Wednesday, May 9, 2018

One Of The Best Food Assistance Developments Of All: More Jobs


           
This past weekend almost every newspaper and news website in the country had at least one headline in common: the jobless rate of 3.9% is at a 17-year low after 91 straight months of job growth that began during the Obama Administration.  On top of the historic progress we’ve already made through the No Kid Hungry campaign, this may have as great an impact on childhood hunger now and in the years ahead as anything else we do.  When the number of unemployed is cut by more than half, and millions more are working, there are certainly many more parents able to feed their families on their own.

We tend not to focus as much on macro-economic trends as we do on school breakfast legislation, and new summer meals sites, but we should.  Those we serve are embedded in these statistics. Our work is not in isolation from but intimately connected to these economic forces, more so than most issues.  We’re in search of an economist who will share his or her strength by volunteering to help us better understand the correlations between employment and wage growth with childhood hunger.  For now, I urge all of us to keep at least one eye on the bigger picture.

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