Ending Hunger in America, 2014 Hunger Report Full Report | Page 151
CHAPTER 4
passionate about food in ways you would never see if they were being organized to take action
on some other problem.
Thornberry approaches food systems work as a community building exercise. She doesn’t give
outsized attention to ending hunger, because it would jeopardize some people’s participation.
Instead, everyone has to see the benefits for themselves. “A food system is something the whole
community experiences,” says Thornberry. “Hunger is not.” How does she ensure that hunger
gets the attention it deserves? “—by making sure to get the right people at the table,” she says.
Food security is the goal of all food systems. We know that households are food secure when
they are able to stop worrying about getting the food they need. Community food security is
a little more complicated. USDA expresses it in terms of “the underlying social, economic,
and institutional factors within a community that affect the quantity and quality of available
food and its affordability or price relative to the sufficiency of financial resources available
to acquire it.”46 If that sounds a bit
too much like academic jargon, it
will be a relief to learn that USDA,
to its credit, has also developed a
Community Food Security Assessment Toolkit that practitioners can
use to get at the issue in much more
concrete ways. The toolkit has been
used by groups all over the country.
It is a good example of a publicprivate partnership since government can support community antihunger leaders while leaving a light
footprint itself.
In Oregon, an AmeriCorps
volunteer conducts the food
security assessment under Thornberry’s guidance. The University of Oregon sponsors the AmeriCorps participant through
RARE—Resource Assistance for Rural Environments. There are at least three RARE participants dedicated to supporting Oregon Food Bank’s work on food systems. AmeriCorps
volunteers, the domestic counterparts of Peace Corps volunteers, are largely underutilized
in supporting anti-hunger initiatives around the nation. RARE is indeed a rare example
of how to use volunteers to provide technical assistance in food system and anti-hunger
projects.
Once the Community Food Security assessment is completed, the AmeriCorps volunteer produces a report with an analysis of the area’s food system, noting food-related
assets as well as deficiencies. Assets may be farms, commercial or otherwise, and the crops
they produce; individuals who do value-added processing, such as canning or baking, and
are interested in marketing their products to consumers; infrastructure such as commercial refrigerators and freezers; community gardens; fish and game. Churches that keep a
stocked pantry are assets. Assets are anything with the potential to improve community
food access, and there are more kinds of food-related assets than we could possibly list here.
www.bread.org/institute?
Oregon Food Bank
Oregon Food Bank’s two
Portland-area locations
hosted 616 volunteers for a
day of service in honor of
Martin Luther King Jr.
? 2014 Hunger Report? 141
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