Here’s another article from the Children’s defense fund for you youth workers to review. I’d like to get your feedback on it in relation to the themes of poverty, homelessness, & education.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s dinner time in America. But for 1 in 4 children, you\u2019d never know it.\u201d The ad with the simple image of an empty plate is meant to catch your eye \u2014 especially if you came across it in the November issue of a favorite magazine, tucked among the tips for a traditional Thanksgiving feast. It\u2019s part of a campaign by Share Our Strength, a national nonprofit organization that fights childhood hunger. As they say below the picture: \u201cDinner time is when families gather to share their day and create memories. But for nearly 17 million children, dinner time can be the cruelest part of the day. Right here in the United States, almost 1 in 4 children don\u2019t know when they will have their next meal.\u201d<\/p>\n
Thanksgiving is a season to celebrate plenty, and a day when many families sit down to tables overflowing with favorite foods to give thanks for all they have been blessed with. For many people, Thanksgiving dinner is the largest meal of the year \u2014 and by the time they\u2019ve finished that last piece of pie, their stomachs are so full they\u2019ll be physically uncomfortable. But the canned food drives and other pleas for donations this month are a quiet reminder that for too many families, Thanksgiving will be like any other meal: not a time of plenty but a time of want.<\/p>\n
Share Our Strength notes 50.1 million Americans aren\u2019t able to regularly put enough nutritious food on the table, and that food insecurity, which includes \u201crunning out of food without money to buy more, cutting portion sizes or skipping meals, and not feeding children in the family because there isn\u2019t money for food,\u201d exists in almost 15% of all U.S. households. Almost 70% percent of food insecure families live above the poverty line. These numbers aren\u2019t just statistics. They reflect the reality many of us are already seeing in our own homes, neighborhoods, or communities right now, as families who were blessed enough to be able to contribute to those canned food drives during past Thanksgivings are today joining the lines of those in need.<\/p>\n
Food insecurity is especially devastating for children, whose developmental well\u2013being depends on access to adequate nutrition. Ensuring all children access to healthy, nutritious food will ultimately improve educational outcomes, reduce rates of childhood obesity, and enhance the mental and emotional health of our children. In addition to everything we know about the devastating short\u2013 and long\u2013term effects hunger has on individual children, we also know that allowing children to go hungry is taking an economic toll on our entire country. This is documented in reports like Feeding America\u2019s \u201cChild Food Insecurity: The Economic Impact on Our Nation,\u201d which concluded \u201cthe direct and indirect effect of child hunger in the U.S. is a contributing factor to the nation\u2019s economic woes and puts America at a competitive disadvantage.\u201d Childhood hunger in the United States is a shameful and preventable crisis and we must work together to solve it right now, from individual efforts in our own communities to supporting policies that fight hunger at the national level. A first immediate step is to make sure the massively underutilized federal summer feeding program\u2019s bureaucratic barriers are eliminated so that the more than three million children who get free and reduced price lunches can ease hunger during the long summer months. Hunger does not stop in June when school is out.<\/p>\n
President Obama has set a goal of ending childhood hunger by 2015, and the federal child nutrition programs, which provide nutritious meals and snacks each day to millions of children, are an important component in these efforts. Right now there is an important Child Nutrition bill stalled in Congress because it is currently paid for with cuts in food stamps. The President and Congress must find another way to pay for the bill other than food stamp cuts. It is all about choices \u2014 what do we value? Tell your Member of Congress that hungry children need help but not by taking from one hand to give to another.<\/p>\n
Several years ago, the Children\u2019s Defense Fund\u2019s pro bono advertising partner Fallon Worldwide created a campaign for us that updated the moving words of Langston Hughes\u2019s poem \u201cGod to Hungry Child\u201d:<\/p>\n