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 th e 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