With each Tyson Foods truck delivery, we have asked our local partners to tell the story of hunger in their state and showcase the good work of volunteers and donors. On Thursday, July 22, we will deliver a truckload to one of the food banks serving the Show Me State – Harvesters: the Community Food Network in Kansas City. Here is their story:
Harvesters’ BackSnack program ensured that 10,000 students a week had healthy food to eat on the weekends.
Look around you. In Missouri, hunger is closer than you think. One in eight people in our state will receive emergency food assistance from a food bank this year. These are our friends, our co-workers, our children’s classmates – even our family members.
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Missouri ranks 6th out of the 50 states in the number of food insecure households – a top 10 list no one celebrates. This means that 14 percent of the families in our state may not know where their next meal is coming from. In rural communities, suburban neighborhoods and urban centers across Missouri, an alarming number of our neighbors are at risk of not having enough to eat to be healthy.
According to Hunger in America 2010, the most comprehensive study of hunger ever undertaken, as many as 728,000 Missourians annually are struggling to put food on the table. In the midst of the worst recession since the Great Depression, far too many people face circumstances that are forcing them to choose between buying food and paying for basic necessities such as rent, utilities or medicine. The economy dealt a powerful blow to those already seeking emergency food assistance and sent many others at risk of hunger to local food pantries, soup kitchens and shelters for the first time.
Missouri is served by six food banks, including Harvesters—The Community Food Network, which provides food and hope to those living in 10 counties of northwestern Missouri and 16 counties of northeastern Kansas. In fiscal year 2009, Harvesters distributed more than 35.6 million pounds of food and household products through our network of more than 620 nonprofit agencies, including pantries, kitchens, shelters, day care centers and other hunger relief agencies. Harvesters accomplished this with tremendous support from the community, including nearly 4,000 volunteer visits each month.
In Missouri, the face of hunger is often a family, struggling to make ends meet. Forty-two percent of households served by Missouri food banks include someone who is working. And far too many of those in need are among the most vulnerable in our society – the young and the elderly.
Missouri ranks 5th in the nation in the number of children under age 18 who are food insecure. Of those served by Missouri food banks, 40 percent—more than 291,000 a year—are children under age 18. Ten percent of those served—nearly 73,000 a year—are age 5 and younger. There is a critical connection between childhood nutrition and cognitive and physical development. Even short-term hunger can negatively impact a child’s health, behavior and the ability to concentrate and perform complex tasks.
Harvesters serves children in northwestern Missouri through our network and with special child-oriented programs such as BackSnack. Children who depend on free and subsidized school meals during the week are often hungry on the weekend. The BackSnack program fills that gap by providing elementary students with a backpack full of nutritious food every Friday afternoon. The need is great and the BackSnack program has grown tremendously from serving just 650 students a week three years ago to feeding more than 10,000 a week during past school year.
Elderly and disabled persons are among those most at risk of food insecurity, because they are often less mobile, have health problems and live alone. Seven percent of the people served by food banks in Missouri are elderly. Harvesters reaches many seniors through its network of food pantries and on-site feeding programs. Seniors in northwestern Missouri also are served through Harvesters’ Senior Mobile Pantries, which deliver fresh produce and other nutritious foods to low-income and homebound residents of senior housing sites.
Harvesters mission is to feed the hungry and to provide the most nutritious food available. Nutrition education programs such as Project STRENGTH for low-income adults and Kids in the Kitchen teach about good nutrition and the importance of eating a healthy diet.
As the need for food assistance grows, Harvesters partners with its national affiliate, Feeding America, and with organizations such as the Missouri Food Bank Association to address the larger causes of and responses to hunger at the state and national level.
Harvesters thanks everyone who donated a digital can to Missouri during the WeCanEndThis campaign and salutes its long-time supporter, Tyson Foods, for donating a truckload of much needed protein to provide 150,000 meals to hungry people in our region.
Fulfilling our mission – to feed hungry people today and work to end hunger tomorrow –
is possible only with everyone’s support. Working together, we CAN do this!
Visualizing Data and Its Impact: Why We Need a Hunger Data Consortium
It has become somewhat of a management mantra: you cannot manage what you do not measure. And, yet, when it comes to the most pressing social problems of our day – like hunger in America — we need so much more than measurement. We need smarter, more collaborative data collection that bypasses organizational silos. And, we need to couple that data with creative, compelling info graphics that spur innovation and action. We need a Hunger Data Consortium.
Hunger is on the rise in America despite decades of government programs and private outreach. According to the most recent figures – which are almost two years old — over 49 million Americans suffer from food insecurity; 17 million are children — which prompted President Obama earlier this year to challenge our nation to end childhood hunger by 2015.
To meet this challenge, we need greater awareness, understanding and advocacy of hunger and its implications. And, that requires enhanced collection, organization and utilization of hunger related data in America. While tremendous amounts of data are collected, it is often incomplete, dated and fragmented — accessible only to researchers and policy makers, not the general public or local hunger advocates.
Benefits of a Hunger Data Consortium
A central, holistic source of data that includes data visualizers as modeled below and is accessible to all can provide important benefits to help solve the problem of hunger in America.
Benefits like:
To illustrate how data could be utilized from the Consortium, CauseShift, the strategists leading WeCanEndThis.com, partnered with Jess3, an interactive branding and data visualization firm, to create the Obesity and Hunger: Partners? info graphic.
Utilizing currently available data from the U.S. Census Bureau, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the info graphic looks at the rates of obesity, food insecurity, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance (SNAP) participation and poverty in the 50 states. It shows states with high levels of food insecurity also have high rates of obesity. In addition, 14 states have both higher than the national average rate of food insecurity and obesity. It also suggests that the current levels of SNAP participation are not
high enough to keep food insecurity or obesity at low levels (see Mississippi, Missouri, Texas, Kentucky or Kansas for example)
What Data Can Provoke
While this info graphic doesn’t answer all the questions as to why obesity and hunger are linked – or how strong the links are — visualizing data like this may help policy makers and researchers see the data in a different light and help provoke new thinking and solutions.
For instance:
These types of questions — and more — can be asked and answered with better data, analysis and presentation.
It’s time we stop hoarding data in silos — accessible only to a few. We need to create a Hunger Data Consortium and let everyone and anyone — the government, non-profits, the media and interested individuals — use it to test hypotheses and create new approaches to ending hunger in America.
This post was published originally on the Huffington Post.