Hunger in America

"An estimated 14.3 percent of American households were food insecure at least some time during the year in 2013, meaning they lacked access to enough food for an active, healthy life for all household members." (USDA: Household Food Security in the United States in 2013)

What can be done to help those who are food insecure?

One way to help those in poverty, is to intervene earlier...

The Way to Beat Poverty By NICHOLAS KRISTOF and SHERYL WuDUNN NY TIMES SEPT. 12, 2014


An excerpt:

James Heckman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist at the University of Chicago, says that our society would be better off taking sums we invest in high school and university and redeploying them to help struggling kids in the first five years of life. We certainly would prefer not to cut education budgets of any kind, but if pressed, we would have to agree that $1 billion spent on home visitation for at-risk young mothers would achieve much more in breaking the poverty cycle than the same sum spent on indirect subsidies collected by for-profit universities.

Second, children’s programs are most successful when they leverage the most important — and difficult — job in the world: parenting. Give parents the tools to nurture their child in infancy and the result will be a more self-confident and resilient person for decades to come. It’s far less expensive to coach parents to support children than to maintain prisons years later.

What does that mean for all of us? We wish more donors would endow not just professorships but also the jobs of nurses who visit at-risk parents; we wish tycoons would seek naming opportunities not only at concert halls and museum wings but also in nursery schools. We need advocates to push federal, state and local governments to invest in the first couple of years of life, to support parents during pregnancy and a child’s earliest years.

Another place to turn: http://feedingamerica.org/how-we-fight-hunger.aspx

As the nation’s leading domestic hunger-relief charity, our nationwide food bank network members supply food to 46 million Americans each year, including 12 million children and 3 million seniors. Feeding America benefits from the unique relationship between local member food banks at the front lines of hunger relief and the central efforts of our national office.

To help in Monroe & Connectciut:

http://www.ctfoodbank.org/

http://www.monroect.org/FoodPantry.aspx