Hunger Troubles

While attending the Anti-Hunger national conference in Washington, D.C. recently, I had the unusual opportunity to sit in on a discussion among leading anti-hunger advocates about the speed and direction of social change in the hunger movement.

I was told to go to an evening meeting on the 12th floor of the Washington Hilton and when I got there at about 8, there were probably 40 people gathered in a circle talking informally in a very large hotel suite that took up a good part of the 12th floor. Many of them were sipping glasses of wine and chomping on cheese and crackers and a variety of pretty fancy desserts. I was directed to help myself to wine; there seemed to be no limit to how much one could pour. And then not long afterwards the meeting was called to order by a food bank director from Texas.

Of the 40 people in that room, a handful of us were volunteers for the New York City Coalition Against Hunger. All the rest were paid employees of some non-profit or another working to defeat hunger in America. Some of these professionals worked for advocacy groups; others worked for food emergency programs such as food pantries or soup kitchens. Some were affiliated with national organizations such as FRAC (Food Research and Action Center) or Feeding America (more or less focused on getting food directly to people who need it). While others were linked to local and regional organizations such as the New York City Coalition or New York State's Hunger Action Network. In the discussion, these lines of difference seemed to matter a lot.

It was a heated discussion, but it was often difficult to tell exactly what the basis for the differences was. As time went on, I perceived tension between those who were part of national groups and those who were part of regional and local groups, and those who were primarily advocates for more generous allocations for SNAP and WIC and those who primarily wanted to ensure that the coffers of food banks were well supplied through federal and state funding.

In the end, though, I think it's fair to say that one of the directors of a regional group was particularly disappointed in the lack of leadership provided by nationals like FRAC, and that therefore urban-based organizations, like his, would have to step up. The nationals, for their part, feared what they saw as this person's overly aggressive and self-absorbed spearheading of a new movement that would alienate potential supporters. This urban-based leader implied that, in fact, his goal was to end hunger, pure and simple, and that too many of his colleagues at the national level were overly cautious, more concerned about maintaining their positions than doing what was right.

I'm honestly unsure whether I have captured these tensions accurately. But it was pretty damn interesting and quite heady to witness these conflicts in a movement that could spell the difference between hunger and well being for about 50 million people in America.