Exodus From Hunger (21 page)

I favor charities that are involved in advocacy and that empower poor people to influence policies that affect them. I recommend that every charitable organization spend 5 percent of its budget to educate its supporters about the problems it is addressing and another 5 percent to influence government policies that affect the people it serves. If every charity would give a tithe of its budget to education and advocacy, they would create the U.S. public and political will that is needed to make dramatic progress against hunger and poverty in our country and around the world. Ask the charities you support what they are doing to speak up for the people they serve.

Our pattern of living should reflect our values. We can live economically, in order to free up time and money to help people in need.

We can also be careful about our impact on the environment. Much of the rest of the world is copying aspects of the typical U.S. lifestyle, and the earth cannot bear the impact of billions more people doing as much environmental damage as we do. When millions of individuals and families make modest changes, it has a significant macro impact. It also raises awareness and increases support for changes in public policies that will have an even bigger impact on the environment.

We can be thoughtful about what we eat. Most Americans are struggling to lose weight, and we nearly all fall short of our goals. This suggests that society will eventually have to make structural changes to complement individual motivation. These could range from more emphasis on physical education in schools to a broad reorganization of how we live and work so that people get more exercise in their daily routine. In the meantime, the evidence is clear about what we ought to do: make a lasting shift to fewer calories and more exercise.

Feeling guilty and temporary diets don’t help. Motivational support from a group program such as Weight Watchers can help. Prayer can also help. Saying a prayer of thanks every time we eat may help us enjoy food in a healthy way—and remember that some people don’t have enough to eat.

Many of us are buying more locally grown foods and raising some of our own vegetables. Some people are opting for organic foods or a vegetarian diet. The main motivations are usually freshness and health. But a change in diet can also be a meaningful protest against ethical issues in the U.S. food system. If we eat locally grown food, we reduce the environmental cost of transporting tomatoes from far away. If we eat lower on the food chain—grain instead of meat—we also reduce our environmental footprint. It takes six thousand calories of grain feed to produce one thousand calories of meat.
³

50 Ways to Help Save the Earth: How You and Your Church Can Make a Difference
(Westminster John Knox Press, 2009) provides a shower of ideas about lifestyle and other ways to contribute to social change. It’s an easy read—and hard to put down. I also recommend
Our Day to End Poverty: 24 Ways You Can Make a Difference
, by Shannon Daley-Harris and Jeffery Keenan (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2007).

We need to keep learning about the problems poor people confront and strategies to solve them, so continue reading about these issues and pay attention to the news.

Those of us who have plenty often get caught up in our own lives and in the lives of friends who also have plenty. Concentrations of poverty tend to be hidden away in regions or parts of our cities that better-off people seldom visit. We’re even farther away from the severe poverty of developing countries. So how can we learn about hunger and poverty in a close-up, personal way?

One way is regular, prayerful volunteer work. Jeffry Korgen, a director of social ministries in a Catholic diocese, asked his colleagues across the country what really works to engage Catholics in social justice.
⁴
Their collective experience is that personal engagement with people in need is critical, and that religious devotion must be part of the experience. Jesus said that when we help hungry people, we are helping him (Matthew 25), and religious devotion allows believers to recognize Jesus in poor people with whom they are working. If we don’t actually spend time with poor people, we can’t meet Jesus in them. And if we don’t take care to maintain a spiritual perspective, we may also fail to see Jesus. Some people volunteer briefly, but give up with a hardened view that poor people are mainly to blame for their own problems.

In this era of international travel and communication we can also become personally engaged with poor people in other countries. More than 5 million Americans are living abroad, and 63 million travel abroad in a typical year.
⁵

Rick Steves, the host of
Europe through the Back Door
on public television, is an active member of Bread for the World. Rick urges Americans to travel in a way that allows them to meet local people. He teaches a style of travel that expands the traveler’s mind. Since the terrorist attacks of 2001, Rick has put increasing emphasis on the most important lessons of travel. Traveling teaches Americans that people in other countries have different, sometimes better ways to do things. It teaches us to think globally, making us more aware of the needs of poor people around the world. He writes about these ideas in his book
Travel as a Political Act.
⁶

A growing number of Americans find ways to spend time with poor people and programs that help them. My son Andrew has gone to Malawi twice to work as a volunteer with World Camp. He has helped conduct AIDS education programs, mainly in high schools, and this has been life-changing for him. His experience included living with Malawian families. He knew that only 2 percent of Malawi households have electricity, but he learned that in a different way when the sun went down and it got
very
dark in the village. Like most other Americans who spend time with poor people in a developing country, Andrew was inspired by the joy and generosity of many of the people he met.

Many Christian congregations and programs now organize short-term mission trips, and 1.6 million churchgoers go each year on mission trips to Asia, Africa, or Latin America.
⁷
The Americans may paint a building or do some other task for a local church or agency. Prayer and religious devotion are part of the experience. People make friends locally, and they can stay in touch with them via the Web when they return home.

People-to-people relationships like this are deeply satisfying, especially for the Americans involved. The Americans and their local hosts learn from each other. The Americans become familiar with a program and then support it financially when they get home. They may invite their overseas counterparts to visit them in the United States. On the other hand, most of the money spent on a short-term mission trip covers the cost of travel, and Americans visiting a country for the first time aren’t likely to help that much.

Bread for the World offers a resource—
Getting Ready to Come Back
—to help people in short-term mission programs reflect on the economic and political aspects of development and on how we can use our influence with the U.S. government to help friends in poor countries. It encourages mission groups to learn about the country they will visit and how our country’s policies and programs affect it. When they return home they can meet with their members of Congress to share what they learned. Participants in short-term mission programs also can become members of Bread for the World, so that their ongoing partnership with the people they visit includes advocacy on poverty issues.

You might be able to make a difference for hungry and poor people at your place of work. If you are a teacher, for example, you may be able to educate your students on hunger and poverty issues.

If you are in business, can you urge your company to provide adequate salary and benefits to all employees? Is there a way your business can help hungry and poor people through its operations—by extending its services to struggling families, for example? Is there a feasible, perhaps even profitable change in operations that would increase your company’s impact among people in need—perhaps opening a facility in a low-income neighborhood? Could your company’s president communicate with your members of Congress about a poverty-related issue?

We aren’t going to end mass hunger and poverty until some for-profit companies identify with the cause and feature hunger in their advertising and philanthropy, as some companies now feature the environment. We also need some businesspeople and companies to be advocates with Congress on behalf of hungry and poor people. Some businesses stand to prosper as the United States or developing countries reduce poverty, but even these businesses seldom help advocacy groups with Congress.

Over time you might be able to shape your career toward work that is focused on people in need. The personal satisfaction you gain may make it worth settling for less income.

The rest of this chapter suggests ways you can directly change the politics of hunger. I especially hope that you will take me up on suggestions from these final sections. It’s also important that you consider ways to ground political work and advocacy in the overall pattern of your life. But we have a chance to change our nation’s politics and policies on hunger and poverty issues right now, so we need a surge in activism now.

The main way our country decides on national priorities is through elections. Some people imagine that elections don’t matter much or that all politicians are the same. But who gets elected definitely makes a big difference. Which party controls the House or Senate makes a huge difference.

Voting is a sacred obligation. Giving time and money to candidates who have demonstrated their commitment to reducing mass hunger and poverty is an integral part of good stewardship. Very few Americans are active in political parties. But the political parties pull the nation in different directions, and people who are active in one of the parties have a disproportionate impact on the future.

When you contribute time or money to a campaign, you will also have the ear of the candidate if she is elected. I’ve watched Terry Meehan, a Bread for the World board member who makes substantial contributions to candidates, use his access to politicians to advance hunger issues. It works. The husband of a former board member volunteered most of his time for a whole year to help a candidate get elected to the Senate for the first time. Many years later, he can call that senator at his home to talk about Bread for the World issues.

The two major parties are now evenly matched. Power shifts back and forth with each election. This has made elections even more important than they were in periods when one party was dominant.

You can also change the politics of hunger through advocacy organizations. At the national level, Bread for the World is one of a growing number of advocacy organizations that tackle hunger and poverty issues. Other organizations that help grassroots people get engaged include the ONE Campaign (
www.one.org
), RESULTS (
www.results.org
), and NETWORK (
www.networklobby.org
). Your church body or a charity you support may maintain an advocacy network. Some of the best advocates get information from more than one organization.

All of these advocacy groups work in a bipartisan way, encouraging Republicans and Democrats to work together for hungry people. At a time of sharp division between the two parties, bipartisan advocacy has become more difficult and more important.

Hunger and poverty are related to many other issues: children, the environment, peace, campaign finance reform, and more. Various advocacy organizations focus on each of these issues. None of us can do everything, so pick one or two areas of concern that especially move you and work in those areas over a period of years.

Advocacy for poor people at state legislatures is usually weaker than advocacy at the federal level, so you might join an advocacy network that focuses on your state legislature. States and local governments cannot run up a deficit like the federal government can, so they slash budgets in hard times. Especially at those times, advocates need to be in touch with their state legislators about programs that are important to poor and vulnerable people.

Industrial Areas Foundation (
www.industrialareasfoundation.org
) and PICO (
www.piconetwork.org
) have helped build many community organizations over the last two decades. Local religious congregations are typically the building blocks. These organizations help low- and middle-income communities agree on priorities and speak up for themselves. The focus is usually on local issues, but some of these organizations are increasingly engaged in state and national issues, too. These community organizations and their increasing involvement in national issues have been an important change for the better in the politics of U.S. poverty.

In some states or communities, there are coalitions that focus specifically on hunger or food security. When the many agencies in a community that feed hungry people think together about long-term solutions, they often see ways to shift some of their effort to have a bigger impact. They almost always strengthen their capacity for advocacy.

If you want to know about organizations that address poverty and hunger issues in your community or state, call your local council of churches, interfaith council, or Catholic diocesan office. You can also ask the Bread for the World organizers for your region.

Efforts to change the politics of hunger require both people and money. As I have studied the history of antihunger advocacy, I have been struck by how often promising organizations went out of business because of money trouble. Political campaigns also cost money; if and when our country manages to reduce the role of money in elections, candidates for election will still need financial support. Most of us could get more impact with our charitable donations by shifting more of our dollars to social change and political purposes.