Letter From Zavala County

           Greetings from Zavala County in southwest Texas, “the spinach capital of the world”, replete with an annual spinach festival and two statues of Popeye by the town square. You might expect a place where all children eat healthy and grow strong, but  instead the child poverty rate is close to 50%, more than twice the national average and the L.A. Times reports that “The highest rate of food-insecure children (in the nation) is in Zavala County, Texas, where 83% of youths are in some jeopardy.”   

 Thanks to Chuck and Katie Dooley, and our partners at The Texas Hunger Initiative and the San Antonio Food Bank, I came down a day before a scheduled speech in Austin to visit schools, teachers and social workers. Our agenda was to learn and bear witness, and explore whether we can bring back a larger group of leaders in 2014. We flew into San Antonio, and drove a couple of hours through semi-arid brush land of mesquite trees and cacti, to Crystal City, the county seat.

            Maggie Flores runs school food service for 2000 students in four schools.  She sees hunger through the eyes of “the ladies” who work for her.  They struggle to feed their own kids, taking home only $800 a month after taxes. Many work a second job after their 6:00 a.m. to 2;00 p.m. shift. The raise they are expecting will be their first in seven years. Jobs are scarce and mostly at the Corrections Center, and the Del Monte canning factory paying a low hourly wage. Some find work in new oil fields 12 miles away, where fracking turned Carrizo Springs into a boom town a few years ago.  The result is enormous  wealth for a few far-away corporations, but a higher cost of living for all who actually live here, with rents increasing from $400 a month to the $1200 a month that oil company employees can afford.

            School breakfast participation is low across the county for the usual reasons. Four years ago Flores tried breakfast in the classroom but teachers mishandled the paperwork. That put reimbursement at risk. The experiment was cancelled.

            There is no food bank in town, although the San Antonio Food Bank holds a mobile food distribution once a month. Cars  lined up there as far as we could see. Summer school includes meals for 30 days but otherwise there’s no rec center, Boys and Girls Club, or other facility to serve as a summer meals site. We asked where families turn for help. “They bunk up together”, state rep Tracy King said, “doubling up to save on rent is their only option.”

            On our way to the elementary school cafeteria, Principal Sonia Zyla told us how she’d reversed poor attendance rates, and tried to get the faculty to model behavior of good attendance and punctuality. “My mantra is Honor Our Time whether it’s the time we set for meetings, or the time we have to do this important work together.”

            We learned of the impact of HeadStart cuts, children “strategically failing” so that they could attend summer school for the meals, and one social worker’s lament with regard to obesity and poor nutrition: “I wish they would teach them how to shop.”

            So close to the newly booming oil fields, but so far from benefitting directly or indirectly, Zavala County is but an isolated example of an increasingly dominant aspect of American life: economic growth that benefits a relative few, while the struggle of hard working families persists. This week a new study from UC Berkeley reported that in 2012 the top ten percent of earners took home more than half of the country’s total income – the highest recorded level ever.  The top one percent took more than one-fifth of the income earned by Americans.

There is a price for such inequality, and in the short-term that price gets paid by those most vulnerable, least able to afford it, and least responsible for their plight– children like those  we visited at Zavala Elementary. They pay for it through compromised health, poor literacy, and lack of opportunity. In the long run we all pay –  because we can’t have a strong America with weak kids.

After decades of bearing witness, not much surprises any more, But there was one thing: no one we met asked us for support, grants, or assistance of any kind.  It was as if decades of struggling on their own had conditioned them not to expect it. We saw the hope and determination that always characterizes places we think of as Hinges of Hope.  But imagination in Zavala County has been depleted by the oppressive heat of a scorching sun combined with the cold indifference of America’s new Gilded Age.

            And that’s why we went: to learn, to bear witness, and to make sure they knew that others cared and hoped to help make a difference.

A 50th Anniversary, Both Public and Private, of MLK I Have A Dream Speech

            Wednesday is the much anticipated 50^th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech, and for me it marks a related but more personal memory. That occasion in 1963 was the only time in my entire childhood my father spent a night away from home. As such it left an indelible impression.

My father was the district administrative assistant to Pittsburgh Congressman Bill Morehead. It was a demanding job yet he managed to be home by 5:30 for dinner every evening. My mother suffered from depression and while she enjoyed many happy times, the fragility of her mental health was ever-present. The hours my dad was at his office, though just a few minutes away, were especially hard for her.  She spent many afternoons with her fingers between the venetian blinds watching for him to walk down the street from the bus stop. He was careful to never be gone for long.

But 50 years ago today, he boarded a bus filled with civil rights and labor leaders for the long, hot ride from Pittsburgh so that he could be on the National Mall the next afternoon to hear King’s speech.  It meant spending that one night out of town, something he’d never done before or since.

My father was the least preachy man I’ve ever known. When he taught, it was by quiet example. The fact that he’d be away overnight – something routine for many of us in our jobs today – was anything but routine for him and our family.  For 50 years I’ve had this unusually intimate sense of how important King’s speech was, not because of the history books, commentators or monuments to him, but because of what seemed to my mom, sister and me like a monumental journey on my father’s part – an absence that signified his presence to something larger than ourselves, a minutely small sacrifice in the scheme of things that spoke volumes to us about the historic import of the day.

President Obama on Wednesday will stand where Dr King stood and is expected to assert that we’ve come a long way in 50 years but still have a long way to go   I hope he will echo the concern King spoke of for those on “a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.”

As an eight year old I learned a little something from my father that August day half a century ago about the importance of civil rights, equality and justice. But I also learned about the importance of devotion to work that matters, and doing such work with colleagues whose talent and character you admire. For a career that has offered me both of those privileges I am grateful to him – and to them.

p.s. The text of King’s speech can be found at @ http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/martin-luther-kings-speech-dream-full-text/story?id=14358231

An Unreasonable Man's Triumph of Imagination

UPDATE:

“Once you have proven the concept, everything else is engineering. The stakes are so high. A baby dies every 60 seconds from malaria. I can’t imagine that some engineering genius can’t figure these things out. Let’s go for it.”

 The Washington Post today with another great piece on Steve Hoffman’s malaria vaccine breakthrough @ http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/michael-gerson-malaria-vaccine-shows-promise/2013/08/12/44367a68-036a-11e3-9259-e2aafe5a5f84_story.html?hpid=z3  

          Yesterday, the journal Science published the results of Steve Hoffman’s newest clinical trial showing that for the first time ever, 100% of the trial volunteers who received a high dose of his unique vaccine were protected.  In the last 24 hours, CNN, Reuters, U.S. News and World Report and dozens of news outlets around the country ran headlines like: “Sanaria’s Malaria Vaccine Yields Unprecedented Protection in Clinical Trials.” Or “New Malaria Vaccine the First to Offer Complete Protection.”   @ ow.ly/nMstN   Major foundation funding has quickly begun to return.   The lead researcher for Steve’s principal competitor, the giant pharmaceutical Glaxo Smith Kline was quoted as saying “This is a really important, really exciting proof of concept.”

Nearly three years ago Public Affairs published my book, The Imaginations of Unreasonable Men, about Hoffman’s quest to develop the first completely effective malaria vaccine that could eradicate malaria as one of the world’s leading causes of illness and death for children.  @ http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1586487647/ref=s9_simh_gw_p14_d0_i1?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-2&pf_rd_r=0J2XKF0D7A1G6MSCMC2H&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=1389517282&pf_rd_i=507846

            I was drawn to the story specifically because of the parallels to our work – knowing that something was solvable, knowing that existing solutions worked but were hard to scale, and that doing so might seem expensive, unrealistic or unreasonable.  Hoffman’s standard - that good is not good enough – was akin to our view that feeding kids is not good enough but that we need to end childhood hunger. I knew there was much to learn from him.

            The book was published just as Steve was taking his vaccine into clinical trials. His approach, which depended on extracting weakened but live malaria parasites from the dissected salivary glands of mosquitoes, was ridiculed in some quarters as impractical to produce and administer.  The trials went badly. The vaccine, administered by injection failed and the volunteers exposed to malaria contracted it (though they were immediately cured by aggressive medical intervention according to standard protocols.)  The funding for Steve’s work dried up.  He faced some dark days.

            But Steve knew that the weakened parasite triggered immunity to protect against malaria when they entered the body through multiple mosquito bites. So he refused to give up, even as some abandoned their support. Instead he doubled down.  He increased dosage and settled on an approach truly beyond imagination: administering the vaccine through an IV, something entirely impractical across Africa where children need it the most.  But his strategic objective at this stage was not scale, it was “proof of concept.” It's an approach very much at the core of our No Kid Hungry campaign.  Now that proof of concept has been affirmed, new funding will be devoted to additional trials, scale and sustainability. 

The history of malaria suggests no more than cautious optimism is warranted at this point. There is still a long way to go.  But Steve Hoffman’s long journey has been dramatically accelerated by the proof of concept strategy we share.

Billy

The lasting power of bearing witness

I’m just back from Seattle where I gave the keynote at a Gates Foundation conference cross sector collaboration in education.  There were attendees from across the country but with a heavy concentration from three states: Colorado, Louisiana and Kentucky.  They wanted to hear about lessons from the success of the No Kid Hungry campaign that might be applicable to their ambitions for growth and greater impact.

During the Q&A, a woman named stood up, and said:  “My name is Beverly Lawrason. I just have a comment that I feel needs to be made.”  Uh oh. Everyone kind of held their breath. “I’m the Assistant Superintendent for our school district. Five years ago we desperately needed help for the hungriest kids in our community. Almost everyone turned us down. Those of you in this room can’t possibly imagine how bad it was.  Our school district is St Bernard Parish in Louisiana and we were devastated by Hurricane Katrina.  We didn’t know where to turn. Then one day a bus pulled up and all of these people from Share Our Strength got off.   Thanks to them our kids got to eat and go back to school.”  

I shared that David Bradley who owns the Atlantic Monthly and the National Journal was one of the people who got off that bus. Jonathan Alter at Newsweek was another. So were Jim and Karen Ansara, numerous donors, and dedicated members of our board. They were there on a Share Our Strength Hinges of Hope trip to bear witness.  And we left more of an impression than I could have ever guessed.

Increasing Child Poverty and the Political Culture in America Today

            For the past ten years I’ve spent July 4^th at Goose Rocks Beach in Maine whose population of a few hundred swells to a several thousand in summer. It is mostly working families with kids, scratching out a few days of summer vacation. Neighbors line the town’s main street to cheer 900 runners in the 5K road race. Then the fire department’s 3 trucks lead a children’s parade of bikes decked out in red, white and blue, to a cookout at the old Community House.  If Norman Rockwell had used Instagram it would be his snapshot of what childhood should be: sunshine and safe streets, kites and cotton candy, barbecues and best friends. 

Unfortunately that snapshot becomes less representative of childhood in America with each passing day. Just before July 4, the Annie E. Casey Foundation released their annual Kids Count report which paints a different picture of America’s children, but one central to our work at Share Our Strength. The important facts:

-          The U.S. child poverty rate is 23% with 16.4 million children below the poverty line, up from 22% in 2010 and from 19% in 2005.  The poverty rate for children under 3 is even higher: 26%.  The number of children in poverty increased even as the unemployment rate gradually declined.

-          Only 46% of 3-4 year olds attend pre-school which plays such a critical role in helping low income kids begin on a more even playing field. A stunning 68% of fourth graders in public schools were reading below proficient levels in 2011.

-          From 2007 through 2011 12 percent of children lived in high poverty areas nationwide, a total of 8.6 million, up 2.3 million children since 2000 when the rate was 9 percent. High poverty areas are census tracts where poverty rates of the total population are 30 percent or more, putting whole neighborhoods at risk with higher rates of crime, violence, unemployment and health issues.

            Statistics are only part of the story, for the rest read this heartbreaking story in Sunday’s Washington Post about childhood hunger in the summertime when schools are closed @ ow.ly/mIVwg

 If you’d told me in 2008 that the fifth year of an Obama administration would witness child poverty increasing, I’d have been shocked. If you’d said it would happen with barely a word in response from the President, or other influential leaders, I wouldn’t have believed it. 

Here’s what’s most alarming: the silence and inaction is less a reflection of the strengths and weaknesses of President Obama, or any one leader, and more an indictment of the now pervasive political culture both major parties have conspired to create.  Like a virulent virus, our political culture has evolved to value the power to survive, above any purpose for which such power might be put.  Governing has become resistant to those rare strains of bipartisanship that were known, at least on occasion, to prevail in the past. The result is polarization and paralysis, frustrating our ability to solve any problems, simple or complex. 

 Today’s political culture demands each party automatically oppose any proposal of the other party. It regards advocating for those outside the politically sacred middle class to be a sign of naiveté and weakness. It shuns even a whisper of sacrifice for others, with no appetite for giving voice to the marginalized or voiceless.  In other words, it is a culture the opposite of the revolutionaries whose spirit we honor on the Fourth of July. 

But one need not go back 250 years to make the point. A passage from Franklin Roosevelt’s Second Inaugural Address in 1937, carved in granite at the FDR Memorial, asserts:  “The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”  In 2013 such words would be labeled a gaffe, the kind of self-inflicted political wound that pollsters and political consultants strive to avoid. 

That’s why the stakes for No Kid Hungry are enormously high. First and foremost is the opportunity to save and change kid’s lives.

We could also help affirm the philosophy we share with the Annie E. Casey Foundation.  In CEO Patrick McCarthy’s foreword to the Kids Count report I heard echoes of our strategy for No Kid Hungry and Cooking Matters: “The gulf continues to widen between children growing up in strong, economically secure families who are embedded in thriving communities and children who are not.  Early childhood strategies alone will not successfully reduce disparities among children; we must also assist their parents. Given the consensus on the need to reduce the country’s long-term debt, simply adding more public dollars to existing strategies is neither wise nor feasible. Although we will need to invest more in early childhood, we should focus our resources on strategies with evidence of high returns in child well-being and healthy development. For example, we should weave together existing programs that support new parents …”

And maybe, just maybe, we can reignite the idea that our political system can accomplish good things, that the ideals behind America’s founding are more than just ideals, and that all our children can have the childhood they deserve, not just at Goose Rocks Beach on the Fourth of July but all across America every day of the year.

Leading health care CEO speaks out on link between hunger and health care

Several months ago Share Our Strength and Deloitte released a report about Deloitte’s extensive research on the connections between hunger and educational achievement, health care, and economic competitiveness. @ http://www.nokidhungry.org/pdfs/school-breakfast-white-paper.pdf

  Now a leading CEO of a health care company, Randy Oostra of ProMedica, has written an op-ed making the case that hunger is a health issue. @ http://www.toledoblade.com/Columnists/2013/06/16/In-Toledo-hunger-is-a-health-issue.html Oostra points out that “even one childhood experience with hunger can have a negative effect on health 10 to 15 years later. Hungry children are more likely to endure poor health and delayed development. Food insecurity is associated with lower scores on physical and mental-health exams.”

ProMedica is a No Kid Hungry ally helping us advance out strategy in Ohio and  Michigan.  And their CEO Randy Oostra is projecting a voice on behalf of the voiceless, and helping to change the conversation in ways that makes our work more accessible to a larger audience.

Marian Wright Edelman's Commencement Speech at Colorado College

“I love my role model, Sojourner Truth, who was an illiterate but brilliant slave women who could not stand slavery or second-class treatment of women, but she never lost an opportunity to speak out and one day she got heckled by an old white man who stood up and said he didn’t believe anymore about her anti-slavery talk than for an old flea bite. She snapped back at him, and said, “That’s all right. The Lord willing, I am going to keep you scratching.” I think if we can all remember that if there are enough fleas biting the biggest dog, and there are enough of us who keep coming back when they flick some of us off, we will get gun safety regulations, we will end child poverty. You just have to bite whenever you see injustice, and if enough of us join that flea corps for children, the flea corps against gun violence, the flea corps against child poverty, we will transform our nation and make it un-American for any child to be poor, for any child to be illiterate, for any child to be unsafe and unable to grow up in our rich land.”

                                                -Marian Wright Edelman

              It’s commencement season and we should each have the right to circulate at least one commencement speech.  I’m choosing Marian Wright Edelman’s earlier this month at Colorado College. 

Like all commencement speeches there are a few unavoidable clichés, but Marian remains a brave and original thinker, in whom the passion for social justice has never diminished. She offers the graduates the seven lessons she shared with her three sons.  They are worth a read.

You can find both the video and the printed transcript  @ http://www.coloradocollege.edu/commencement/