End Child Summer Hunger Now!

Release Date: April 15, 2016

Spring is almost in full swing and summer is just around the corner. Millions of children in America can’t wait for summer vacation, but for millions of poor children who rely on school meals it’s a mixed blessing. “I qualify for free and reduced lunch. I can get a free breakfast, I can get like a muffin, juice, anything like that, in the morning, and then lunch, I don’t have to pay, so I can get whatever I wanted for lunch. So I’ve always been able to eat at school for lunch and breakfast.” Linda Ransom is a Columbus, Ohio high school senior and the winner of a Children’s Defense Fund Beat the Odds^® scholarship whose family struggles to make ends meet. When Linda was seven her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer and the medical crisis led to a family financial crisis. Linda’s mother lost her job, and with a mountain of medical bills is still trying to catch up ten years later. They’ve been homeless for stretches of time. Food has often been beyond their means. Linda says, “If we didn’t have any food at home, I knew I could get some at school, and sometimes I could take a couple things from the breakfast line and I could just save it for later, so when I got home, if I was hungry, I could eat it.”

Hunger doesn’t take a summer vacation and poor children like Linda who rely on free and reduced price breakfast and lunch during the school year to keep the wolves of hunger at bay face a long summer of food deprivation. “It was hard without school during the summer, but being able to qualify for something like food stamps or having a food pantry near us, that helped a lot,” Linda says, but at the end of the month, “it was kind of like a hit-or-miss kind of situation.”

Hit or miss. No child in rich America should go hungry this or any summer, especially when 100 percent federally funded summer feeding programs are available if local officials and communities apply for or use them. But more than 1 in 4 families with children are food insecure and struggling to keep food on the table. The federal Summer Nutrition Programs could help millions more children escape hunger this summer by providing meals if responsible adults act now. The need is urgent. Although 19.7 million children received free or reduced price lunches during the 2013-2014 school year, only 3.2 million children – 16.2 percent – participated in the Summer Nutrition Programs.
If local school boards, community groups, faith congregations, mayors, and county representatives act now, they should be able to get 100 percent federally funded Summer Nutrition Programs in their area or add more if there already are some summer food sites. The federal Summer Food Service Program and the “Seamless Summer” option offered through the National School Lunch Program are designed to replace the regular school year breakfast and lunch programs. Meals provided through the Summer Nutrition Programs also can link children without summer learning opportunities, camps or other costly options to educational and recreational programming to keep them learning, active and safe during school vacation. Summer feeding programs also create jobs for food preparers, servers, bus drivers and others.

Schools, community recreation centers, playgrounds, parks, places of worship, day and residential summer camps, housing projects, migrant centers, and Native American reservations are among places that can serve as summer feeding program sites. Many more sites are needed to fill the summer hunger gap for millions of children. Far too many communities have no sites at all or have sites difficult for children without transportation to reach. Check in now with your school officials, mayors and county executives to learn what they are doing to prevent childhood hunger. Some questions to ask include:

• How many children receiving school year breakfasts and lunches will be served by Summer Food Service Programs?  What steps have they taken or will they take immediately to get more summer feeding sites up and running?

• How are parents notified about free summer food options? 
• Are there district school buses that could be outfitted to deliver summer meals to inaccessible rural areas?

• How many weekend and holiday meal backpacks are provided to children within the Summer Food Service Programs? Has your school district reached out to seek community support for these backpacks?

• In districts with large percentages of children in housing projects, have you or local officials asked housing authorities to make sure they get food to hungry children?

• Are faith communities and service organizations with kitchens in your community aware of the 100 percent federally funded resources and planning to provide summer meals this summer? Do they know about the Children’s Defense Fund’s Freedom Schools^® program that provides summer reading enrichment and food to stop summer learning loss and hunger among low-income children?  

The Department of Agriculture (USDA) has been working very hard to reach more children and is testing exciting new ways to help overcome barriers blocking summer meals for hungry children. Some communities are using mobile vans to transport meals. Others use electronic benefit transfer (EBT) cards to transfer money to help families purchase extra food for children in the summer. When 4.9 million households, including 1.4 million with children, had no cash income in fiscal year 2014 and depended only on food stamps to stave off hunger, every public official, congregation, and school system needs to use every tool available to help keep children from going hungry over three long summer months.

Check the Summer Meals Toolkit on the USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service’s Summer Feeding Service Program website to learn more about becoming a Summer Meal Champion in your community or call the National Hunger Hotline at 1-866-348-6479. There is no reason why there should be a single hungry child in America. Please act now before the school year ends to allow millions of children to take a real school vacation without hunger pains.

Income Inequality: The Housing Struggle

Release Date: April 8, 2016

“I was in Newark and Harlem just this week. And I walked into the homes of welfare mothers. I saw them in conditions—no, not with wall-to-wall carpet, but wall-to-wall rats and roaches. . . . [One mother] pointed out the walls with all the ceiling falling through. She showed me the holes where the rats came in. She said night after night we have to stay awake to keep the rats and roaches from getting to the children. . . . And the tragedy is, so often [poor Americans] are invisible because America is so affluent, so rich.”
 

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke these words during his last Sunday sermon on March 31, 1968 at Washington National Cathedral calling for support for a Poor People’s Campaign. Almost fifty years later questions about how much poor Americans are forced to pay for housing – and what happens when they can’t afford it – are back in the national spotlight. The new book Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, by Harvard University sociology professor and Justice and Poverty Project co-director Matthew Desmond, is calling renewed and urgently needed attention to a tragic eviction cycle invisible to many but all too familiar to families trapped in the cruel prison of poverty.

Dr. Desmond found that in the face of stagnating or falling incomes and soaring housing costs eviction has become more commonplace in America than ever. He spent months in Milwaukee, Wisconsin living first in a trailer park and then in an inner city rooming house documenting the experiences of eight families he met. In a recent interview he explained: “Most Americans, if they don’t live in trailer parks or in the inner city, think that the typical low income family lives in public housing or benefits from some kind of housing assistance, but the opposite is true.” In reality, only one in four families who qualify for housing assistance receives it: three in four are forced to struggle on their own. Dr. Desmond says, “We’ve reached a point in this country where the majority of poor renting families are giving at least half of their income to housing costs and one in four are giving over 70 percent of their income just to pay rent and keep the utilities on.”
 

When Dr. Desmond met Arleen, a single mom with two boys, she was paying 80 percent of her income to rent a run down two bedroom apartment in Milwaukee: “I saw Arleen confront terrible situations. Should I pay my rent or feed my kids? Should I pay my rent or get the kids clothing they need for a new school year? Should I chip in for a funeral for when my sister dies?”

Arleen and her boys were evicted so many times as he followed her trajectory, they lost count. One time her son threw a snowball and hit a passerby, and that person retaliated by kicking in the door to their apartment. The landlord evicted Arleen’s family because of the damage to the door. Dr. Desmond says Arleen then missed an appointment with a welfare caseworker because the letter about the appointment went to her old address. So she got evicted from the new apartment. The crises families face trying to pay for housing are “not just a consequence of poverty, but a cause of poverty” he says. He also noted Black women are often overrepresented in eviction proceedings, just as Black men are in prison: “Poor black men were locked up. Poor black women were locked out.”

Last year, the Children’s Defense Fund included in our Ending Child Poverty Now report an expansion of housing vouchers to all households with children below 150 percent of poverty whose fair market rent exceeds 50 percent of their income. Of the nine policy improvements to alleviate child poverty we proposed, this had the single greatest impact. It would reduce child poverty 20.8 percent and lift 2.3 million children out of poverty. How then do we build the political and public will to do what works?

 

 

Dr. Desmond also met Vanetta in Milwaukee who said in a recent interview: “I grew up in every shelter, basically, in Illinois and Milwaukee. I didn’t have a stable place over my head. I didn’t have proper food, or I didn’t even know a few times how I was going to eat that night. We missed meals multiple nights, and it was hard. And all I ever wanted for my kids was not to put them through that.” Her troubles started during the recession when her hours at the Old Country Buffet were slashed from five days to one day a week. Suddenly she had to choose between paying arrears to keep the electricity on or paying the rent. Falling further and further behind, she received an eviction notice. Terrified of being homeless and losing her children, and desperate to pay the bills, Vanetta participated in a robbery. She’d been on the waiting list for public housing for two years, but after the robbery she became a convicted felon, which meant her chances of ever being approved were almost zero.

 

In that final Sunday sermon Dr. King reminded us: “Ultimately a great nation is a compassionate nation. America has not met its obligations and its responsibilities to the poor. One day we will have to stand before the God of history and we will talk in terms of things we’ve done. Yes, we will be able to say we built gargantuan bridges to span the seas, we built gigantic buildings to kiss the skies . . . It seems that I can hear the God of history saying, ‘That was not enough! But I was hungry, and ye fed me not. I was naked, and ye clothed me not. I was devoid of a decent sanitary house to live in, and ye provided no shelter for me.’” Dr. King said, “this is America’s opportunity to help bridge the gulf between the haves and the have-nots. The question is whether America will do it.” For millions of Americans, including all those who still can’t afford decent shelter for their families, that question remains unanswered.

The Time is Always Right to do Right

Release Date: April 1, 2016

March 31 is the anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s last Sunday sermon at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. in 1968 before his assassination four days later: “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution”. Dr. King said he believed a triple revolution was taking place in the world – a technological revolution, a revolution in weaponry, and a human rights revolution. To face this triple revolution, he said we must figure out how to develop a world perspective, eradicate racism and economic injustice, rid our nation and world of poverty, and find an alternative to war and bloodshed – all with great urgency:

“It may well be that we will have to repent in this generation. Not merely for the vitriolic words and the violent actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence and indifference of the good people who sit around and say, ‘Wait on time.’ Somewhere we must come to see that human progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated individuals who are willing to be co-workers with God. And without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the primitive forces of social stagnation. So we must help time and realize that the time is always ripe to do right.”

 

We must act upon his warnings if our children, nation’s future and founding principles – subverted and still sullied by the legacies of slavery, Native American genocide, exclusion of women and nonpropertied men of all colors from our electoral processes – are to be saved.

 

I have said often that too many Americans would rather celebrate than follow Dr. King. Many have enshrined Dr. King the dreamer and ignored Dr. King the “disturber of all unjust peace,” as theologian Vincent Harding said. Many remember King the vocal opponent of violence but not the King who called for massive nonviolent civil disobedience to challenge the stockpiling of weapons of death and the wars they fuel and the excessive materialism of the greedy which deprives the needy of the basic necessities of life. And many celebrate Dr. King the orator but ignore his words about the need for reordering the misguided values and national investment priorities he believed are the seeds of America’s downfall.

 

Dr. King’s greatness lay in his willingness to struggle to hear and see the truth; to not give into fear, uncertainty and despair; to continue to grow and to never lose hope, despite every discouragement from his government and even his closest friends and advisers. Contributors deserted him as he spoke out not only for an end to the Vietnam War but for a fairer distribution of our country’s vast resources between the rich and the poor. Why was he pushing the nation to do more on the tail of the greatest civil rights strides ever made and challenging a President who had declared a war on poverty? Because he saw that our nation’s ills went far deeper and that fundamental structural and priorities changes had to be made and that the War on Poverty and Vietnam War were inextricably intertwined.

 

In the Cathedral sermon he announced that in a few weeks he would be coming back to Washington leading a Poor People’s Campaign: “We are going to bring the tired, the poor, the huddled masses . . . We are going to bring children and adults and old people, people who have never seen a doctor or a dentist in their lives . . . We are not coming to engage in any histrionic gesture. We are not coming to tear up Washington. We are coming to demand that the government address itself to the problem of poverty. We read one day, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.’ But if a man doesn’t have a job or an income, he has neither life nor liberty nor the possibility for the pursuit of happiness. He merely exists.”

 

“We are coming to ask America to be true to the huge promissory note that it signed years ago. And we are coming to engage in dramatic nonviolent action, to call attention to the gulf between promise and fulfillment; to make the invisible visible. Why do we do it this way? We do it this way because it is our experience that the nation doesn’t move around questions of genuine equality for the poor and for black people until it is confronted massively, dramatically in terms of direct action . . . And I submit that nothing will be done until people of goodwill put their bodies and their souls in motion.”

 

As always Dr. King’s voice and vision were prescient and right – and speak to where our nation is today. Towards the end of his life Dr. King said to a group of friends: “We fought hard and long, and I have never doubted that we would prevail in this struggle. Already our rewards have begun to reveal themselves. Desegregation…the Voting Rights Act…But what deeply troubles me now is that for all the steps we’ve taken toward integration, I’ve come to believe that we are integrating into a burning house” riddled by excessive militarism, materialism and racism. When asked what we should do Dr. King answered: “We’re just going to have to become firemen” and sound the siren of alarm.

 

Our nation and world desperately need loud sirens and firefighters for justice right now to curb morally obscene child poverty rates; wealth and income inequality; massive miseducation of poor children of color; preventable hunger and homelessness; mass incarceration and unjust criminal justice systems that criminalize the poor; and bullying and demagogic politicians encouraging assault of nonviolent protesters.

 

The time is ripe right now to do what is right and reject the ugliness, violence and greed that have permeated too much of our political discourse. We need to move forward and not backward and teach our children we can disagree strongly without disagreeing wrongly.

The Moment We Have Waited For

Release Date: March 25, 2016

Rev. C.T. Vivian, legendary civil rights leader, believes young people today are inheriting the world at a unique crossroads in history and that “this is the moment we have waited for. When I say ‘we’ve’ waited for, I’m talking about humankind has waited for. I’m talking about all the great philosophers and thinkers have waited for this moment. We have lived like we have lived, blowing each other up, killing each other, stealing from each other, making a world that is not fit for human beings — we have lived that way because it’s been allowed to be.” But Rev. Vivian believes we are reaching a tipping point where many are realizing we just can’t go on this way and survive. I truly hope so for our children and grandchildren’s sake!

Rev. Vivian, a Presidential Medal of Freedom winner, leader in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), a confidant of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and a role model for so many of us in the 1960s era of civil rights activism and still, has been and remains an indispensable long haul moral, racial and economic justice warrior. At 91 years young he has a crystal clear message for today’s young people and all of us. He inspired and challenged a receptive Children’s Defense Fund audience of college students when he said he is convinced this is the generation that will finally create new ways of solving social problems to make that new, better world we must build together with urgency and persistence.

Watch Rev. C.T. Vivian

 

“The human drama of your time will not be a military drama . . . Even if they want it, it can’t happen, because we’ve come to the point that violence cannot solve human problems . . . We can’t live in an atomic world and think like we used to think in terms of how wars were fought, in terms of how men killed each other, because today, if we decide to live like we lived yesterday, none of us will live at all.” Instead, “we have to come with a different understanding of our relationships to the world around us, and that’s the most important thing of all . . . You can’t live in yesterday’s world. And I want you to be very thankful of that, because you are forming the new world to be and the old world has no place in it.”

 

Rev. Vivian believes “if we are wise, we will not allow any of us to treat the rest of us as though we were less than rather than more than.” And he looks to history to prove that hatred and violence always destroy more than they create and always turn back the clock of progress. “By the time the First World War ended and the killing was over, Europe was destroyed,” he said. “All the work and hope and dreams that went on before it were destroyed in the midst of it. Second World War, right, we did the same thing – we destroyed what we had worked for and hoped for and dreamed for. War cannot be used anymore because you can’t create the beloved community on yesterday’s understandings. We will destroy more than we create, and you can’t have the world you want that way. It’s up to us to create the world we really want.”

 

“The central task” he continued, “will be to remove violence as a means of solving social problems. When we really think of it that way, then we are on our way. The task will be different than before. We all dreamed of it. We sat in church and talked about it. We made songs about it. We talked about a new world coming. We talked about all of that, right? Now that it’s here, we’ve got to make it real.”

It’s up to us to create the world we really want . . . We’ve got to make it real. The 1960s Civil Rights Movement laid a foundation for the new world as ordinary people tired of injustice seized the moral high ground and confronted the racial violence surrounding them with controlled, disciplined, nonviolent action which allowed America to see there was another way to create change. When C.T. Vivian was jailed and beaten, he never wavered. He says: “Gandhi and the world he lived in changed because he used a different method and a different means. Dr. King changed America because he used a different understanding. He used a different way to move” and Rev. Vivian believes today’s young people can finish what his generation began.

 

His words have a special meaning and challenge today when violence as a conflict resolution strategy has become a daily threat internally and externally in this era of domestic and global terrorism; relentless gun violence in our nation driven by a powerful gun lobby that saps the lives of 30,000 human beings every year including thousands of innocent children; and out of control demagogic political discourse which encourages violence at home and fuels anger around the world by demonizing people who believe and pray differently from many of us. What is it going to take for enough of our political leaders and citizens to stand up and reject the old world view too often riddled with intolerance and hatred? When will a critical mass of citizens and leaders come together to build a new nation and world fit and safe for all of our children and confront those who fuel racial and religious intolerance within and without our borders? And how many of us will stand up and say no to the violence of coarse and careless political, racial, gender, or any rhetoric intended to demean another human being and that teaches our children we cannot disagree without being disagreeable?

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists publishes a “Doomsday Clock.” In 2016, the clock has been set at 3 minutes to midnight as tensions between the U.S., Russia, North Korea and other nations, particularly those involved in conflicts in the Middle East, remain high and landmark climate change agreements have not yet evolved into the fundamental changes needed to ultimately arrest the problem and mitigate additional conflict and catastrophe. Rather than be discouraged or paralyzed by these disturbing concerns, we need to get up, organize, and mount without ceasing our strong nonviolent voices and witnesses to change the narrative of what it means to be a good steward of God’s earth and all of God’s peoples – and be determined to pass on a safer and better nation and world order to our children and grandchildren.