Exodus From Hunger (14 page)

If you are writing to your member of Congress, keep it short and be sure to include your name and address (to show that you are a constituent). State succinctly what action you want your member of Congress to take and why this is important to you.

Handwritten letters are effective. President Obama asks his staff to bring him ten handwritten letters every day—not copies of e-mails—as a way of staying in touch with people.

Mail to Congress takes about a week longer than other mail, because it is radiated as a security measure. So if your message is urgent, call your member’s Washington office or send an e-mail.

If you send an e-mail, don’t just forward an e-mail you receive from somebody else. Use a different subject line, include your return address, and make it personal. Congressional offices are struggling to cope with the rising flood of e-mail, and offices don’t give much attention to mass e-mails and postcards.

You’ll have an even bigger impact if you organize letter writing in your church or group. You’ll also have a big impact if you seek a meeting with your member of Congress or an advisor.

Pray for your members of Congress.

W
hen I came to Bread for the World in 1991, few groups organized advocacy for hungry and poor people. My main innovation was to set aside some of Bread for the World’s resources to encourage and help other organizations to get involved in the politics of hunger and poverty. Our goal has been to build a movement strong enough to push the U.S. government to do its part to overcome mass hunger and poverty.

While we were expanding the movement, powerful help was on the way from unlikely quarters. As the new century began, we found ourselves working with Bono and other celebrities on global poverty issues. We started getting help from some wealthy people, notably Bill and Melinda Gates. Evangelical Protestants and Jewish and Muslim organizations became more engaged in advocacy for poor people. And each of the country’s last three presidents have, in different ways, provided leadership on these issues.

These changes add up to a positive shift in U.S. politics around hunger and poverty issues. U.S. politics has also become more polarized, and Americans feel frustrated with our government and politicians. But we have some momentum as we push for an expanded national effort to reduce hunger and poverty in poor countries and the United States.

Twenty years ago, few of the U.S. charities that help hungry and poor people in this country and around the world were involved in advocacy. Charities helped poor people, but thought they couldn’t and shouldn’t get involved in politics. That has changed, and Bread for the World encouraged the change. We argued that charities should speak up for the people they serve. We wrote about this and convened meetings about it.

As key charities started to expand their involvement in advocacy, Bread for the World helped them. I have served for many years as a board member of InterAction, the association of U.S. charities that work in developing countries, and Bread for the World staff helped plan their first events on Capitol Hill. InterAction and some of its member charities are now major partners in advocacy. We also partnered with Feeding America, the main network of U.S. food banks and food charities, as they expanded their involvement in advocacy. We worked with them on Washington events and legislative campaigns.

Bread for the World has also had some influence on Catholic Charities, World Vision, Lutheran World Relief, and MAZON (the main Jewish antihunger organization)—urging them to put more effort into advocacy and collaborating as they did so. The rapid development of Web-based advocacy made it easier for organizations to mobilize letters to Congress from their supporters.

Bread for the World has engaged in ongoing analysis of what it would take to end widespread hunger and poverty in the United States and around the world—in effect, planning the movement we hoped would emerge. Based on that analysis, we called together diverse institutions that might become interested in forming an Alliance to End Hunger. They included diverse religious groups, charities, foundations, corporations, unions, universities, think tanks, and advocacy organizations.

I am now president of three affiliated institutions—Bread for the World, which lobbies Congress for hungry people; Bread for the World Institute, a tax-deductible affiliate that does research and education to help end hunger; and the Alliance to End Hunger, our secular affiliate.

The Alliance now has eighty members, including Jewish and Muslim groups, Universities Fighting World Hunger, and concerned corporations such as H-E-B, Sodexo, Cargill, Mosaic, Elanco, and Land O’Lakes. The Alliance is managed by Ambassador Tony Hall, who crusaded for hungry people as a member of Congress for twenty-four years and then served as U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the U.N.

World Food Program. Tony works personally with members of Congress, meeting with them one-by-one to encourage them to step forward as heroes for hungry people. The Alliance helps its members follow hunger issues in Congress and work together.

The Alliance has done a series of studies on how U.S. voters think about hunger and poverty, and we have learned that government initiatives to help hungry and poor people enjoy broad support among both Republicans and Democrats.
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Yet nearly all Americans believe government initiatives are often ineffective and that the best programs support hard work and self-reliance. Politicians can connect with U.S. voters by putting “liberal” and “conservative” themes together—making clear their commitment to overcoming hunger and poverty but, at the same time, insisting that programs be effective and avoid creating dependency.

The Alliance to End Hunger has shared these findings with politicians across the political spectrum, and several candidates for president in the 2004 and 2008 elections used our findings.

The three U.N. agencies focused on hunger and agriculture—FAO, the World Food Program, and the International Fund for Agricultural Development—joined together to organize an International Alliance Against Hunger. They used our Alliance as one model and encouraged the formation of national alliances against hunger to build political will in other countries around the world. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization invited me to give the inaugural lecture at its 2004 biannual meeting. Other lecturers in this series have included John D. Rockefeller, Indira Gandhi, and Julius Nyerere. I was able to talk with representatives of all the nations of the world about building the political will to overcome hunger.

Bono had his own ideas about how to build political will to help poor people. He played an important role in the Jubilee campaign, and by 2002 he was working with Bread to increase development assistance to Africa. He continues to serve as a powerful voice for Africa, bringing with him a dazzling capacity to command media attention and influence powerful people.

Bono (born Paul Hewson) is the son of a Protestant mother and a Catholic father. He is still married to his high school sweetheart, and he has been part of the same band—U2—for more than thirty years.

During the Ethiopia famine of the mid-1980s, another Irish rock star, Bob Geldof, organized Live Aid, a concert that raised millions of dollars for Ethiopia. U2 played in the concert, and Bono and his wife, Alison, later traveled to Africa. Bono came to understand that onerous debt-service obligations dwarfed the charitable contributions Live Aid had mobilized. Bono got involved in advocacy and found Jamie Drummond to be his advisor.

In 2004 Bread for the World organized services of prayer for poor people at the Democratic and Republican national conventions. Bono came to the Republican event. He arrived late, as usual, but after he spoke he sat down next to me and sang hymns with us. He and I were sitting next to an open door behind the pulpit of the church. His handler kept poking her head around the corner, urging Bono to leave for his next gig. But Bono was enjoying the worship and stayed to listen to my sermon. He told the gathering, “David Beckmann is my rock star.” My son Andrew, then a college student, was at the service but wasn’t convinced that his father was a rock star.

Bono proposed a campaign that would include Bread for the World, other church groups, and major international charities that were becoming more involved in advocacy. Bread for the World invested heavily in helping Bono launch what became the ONE Campaign. The ONE Campaign has enlisted more than 2 million Americans in Web-based advocacy on global poverty issues and has now launched similar efforts in Europe and Japan.

I have worked with other celebrities, but Bono is exceptional. He visits Africa and studies the issues. When he meets with a senator, he is informed and convincing. I have come to trust his motives. Bono is also a poet. He writes song lyrics that are important to millions of people, and he also speaks about Africa in a gritty and inspiring way.

I’ve learned a lot from Bono and his advisors about mass media and the Web. The companies that contract with celebrities invest millions of dollars to build public excitement around them. Personally I’m not very interested in celebrities, but this public excitement is a valuable commodity. If Bono allows his image to appear on the home page of Google, that will draw business and make it profitable for Google to promote Bono’s message about Africa. A stable of companies are marketing products in association with RED, a Bono brand that benefits the Global Fund for AIDS.

Bono has urged his celebrity friends to join him in advocacy for Africa. When Brad Pitt agreed to help the ONE Campaign, my longtime assistant Dolly Youssef laughed at me because I wrote on my to-do list: “Find out who Brad Pitt is.”

I spoke to a group of conservative Baptist church leaders a few months later. Many people in the group were skeptical about any role for the U.S. government in reducing poverty. I mentioned some of the evangelical church leaders who work with Bread for the World. But that conservative crowd only warmed up when I mentioned Brad Pitt. The room erupted in giggles, and I could feel that my message was suddenly getting through.

I met Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie at President Clinton’s annual conference on global issues. I told them about my experience with these Baptists. Brad laughed about the influence of celebrities in our culture. I was impressed that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie seemed intent on learning more about Africa. They wanted to use their influence in ways that would really help.

More than half of all U.S. press coverage of Africa in 2005 was driven by celebrities, including a trip that ABC news correspondent Diane Sawyer made to Africa with Pitt. Television journalists quoted celebrities about Africa fifteen times more often than they quoted Africans.
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When British Prime Minister Tony Blair hosted the G8 Summit in 2005, he focused the agenda on Africa. Bono and Bob Geldof decided to organize Live 8 concerts, an echo of the Live Aid concert a decade before but now focused on getting the G8 heads of governments to make ambitious commitments to Africa. They proposed simultaneous concerts in all the G8 countries and South Africa. AOL agreed to broadcast the concerts for free, and top bands from all over the world agreed to appear.

I worked the press tent at the Live 8 concert in Philadelphia. Richard Branson, who owns Virgin Atlantic, provided an airplane to fly activists from Philadelphia to the summit site in Gleneagles, Scotland. Bread for the World organized the delegation of grassroots activists and church leaders that went to Scotland.

Jim Wallis, who heads the Christian social-justice organization Sojourners, organized a delegation of U.S. church leaders. We started with a meeting at the White House and then flew to London. Together with British and African church leaders, we met with Gordon Brown, then chancellor of the exchequer. We thanked the U.S. and U.K. governments for focusing the G8 on global poverty and encouraged specific and ambitious agreements.

Live 8 made that year’s G8 Summit a big media event. The G8 heads of government committed to doubling development aid to Africa and the rest of the developing world, and aid levels have increased since then. The G8 also committed to negotiating trade policies that would open opportunities for Africa and the rest of the developing world. That’s a promise yet to be fulfilled.

If Bono had called for increases in U.S. development assistance ten years earlier, he would have failed. But public opinion in the United States and other industrialized countries had become more favorable toward helping Africa. The terrorist attacks of 2001 helped convince people that it’s not smart to neglect misery in far-off places. Bono called for increasing aid to Africa at a time when many voters and political leaders thought it was the right thing to do. He made himself the spokesperson for a global grassroots movement.

Celebrities are gods in our society, and I am profoundly grateful to Bono and other celebrities for their powerful advocacy on behalf of Africa and poor people around the world.

My strangest meeting with Bono was in New York in the fall of 2002. Jamie Drummond shot me a quick e-mail to say that he and Bono were going to meet for drinks with some people from the Gates Foundation that Friday evening. Could I join them? I didn’t hear from Jamie again, but I got on the train from Washington to New York, not sure that I’d find anybody at the restaurant.