“1 in 5 American Kids Don’t Feel Entitled, Just Hungry” – Remarks for No Kid Hungry

On December 3 I shared at a No Kid Hungry event for Share Our Strength our personal story of spending nine months on Food Stamps when Jim and I first met over three decades ago. We never forgot what that was like or the desperate families we shopped with.

Nor will Mayor Cory Booker of Newark, NJ or 8 other US mayors, 20 members of Congress or 4 governors who last week took the “Food Stamp Challenge.” They tried for one week to eat only food purchased with a federally prescribed weekly allotment of Food Stamps. Read the article here.

Today it is beyond comprehension that one in five of America’s children don’t know when they will get their next meal, and still, many of them receive no nutritional assistance from the government. Without food kids do not grow or learn or develop to their full potential. We know this personally, and so give what we have so that America’s neediest kids can have access to SNAP, the federally funded Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program.

You may see my remarks for Share Our Strength’s No Kid Hungry benefit dinner at Rialto at the Charles Hotel in Cambridge, MA here. We appeared in a Public Service Announcement for Share Our Strength here.

Our deepest thanks go to the phenomenal philanthropist chefs who prepared the meal, including our friends and master chefs Jody Adams of Rialto and Gordon Hamersley of Hamersley’s Bistro in Boston.

Also last week, the Massachusetts Partnership and Project Bread in Boston joined several local organizations to launch the Massachusetts School Breakfast Challenge, which aims to increase school breakfast participation in the state by 35 percent by the end of 2014. Breakfast is the most critical meal of the day for learning, yet children who are eligible for free federally-funded school lunches because of low family income, typically receive no breakfast at home. Yet, Massachusetts ranks 38th in the nation in participation in school-based breakfast. Read the full article and many more from the No Kid Hungry Blog.

Share Our Strength, the national anti-childhood hunger organization, is a grantee of the Ansara Family Fund.  It builds statewide coalitions between businesses, governments, schools and community organizations to enroll America’s neediest children in nutritional assistance programs and provides grants to emergency food organizations throughout the U.S.