With the White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition and Health looming, food bankers have identified improved access to healthy food as a high-priority outcome, though they are only cautiously optimistic that this and other goals can be achieved. The White House conference, scheduled for sometime in September, comes more than…
Posts published in “Advocacy”
Just about every week, the Food Law and Policy Clinic at Harvard Law School fields questions from organizations that are concerned about their liability related to donated food. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. The Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Food Donation Act, passed in 1996, was designed to encourage…
Food banks agree that demand for food assistance has remained unusually high, even as the pandemic has eased. Now Feeding America has put a number on that demand. In a report released last week, it found that an estimated 53 million people received charitable food assistance in 2021. That’s down…
When Susannah Morgan started working in hunger relief 26 years ago, she believed that getting more food to more people was the answer to eliminating hunger. Now she understands the problem of hunger differently – and it’s changing everything about the way she approaches her job as CEO of Oregon…
When food banks follow the guidance of their clients, they often find themselves advocating about issues they hadn’t realized were so relevant to food insecurity. Lobbying for community-oriented policing, more grocery stores and telephone-based signatures for SNAP are among the advocacy efforts some food banks are newly engaged in, thanks…
I have a crinkled $20 bill in my pocket, and I’m standing in the first aisle of the Save-A-Lot in Kent, Ohio, trying to make the paper a little bit thicker so it can last for the next 10 days. It’s not the first time I’ve been here, but I…
WhyHunger has long advocated that food is not the answer to hunger. Now it has affirmation that the general population is starting to get it. Its recent survey of 1,060 U.S. adults across all income levels found that people are acknowledging ways of solving hunger that have nothing to do…
Neil Hetherington and his team at Daily Bread Food Bank in Toronto have long vocalized that government policies impact how often people visit food banks. Now they have data to back up that assertion. The food bank supplied monthly usage data from January 2014 through March 2020 to researchers at…
Food Bank News has found that 33 of the 101 largest food banks in the country are excelling in using their websites in four areas important to advocacy — having SNAP-related education and outreach on the site; having an advocacy page; having legislative policies on the site, and having calls…