Ending Hunger in America, 2014 Hunger Report Full Report | Page 137

CHAPTER 4 his constituents in Dayton made a big difference. In 2002, Hall was appointed by President George W. Bush to serve as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Programs in Rome. Presently, as the executive director of the Alliance to End Hunger, he engages a diverse group of organizations in building the political will to end hunger. The Alliance is a secular affiliate of Bread for the World. As a member of Congress, Hall visited some of the most poverty-stricken and war-ravaged countries in the world. He saw people die of hunger right before his eyes. That literally changed his life, he says. He was committed to helping Dayton residents understand why ending hunger was so important to him and why it should be important to them. Leadership is a subject that comes up again and again in this chapter, and one couldn’t ask for more leadership from an elected official than Dayton got from Tony Hall. Early in his congressional career, Hall’s office surveyed voters in the district; the surveys showed that voters did not consider hunger one of their main concerns. Hall realized it was up to him to change that. He went about that by leading a community-wide effort to end hunger in Dayton. One of the first things he did was start a gleaning program. Hall had long been a fan of gleaning, the salvaging of unharvested fruits and vegetables from farmers’ fields, a practice that he knew about from reading the Bible. “You shall not strip your vineyard bare, or gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and the alien.” (Leviticus 19:10, NRSV) “When you gather the grapes of your vineyard, do not glean what is left; it shall be for the alien, the orphan, and the widow.” (Deuteronomy 24:21, NRSV) The gleaning program he started brought people from vastly different backgrounds literally together in the fields. It was the first time some wealthy people had ever talked with people living in poverty. “Those were remarkable conversations,” Hall says. “People who never worried about missing a bill payment in their lives learned how people who struggled to pay their bills managed to get by on a pay-nothing job and not much help from government.”16 He had little problem getting people to follow his lead. “People will follow if they sense you’re sincere and want to do good,” he says. “When you lead by example, others will take up the cause, and some of them will become leaders too.”17 A utility company sponsored 25 employees each year to participate in projects on behalf of the company. In subsequent years, says Hall, the people who had held those positions wanted them back. “As we carried out projects and received publicity for them, we inspired more people to get involved. As people in Dayton learned about our anti-hunger efforts and saw that they worked, the volunteers’ efforts begat more volunteers. Some of them invented new projects that I never would have www.bread.org/institute? Amanda Lucidon for Bread for the World Adlai Amor, director of communications at Bread for the World, and Barbie Izquierdo, featured in A Place at the Table, watch clips from the film in the breakout session, “Voices of Poor and Hungry People” during the National Hunger Free Communities Summit. ? 2014 Hunger Report? 127 n