Second Harvest Heartland of Minnesota has had enough. Last year, the nation’s seventh-largest food bank recorded 7.5 million visits to its food pantries, up from 5.5 million the year before, and double the number of 2021. “It’s unsustainable,” said Allison O’Toole, the food bank’s CEO. It’s why the food bank…
Posts published in “Advocacy”
It’s fair to say that running a food pantry, even as a volunteer, is a time-consuming job, making it difficult to plan beyond the immediate tasks at hand. But it’s also evident that a new spirit of collaboration between front-line emergency food providers is percolating. Sharing information, establishing a unified…
There are many ways for food banks to be active in advocacy. Chief among them are regularly communicating with members of Congress and state governments about anti-hunger legislation, as well as engaging the media and partner organizations on policy issues. The Food Bank News Advocacy Honor Roll looks strictly at…
At first glance, there does not seem to be a lot of connection between food insecurity and poetry. Food insecurity is a practical problem that demands practical solutions, be they charitable food distributions or funding from state and federal governments. Within that paradigm, the role of poetry may not be…
It’s widely acknowledged in the hunger relief community that the people who grow the nation’s food also tend to be among the most food-insecure. The estimated 2.4 million people in the U.S. who work on farms, many of them southern border immigrants, earned an average of $20,000 to $25,000 in…
Despite the momentum around September’s White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition and Health, President Joe Biden did not mention domestic food insecurity in his State of the Union speech earlier this week. It was at least heartening that the CEO of one of the nation’s largest food banks was invited…
For food bank advocates seeking to sway their state legislatures toward policies that promote health and nutrition, Dariush Mozaffarian has some guidance about where to push. States can take advantage of three big federal tools, each with a lot of funding behind them, to promote a healthier populace, said Mozaffarian,…
Affinity marketing is the reason some people carry credit cards emblazoned with logos from a university or sports team. It taps into a person’s sense of identity, giving them an extra nudge toward a particular product. Raj and Anna Asava have applied the concept of affinity to a more charitable…
It was hard not to be inspired when no less of an influencer than President Joe Biden said, “I really do know we can do this – end hunger in this country by the year 2030.” The President’s ambition met the energy of the crowd at the White House’s much-anticipated…