WHY Hunger: Building a Global Social Movement

posted by brooklynfoodconference, on April 20, 2009

Alison Cohen has hope. Cohen is director of programs at WHY (World Hunger Year) and as such she’s seeing real pain during the recession, but still she has hope. Take the Obamas’ garden, for example. “I know it’s a small thing, but it’s a huge symbol, a metaphor for what we’re all longing for,” says Alison who grew up shelling beans and shucking corn from her family’s kitchen garden. Apparently even the Bushes shared that longing. It turns out they quietly ate organic when they were in the White House. And get this—Detroit is now planning the world’s largest urban farm. Detroit—the city that spewed out cars for which we paved over our land and poured fumes into the air—is looking to reinvent itself through growing food. Will Motown become Footown?

Alison Cohen and goat on a New Hampshire farm. Photo by Aley Kent of Heifer International.

It’s not just these examples. It’s that there are more and more of them every day. As she puts it, “A lot of stepping stones seem to be coming together to form a staircase. I think the whole food democracy movement can be directly associated with the need for more simple living. It’s about building local economies. It’s about knowing where your food comes from. It’s about elevating food to a basic human right, not just calories but good healthy nourishing food.”

Cohen’s position at WHY gives her a real chance to help shape that staircase. WHY was started by Bill Ayres and the late singer-songwriter Harry Chapin when they realized that even if they produced concerts and raised a million dollars every night for a year, they wouldn’t put a dent in world hunger. So in 1975, they decided their commitment to ending hunger would be lifelong and more comprehensive than charity. They founded World Hunger Year. WHY focuses on self reliance by supporting over 5000 community-based groups that go beyond giving people emergency food and shelter. “WHY serves the servers,” writes Bill Ayres on the WHY web site. WHY helps these organizations raise money, acts as a hunger information clearinghouse and, importantly, connects groups to each other with the goal of building a global social movement around food sovereignty and food democracy. “Our guiding framework is food sovereignty, the right of people to control their own food and agriculture policies,” says WHY’s web site.

For instance, WHY connects emergency food providers and the food democracy world. “They aren’t typically on the same page,” Cohen said. “In terms of advocacy and policy, they might wind up at cross purposes. But that doesn’t have to happen and even more than that we believe it’s critical that they work together and see the need for both systems. Ultimately the goal is for emergency food providers to go out of business, so we add a component to their work that seeks self reliance. It’s not a charity model.”

Even people who call WHY’s National Hunger Hotline (1-866-3HUNGRY) find they get more than expected. The hotline not only finds individuals a soup kitchen or other food program near them but also makes them aware of what government assistance they might get (each year, $39 billion that’s already allocated for work-support initiatives is not being redeemed). It might even hook them up with a community garden or with families starting a school food program. Check out these hotline stories.

Cohen has spent her career working towards a greater good. At Heifer International (what better organization for a woman who once had a pet steer named Pinky), she worked to organize farmers outside Chicago. Before that, she worked with women farmers in West Africa (where 80% of farmers are women) and with farmers in El Salvador and Canada. Me, I worked for one of the big banks when its stock price was soaring and our CEO’s “vision” was nothing more than how much money he wanted to bring in. But I share Cohen’s hope and vision for the future. So does anthropologist William Ury. He says that information is making our global society look like the pre-agricultural period of human history because we’re shifting from fixed resources, like land, to an expandable resource-information. Ury says we have “the most promising opportunity in 10,000 years to create a co-culture of coexistence, cooperation and constructive conflict.”

- Paige Churchman

WHY is one of the sponsors of the Brooklyn Food Conference.