Stories from the National Hunger Hotline: Beyond Referrals
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The National Hunger Hotline (NHH), a service of WhyHunger's National Hunger Clearinghouse, provides real-time referrals for people in need across the U.S. to emergency food and assistance programs. Receiving an average of 700 calls per month, the NHH is a portal to information, assistance, and resources, ultimately empowering families and individuals to meet their vital needs including fresh, healthy food. In Stories from the Hotline, we share some of the experiences of callers and our efforts to support them.
A young, disabled woman from Texas called the National Hunger Hotline looking for a summer food service meal site in her area. In addition to children and teens, disabled persons over 18 years of age who participate in school programs established for the mentally or physically disabled are eligible to participate in the Summer Food Service Program.
Using the "Eat Right, Find a Site!" interactive map at squaremeals.org, the Hotline advocate found the site closest to her address. She informed the Hotline advocate that she had already been to this site, which was located in her apartment complex, but the site manager had denied her meals because she was older than 18, even though she had provided documentation of her disability. The Hotline advocate noted this, and provided her with contact information for another site in her area.
Afterwards, NHC staff spoke with a contact at the USDA to report that the site manager had wrongfully denied benefits to the disabled woman. The site manager was contacted and informed of proper protocol.
The National Hunger Hotline 1-866-3 HUNGRY and 1-877-8 HAMBRE (1-866-348-6479 and 1-877-842-6273) refers people in need of emergency food assistance to food pantries, government programs, and model grassroots organizations that work to improve access to healthy, nutritious food, and build self-reliance. Help is available on Monday through Friday from 9am-6pm EST. Hablamos espaņol. The Hotline is funded in part by the USDA Food and Nutrition Service.
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Cooking Up Community: Nutrition Education in Emergency Food Programs
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WhyHunger is pleased to announce a comprehensive, 88 page capacity building guide, Cooking Up Community: Nutrition Education in Emergency Food Programs. While geared towards emergency food providers-- broadly defined as any organization that works on access to nutritious food for low-income people-- the guide is equally useful for any organizations conducting nutrition education.
Throughout the course of one year, WhyHunger's National Hunger Clearinghouse gathered and synthesized resources and case studies about innovative nutrition education programming from organizations around the country. The programs and activities highlighted within the guide provide examples and inspiration for emergency food providers to expand or strengthen their programming, forge new partnerships, and collaborate with others in order to fulfill their commitment to improve the health and wellbeing of their community. Download the executive summary or the full report at www.whyhunger.org/cookingupcommunity.
Organized by chapters that delve into specific components of nutrition education programming, such as cultural competence, evaluation, curriculum, and more, users can focus on the sections that pertain to their goals or read the guide in its entirety. Some organizations featured include Share Our Strength, the Sustainable Food Center's La Cocina Alegre/The Happy Kitchen, and Second Harvest Food Bank of Santa Cruz County.
Cooking Up Community: Nutrition Education in Emergency Food Programs is a living document. Therefore, your thoughts and input are greatly valued. Please share this guide widely and tell us what you think by completing this brief survey about the publication.
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Summer Food Service Programs
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Summer brings the highest rates of childhood hunger in the U.S. With children out of school, those who receive free school breakfast and lunch are going without, and many of them are skipping meals and eating less than during the school year. The Summer Food Service Program provides funding to serve meals and snacks to children and teens to fill that nutrition gap. Schools, local governments, National Youth Sports Programs and nonprofit organizations can operate summer feeding sites, combining an activity with a safe place to get food.
WhyHunger partners with the USDA to promote the Summer Food Service Program to ensure that more children and their families have access to free, nutritious food during the summer months. Families in need can call our National Hunger Hotline at 1-866-3 HUNGRY or text 'food' to 877-877 to be connected with a summer feeding site in their community.
Help spread the word! You can find posters and web banners here for the Hotline-- spread the word to your local schools, print out and hang the posters in libraries and other community centers. People can also call WhyHunger's National Hunger Hotline, 1-866-3 HUNGRY, or go online to www.whyhunger.org/findfood to be connected with food pantries, government nutrition programs, and other emergency food assistance this summer and throughout the year.
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The Stop Community Food Centre's Learning Network
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Located in a diverse, low-income neighborhood of Toronto, The Stop originated as a food bank but has since transformed their service delivery model. Now a vibrant Community Food Centre, programs at The Stop include drop-in meals, a food bank, a perinatal program, cooking programs, community bake ovens and markets, community gardens, a greenhouse, compost demonstration centre, food systems education programs, and more.  | | The Stop Community Food Centre: An Introduction |
The Stop uses a holistic approach to "meet basic food needs and, at the same time, foster opportunities for community members to build mutual support networks, connect to resources and find their voices on the underlying causes of hunger and poverty." Community members are actively involved in The Stop's programs, which empowers them to forge their own responses to hunger.
To help other organizations replicate or draw from the Community Food Centre model, The Stop has created the Learning Network to share resources, learning and best practices. The Learning Network features Learning Modules, which focus on distinct programmatic and organizational areas of the Community Food Centre. The modules are based around a series of videos and are supplemented with other downloadable resources. This content is all free; all that is required is that users sign in and create a confidential profile.
Current Learning Modules include: - The Community Food Centre Model
- Community Garden Programs
- Education Programs
- Volunteer Program
- Community Action Program
- The Issues
- The Food Bank
- Community Kitchens
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| Good Food, Good Jobs |
Last week the Applied Research Center, a racial justice think tank and publisher of Colorlines.com, released Good Food and Good Jobs for All: Challenges and Opportunities to Advance Racial and Economic Equity in the Food System. Part of a series on food justice and race, the report makes recommendations on how the labor movement and the food justice movement-- which journalist Michael Pollan referred to as a "lumpy tent" of stakeholders-- can better work together to advance their respective, and interrelated, agendas. With one in six Americans working within the food system and one in six Americans relying on SNAP (formerly food stamps), emergency food providers should join the movement to advocate for good food jobs.
The challenge, according to the report, is to move beyond self-interest: "An effective response to the inequities of the food system requires analysis and action that both acknowledge and address the economics and racial composition of the power elite and those most impacted." The report details unlikely and innovative approaches to further advance the work for good food and good jobs. By stipulating conditions for liquor licenses, procurement policies or retail subsidies, for example, activists can leverage these assets to create change.
To view the full report, go to: arc.org/foodjustice. For additional resources on race and food justice issues, see also: Applied Research Center's The Color of Food, the Food Chain Workers Alliance's The Hands That Feed Us and WhyHunger's Food Security Learning Center topic on Race and the Food System.
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Sharing Your Story
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Have you had any recent successes in food sourcing at your food pantry that you want to share? What challenges are you facing? Is there anything that you want to learn more about?
We want to hear from you! Email us at nhc@whyhunger.
Contributors: Christine Binder and Jessica Powers.
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