Bearing Witness in Appalachia: Unseen America

     Below you’ll find a piece written by one of my colleagues in the best tradition of bearing witness. Elizabeth Sell and her team have been visiting South Carolina, Florida and Tennessee to better understand poverty and hunger and how our work, especially summer meals sites, addresses it.

     With so much attention these past two weeks on the presidential nominating conventions, Elizabeth’s reflections underscore the stakes for so many struggling children and families. If our political leaders saw from their podiums what we see on the ground and in the field, the national conversation would sound very different. The need for action on behalf of our children would take on greater urgency.  Elizabeth’s letter follows:

From: Sell, Elizabeth
Sent: Monday, July 25, 2016 10:55 AM
To: All Staff

Hi Everyone,

I wanted to share some impressions from my recent trip to our summer meals pilot project in Sneedville, TN.

If you find yourself in Sneedville, it’s because you live there, or you’re lost. Tucked in a valley in the Appalachian Mountains, reaching this small town in eastern Tennessee from any direction requires negotiating a series of hair pin turns up and down mountains. There’s no interstate nearby, the closest major town is about an hour away. Only about 6,000 people call this isolated community home.

I was in Sneedville because No Kid Hungry was conducting a summer meals pilot to test the best way to operate a “meals on wheels” style delivery model. We worked with our campaign partner in Tennessee, and a local church group to arrange a delivery system that drops off summer meals for kids either at their homes, or at drop-off points where families can pick-up the food and take it home. Shaina, an Americorps member and native of Sneedville was my guide. She patiently allowed me to tag along with a videographer, interviewing families as she dropped off food for their kids. Shaina’s four-hour route takes her all over this valley ­­-- up mountains, down dirt roads that are nearly impassable during heavy rains, and across some of the most beautiful, pristine country side you’ll ever see.

It was lucky I was with Shaina. Many families refused to let us film the food delivery, I can only speculate that they were both distrustful of outsiders and didn’t want to bring attention to themselves. There are still people in this community that don’t have indoor plumbing. Others lived in homes so dilapidated that front doors don’t shut properly, windows were missing glass, a well-placed boulder acts as a step up to the door instead of a deck or stairs. Many of these homes were surrounded by pieces of the family’s past, broken down cars and televisions, rusting farm equipment. Most of the area isn’t serviced by a trash pick-up, people have to bring their refuse to the local dump. It takes a car to get your trash to the dump, and money to buy gas for that car, so many people opt to let their trash build up outside in piles or in metal cans until there’s enough to burn.

Five days a week, Shaina loads up her SUV with a breakfast and a lunch for every child on her route. Faith and Natalia are one of her first stops. Faith is in her mid-twenties, but her life has already been destroyed by drugs. It was fitting that my last day in Sneedville was the same day Congress passed legislation to combat the opioid crisis in this country. Every single one of the families I met had been affected by the destructive forces of addiction. Faith’s first two kids were taken away by the state. Her daughter Natalia is just about a year old. Faith is pregnant again. She’s clean now, and living with two other women in a tiny, one-bedroom house at the end of a long dirt road. It’s tidy and orderly inside, but blankets cover the ripped plastic in the windows where the glass should be, you can’t help but wonder what will happen to them when it gets cold. Natalia is starting to eat solid foods and the apple sauce and cereals that come in the meal delivery help Faith save a bit her SNAP dollars. The women that live in the house all pool their food together to make it last a bit longer.

Sue never expected to be a mom for a second time. When her daughter’s life crumbled under the weight of addiction, it forever changed Sue’s life too. Her one-bedroom trailer isn’t meant for three people, but Sue and her two grandchildren make do. Patrick and Scarlett share a bed in the bedroom, Sue sleeps on a recliner. They live about 5 miles from the town’s only grocery store and don’t have a car. They’ve never been to a summer meals site because the kids have no way of getting there. People drive fast on the country roads, and Sue worries about people high on drugs hitting the kids if they walked or took bikes, but that’s a moot point since they don’t have bikes anyway. Sue skips meals sometimes to make sure the kids eat, when I ask her about it she just brushes it off. “I’m old, I don’t need much to eat anyhow.” Sue is always laughing, Scarlett and Patrick inherited that from her. And, they’re both honor roll students, clearly whip smart. Scarlett pulls me down to her level and then tells me that if I want to call her Charlotte I can, and then nearly falls over laughing at her own joke.

 

Chloe is delighted when we get to her house. She’s only five, but she loves people. We saw a snakeskin she found in the woods, we were introduced to all her dogs and cats. She insisted that I take her picture from many different angles. Louise is another grandmother that found herself entering a second round of motherhood. Her son struggles with addiction, he left Chloe and her baby brother Noah to be raised by Louise and her husband. Their cabin is nestled in a quiet meadow. It emerges like a bastion of comfortable, intentional solitude when you come upon it after a drive through the woods and up and down several steep mountain sides. Louise laughs when I ask if she’d bring Chloe to a summer meals site in the future, they only drive when it’s absolutely necessary. Gas costs money.

 The program we’re piloting in Sneedville is doing exactly what it set out to do, it’s reaching kids in hard to reach places. This pilot has fed just a few of the children that rank among the millions missing out on summer meals programs because of the inefficiencies of the current program. If it doesn’t exist next year, those kids will continue to miss out. Transportation barriers are too immense to get them to summer meals programs.

The heartbreaking truth is that there are little kids just like Scarlett, Chloe and Patrick all over this nation, and they’re waiting for help. The way the current summer meals program is structured, however, we simply can’t reach them. That’s not good enough. It’s critical that we urge Congress to stand up for these kids. We need policies that let programs like the one in Sneedville become more than a pilot. We need policies that encourage innovation. But until Congress passes new summer meals legislation, help is not on the way for the millions of kids who struggle with summer hunger. Hungry kids can’t wait – join us in asking Congress to take action. Now.

Bearing Witness in Appalachia: Unseen America

            Below you’ll find a piece written by one of my colleagues in the best tradition of bearing witness. Elizabeth Sell and her team have been visiting South Carolina, Florida and Tennessee to better understand poverty and hunger and how our work, especially summer meals sites, addresses it.

            With so much attention these past two weeks on the presidential nominating conventions, Elizabeth’s reflections underscore the stakes for so many struggling children and families. If our political leaders saw from their podiums what we see on the ground and in the field, the national conversation would sound very different. The need for action on behalf of our children would take on greater urgency.

            By the time the conventions are over we’ll have heard enough speeches to last a lifetime about why one candidate is better than the other.  But we still won’t have seen or heard firsthand what the lives of Americans like Shaina, Sue, Patrick, and Scarlett, described below, are really like. At Share Our Strength, our No Kid Hungry campaign is committed to bringing you as close to those lives as possible through bearing witness.

            Elections are vitally important because often only public policy can scale ideas that work and bring their benefits to all who need and deserve them. At its best public policy knits together the many strengths we each have to share, and makes America stronger as a result. Your vote in November is a way of bearing witness as well, to the nation American can and should be.

            Elizabeth’s letter follows:

From: Sell, Elizabeth
Sent: Monday, July 25, 2016 10:55 AM
To: All Staff
Subject: Impressions From TN

Hi Everyone,

I wanted to share some impressions from my recent trip to our summer meals pilot project in Sneedville, TN.

If you find yourself in Sneedville, it’s because you live there, or you’re lost. Tucked in a valley in the Appalachian Mountains, reaching this small town in eastern Tennessee from any direction requires negotiating a series of hair pin turns up and down mountains. There’s no interstate nearby, the closest major town is about an hour away. Only about 6,000 people call this isolated community home.

I was in Sneedville because No Kid Hungry was conducting a summer meals pilot to test the best way to operate a “meals on wheels” style delivery model. We worked with our campaign partner in Tennessee, and a local church group to arrange a delivery system that drops off summer meals for kids either at their homes, or at drop-off points where families can pick-up the food and take it home. Shaina, an Americorps member and native of Sneedville was my guide. She patiently allowed me to tag along with a videographer, interviewing families as she dropped off food for their kids. Shaina’s four-hour route takes her all over this valley ­­-- up mountains, down dirt roads that are nearly impassable during heavy rains, and across some of the most beautiful, pristine country side you’ll ever see.

It was lucky I was with Shaina. Many families refused to let us film the food delivery, I can only speculate that they were both distrustful of outsiders and didn’t want to bring attention to themselves. There are still people in this community that don’t have indoor plumbing. Others lived in homes so dilapidated that front doors don’t shut properly, windows were missing glass, a well-placed boulder acts as a step up to the door instead of a deck or stairs. Many of these homes were surrounded by pieces of the family’s past, broken down cars and televisions, rusting farm equipment. Most of the area isn’t serviced by a trash pick-up, people have to bring their refuse to the local dump. It takes a car to get your trash to the dump, and money to buy gas for that car, so many people opt to let their trash build up outside in piles or in metal cans until there’s enough to burn.

Five days a week, Shaina loads up her SUV with a breakfast and a lunch for every child on her route. Faith and Natalia are one of her first stops. Faith is in her mid-twenties, but her life has already been destroyed by drugs. It was fitting that my last day in Sneedville was the same day Congress passed legislation to combat the opioid crisis in this country. Every single one of the families I met had been affected by the destructive forces of addiction. Faith’s first two kids were taken away by the state. Her daughter Natalia is just about a year old. Faith is pregnant again. She’s clean now, and living with two other women in a tiny, one-bedroom house at the end of a long dirt road. It’s tidy and orderly inside, but blankets cover the ripped plastic in the windows where the glass should be, you can’t help but wonder what will happen to them when it gets cold. Natalia is starting to eat solid foods and the apple sauce and cereals that come in the meal delivery help Faith save a bit her SNAP dollars. The women that live in the house all pool their food together to make it last a bit longer.

Sue never expected to be a mom for a second time. When her daughter’s life crumbled under the weight of addiction, it forever changed Sue’s life too. Her one-bedroom trailer isn’t meant for three people, but Sue and her two grandchildren make do. Patrick and Scarlett share a bed in the bedroom, Sue sleeps on a recliner. They live about 5 miles from the town’s only grocery store and don’t have a car. They’ve never been to a summer meals site because the kids have no way of getting there. People drive fast on the country roads, and Sue worries about people high on drugs hitting the kids if they walked or took bikes, but that’s a moot point since they don’t have bikes anyway. Sue skips meals sometimes to make sure the kids eat, when I ask her about it she just brushes it off. “I’m old, I don’t need much to eat anyhow.” Sue is always laughing, Scarlett and Patrick inherited that from her. And, they’re both honor roll students, clearly whip smart. Scarlett pulls me down to her level and then tells me that if I want to call her Charlotte I can, and then nearly falls over laughing at her own joke.

 

Chloe is delighted when we get to her house. She’s only five, but she loves people. We saw a snakeskin she found in the woods, we were introduced to all her dogs and cats. She insisted that I take her picture from many different angles. Louise is another grandmother that found herself entering a second round of motherhood. Her son struggles with addiction, he left Chloe and her baby brother Noah to be raised by Louise and her husband. Their cabin is nestled in a quiet meadow. It emerges like a bastion of comfortable, intentional solitude when you come upon it after a drive through the woods and up and down several steep mountain sides. Louise laughs when I ask if she’d bring Chloe to a summer meals site in the future, they only drive when it’s absolutely necessary. Gas costs money.

 The program we’re piloting in Sneedville is doing exactly what it set out to do, it’s reaching kids in hard to reach places. This pilot has fed just a few of the children that rank among the millions missing out on summer meals programs because of the inefficiencies of the current program. If it doesn’t exist next year, those kids will continue to miss out. Transportation barriers are too immense to get them to summer meals programs.

The heartbreaking truth is that there are little kids just like Scarlett, Chloe and Patrick all over this nation, and they’re waiting for help. The way the current summer meals program is structured, however, we simply can’t reach them. That’s not good enough. It’s critical that we urge Congress to stand up for these kids. We need policies that let programs like the one in Sneedville become more than a pilot. We need policies that encourage innovation. But until Congress passes new summer meals legislation, help is not on the way for the millions of kids who struggle with summer hunger. Hungry kids can’t wait – join us in asking Congress to take action. Now.

Why America's Children are the Next Great Cause Worth Fighting For

            Over the weekend, John Martin, national political correspondent for the New York Times, wrote an article headlined “Democrats, Looking Past Obama, Are a Party Without a Cause”.  In it he asserts that “it is unclear what will be the next great project of liberalism”, describes centrist Democratic support for incremental steps to help people adjust to a shifting workplace” and asks and what “grand ambition” will animate the Democratic Party in the post-Obama era beyond the unifying quest to defeat Donald Trump. http://tinyurl.com/zuuonwm

            Given the high stakes in this election, if Martin is right, it is a terrible missed opportunity. Infrastructure, economic equality, a higher minimum wage and easier access to higher education are all mentioned as candidates for a Democratic Administration’s agenda.  They are all worthy and would be important advances.  But there still lacks a larger unifying theme. One that should be considered is a broad and deep investment in America’s children, aimed especially at breaking the cycle of child poverty – an investment that could include early childhood education, health care, child care, nutrition assistance, mentoring, and other supports.

            Notwithstanding the lip service political leaders give to children, we actually don’t invest in them. According to the advocacy organization First Focus, the share of federal spending dedicated to children is just 7.83% of the federal budget and total spending on children has decreased 5% over the last two years. The reason is simple: children are politically voiceless. They don’t vote and don’t make campaign donations. With only a few exceptions, they have no lobbyists.  The agenda in Washington and in state capitols gets set by others.   As Mark Shriver, president of Save The Children Action Network recently told the Washington Post:  “I’ve spent 20-some odd years listening to politicians tell me how great our work is and essentially patting me on the head. And then when push comes to shove they don’t invest in children.”  Marian Wright Edelman, the founder of the Children’s Defense Fund calls this “our intolerable national hypocrisy gap.”

            Bold leadership would put ending child poverty and making a robust investment in the next generation at the center of its agenda. From the New Deal and social security to the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights legislation, the Democratic Party has been most effective and inspiring when acting on behalf of those too weak, disenfranchised, or unable to act for themselves. Today that group is our children, more than 20% of whom live in poverty.  As the Democrats look for their next great cause, it ought to consider the one that all of our futures depend upon.  Our economic competitiveness and national security demand that we address the moral injustice of child poverty in America. 

Baton Rouge

           The murder of more police officers yesterday in Baton Rouge shocks but no longer surprises. Horrific incidents of violence – Orlando, Dallas, Nice and twice Baton Rouge  - come closer and closer together, leaving us seemingly powerless to prevent them.  Social media is filled with calls to stop the violence and pray for peace, but we know words and prayers will not be enough.

When the President spoke yesterday afternoon he urged that everyone “focus on words and actions that can unite this country rather than divide it further.”  At Share Our Strength we are privileged, as are many nonprofit organizations, to be in the business of taking actions that unite.  The deep divisions plaguing us can only be diminished by sharing: compassion, resources, opportunity, justice, and strengths.  Such sharing requires faith, but the alternative is unfathomable. Our anti-hunger, anti-poverty, and community building work has always mattered deeply both to those we serve, and to those for whom we’ve created opportunities to serve. In the days ahead it matters even more.

Letter from the Hardest Day of Chefs Cycle

After the second day of Chefs Cycle we stayed at a Days Inn near the water in Morro Bay. The parking lot had been transformed into a staging ground for an army of cyclists who just had one of the hardest days of their lives. Travis Flood, a chef who rode, summoned the energy to cook dinner for the rest of us in a makeshift tented kitchen with massive black iron grills. Eight massage therapists leaning over tables worked on the sore or injured. 

 

We’d pedaled just under 200 miles in 2 days and with one more day to go.  The first day from Carmel to King City took us through the Salinas valley. We saw what John Steinbeck saw: the back breaking nature of the manual labor that harvests the food we so enjoy. “These migrants are more American than half the politicians in Washington” one rider said to me.

 

Restaurateur Christopher Myers and I compared notes on what we’d witnessed: Dozens of bikers who couldn’t go on but wouldn’t quit, pedaling so slowly up steep hills that from a distance it looked as if they had stopped and got off their bikes. The quadriceps of some cramped and were hard as stone. One sat silently against a tree with ice bags on her knees.  Those who overheated poured ice over their head to lower the temperature of their body’s core. As the heat intensified, a silence descending on the ride.  Riders stopped for water every 3-4 miles, sometimes knocking on farmhouse doors, in addition to the official water stops every 25 miles.  The day before, Ellen Bennett crashed and needed 21 stitches in her hand. The next day it would be Allan Ng, who broke his collarbone and will have surgery this week. “It was carnage,” Christopher said, his eyes wide, “Carnage!”  

 

Temperatures hit 106 degrees that day and there was no shade to be found. I had less than 15 miles to go, one-third of it a steep mountain pass. I wanted to finish, having completed every leg last year and having trained more this time around.  But the heat overhead and off of the asphalt had sapped my energy and along with it some of my spirit. I feared what stopping would do to my confidence on the third and last day. But I feared going on as well.

 

Near the crest of what would be my last hill of the day I saw a lone orange jersey near the top, a biker straddling his bike with both feet on the ground,  head down and resting on his folded arms across the handle bars. He was as still as a statute.  I pulled alongside. “Are you okay?” He lifted his head slowly. It took a moment for his eyes to focus.  He didn’t say anything but didn’t have to. “Let’s just walk for a little while” I said softly.  After 15 minutes a support car pulled up. We loaded our bikes on the back and got in.

 

Does it seem inconsistent if not insane to say that almost all of us look back on it as exhilaratingly fun? Is that the nature of resilience or simply time’s passage?  At dinner, several chefs said Share Our Strength had become their doorway to the healthier lifestyle they wanted to create for themselves but never knew how. If they could get healthier they could help their customers do so too, as well as the hungry kids we seek to serve.

 

 

The entire experience was "sharing strength", up to and including unforgettable images of one rider after another struggling up a steep mountain pass with another stronger rider on each side of him/her, one of their hands on the small of his back gently lifting him forward even as they struggled one handed to pedal themselves up the rest of the way.

           

As challenging as is the ride, what we do every day at Share Our Strength and Community Wealth Partners is even harder: insisting on transformational rather than incremental change, maximizing impact for every child, designing new ways for individuals and businesses to share their strength, maintaining our commitment to innovation and accountability, all while knowing that the cathedral we are building may not be finished in our lifetime.

 

I went to sleep on the evening of the second day saying to myself that I wasn’t riding again tomorrow. I would be a volunteer instead.  But when I woke up 6 hours later I couldn’t wait to get back on the bike.  Again there were steep hills. But temperatures were in the mere eighties.  I rode from start to finish as I had the first day. Even kept up with Tom Nelson (mostly). We exceeded $1 million raised. It was a glorious ride.