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…
Posts published in “Advocacy”
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…
For years, the food banking sector has talked about the need to address the root causes of hunger. Now there is a campaign and toolkit to help ignite those plans into action. The Next Shift campaign, created by the organizations and individuals of Closing the Hunger Gap, puts forth a…
Fifty-two years ago this week, the Nixon Administration convened a national conference on ending hunger that resulted in landmark legislation, including the creation of WIC. The conference was considered a breakthrough success in addressing the food and nutrition issues of the time. This week, Massachusetts Representative Jim McGovern is revving…
Miles-long lines at food banks during Covid highlighted just how easily families may slip into food insecurity, despite the ongoing efforts of food banks over the past 50 years to distribute food. Even before Covid exposed the precarious nature of many families’ food budgets, hunger relief organizations were beginning to…
Although Good Shepherd Food Bank has long served diverse communities across Maine, it wasn’t until Covid-19 hit that the organization realized how much variety there was in the food its clients wanted – and how little of that variety it provided. The problem became apparent when fears about how the…