge deposits of seaweed in front of our Goose Rocks Beach home and sometimes reshapes the beach entirely. The seaweed attracts flies, shorebirds, and an entire new population of creatures to our doorstep. When one of those species becomes endangered, such as the piping plovers and least terns, the entire ecosystem is put at risk. The menu on the local restaurant chalk board depends on what the fisherman down the street caught that day, and that depends on weather, wind, tides and the health of the marshes.

Accustomed to the notion that our environment is fragile and interconnected this way, we are careful about even the smallest environmental impacts. But we sometimes seem less conscious that our political ecosystem is just as sensitive and interdependent. Though the immediate consequences may not be as readily visible, they are just as real. A change in committee chairs can shift the entire legislative agenda of the House or Senate. One agri-business lobbyist can revise “offsets” in the child nutrition reauthorization and affect future levels of SNAP funding for children across the country, and for some not yet born. Ideas matter. So do elections, even in states far from where we live. So does the ability to organize, advocate and persuade. And to engage average citizens in campaigns like No Kid Hungry.  At Share Our Strength we will need to deploy every asset and skill we have these next few months and in a way that integrates all into one strategic whole.