Ending Hunger in America, 2014 Hunger Report Full Report | Page 136

Dayton, Ohio: Bringing Hunger Home
This example is less recent than the previous one or the ones that follow, but it
is important because it shows how an elected leader, a member of Congress, was
Toledo
able to draw attention to hunger in his community and mobilize people to join
in a community-wide effort to end it.
FRAC is one of America’s leading national anti-hunger organizations, and FRAC president Jim Weill is one of the most thoughtful
people in the country on the subject of hunger. In 2013, at the annual
Hunger Free Communities Summit in Washington, DC, sponsored
by the Alliance to End Hunger, Weill was asked how to end hunger in
America. He said we should think of it in terms of golf. The economy is
the drive, where we will make up the most ground. The federal nutrition
programs are the chip shot, getting us closer to the hole, but not all the way.
Finally, there are the local efforts, which he compared to the putt.13
The audience was made up mostly of the putters in his analogy, people representing organizations from around the country trying to end hunger in their communities. Some may have been surprised to hear themselves described
as coming into the picture so late
in the game. Many would say that,
for most if not all of their time as
anti-hunger advocates, it seems
as though they’ve been lining up
for their shot hundreds of yards
from the hole. Tony Hall, executive director of the Alliance to End
Hunger, who had invited them to
West
the conference, said the analogy
needed some additional explanaVirginia
tion. He doesn’t disagree with it,
but he says we should