Ending Hunger in America, 2014 Hunger Report Full Report

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 n

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