CHARITY,
JUSTICE AND EMERGENCY FOOD
Janet E. Poppendieck*
Director, Center for the Study of Family Policy
Hunter College City University of New York
Professor Poppendieck offered the following remarks introducing
the "Community Strategies" segment of the Vincentian Chair
of Social Justice Moral Dimensions of Poverty Conference on October
16, 1999. In this presentation Dr. Poppendieck explores a comparative
model of charity and justice. She offers the food stamp program as
a model of justice and the emergency food system in New York City
as the charity model. Professor Poppendieck advocates that the growing
social and economic inequality in our nation compels us to avoid the
"seductions of charity" and aim for policy and programs
of fairness, security and justice.
INTRODUCTION: CHARITY AND JUSTICE
In
the history of response to poverty and hunger in the United States,
two models have competed for popular endorsement: charity and justice.
The charity model is associated with voluntarism, neighborliness,
localism, spiritual good and personal involvement. The justice model
is associated with dignity, entitlement, accountability and equity.
Its essence is the creation of rights, not only moral rights that
may be asserted but also justiciable rights, rights which are enforceable
in a court of law. While the charity model may spring from compassion
and is concerned with the alleviation of suffering, the justice model
springs from an ideal of fairness and is concerned with the limitation
of inequality. While the charity model embodies notions of benevolence
and caring for those who are less fortunate, the justice model is
rooted in feelings of solidarity and perceptions of mutual and common
interest. The moral philosopher Allen Buchanan (p.77) has recently
written, "moral progress, to a large extent, consists of the
expansion of the realm of justice into what we previously believed
to be the domain of charity." I was struck when I read this,
because in my own research on food assistance, I believe that I have
been witnessing just the opposite, the expansion of charity into the
realm previously allocated to rights, and thus to justice. The primary
expansion of the "domain of charity" has occurred in the
growth of those food distribution and feeding programs usually labeled
"emergency food." These are soup kitchens, food pantries
and the food banks and food rescue programs that supply them. They
are called "emergency food providers" because they provide
food to individuals or families facing "food emergencies,"
defined as situations in which the household has neither sufficient
food nor the cash with which to purchase sufficient food. Since the
early 1980s, emergency food programs, especially private, charitable
programs, have grown rapidly in both numbers and capacity.
THE RISE OF EMERGENCY FOOD:MORE THAN 50,000 PROVIDERS
New
York City figures can illustrate growth at the local level. When the
Food and Hunger Hot Line, a telephone referral service for
people in need of immediate food assistance, was getting started in
1979, it was able to identify 30 "emergency food" providers--soup
kitchens and food pantries in New York City. By 1987, the number had
grown to 487, and by the end of the decade, it had reached 600 (Food
and Hunger Hotline, 1995, p.iii.). In 1998, more than 1000 providers,
affiliated with the local food bank were reported (Food for Survival,
1998, p.5). Additionally, the New York City Coalition Against Hunger
estimates that there are another 200 or so that are not food bank
affiliated (NYCCHA, 1999). New York may be at the high end of the
meals per capita spectrum, but the growth curves for other large cities
are similar. Nationwide, Second Harvest has identified more than 50
thousand providers associated with its 185 food banks.
The really
big numbers in the charitable food assistance story, however, are
the numbers of givers, not the numbers of recipients. Each of the
nation's tens of thousands of soup kitchens and food pantries is at
the center of a web of supply, a web that extends both to the most
casual donor who drops a can into a grocery store collection barrel
and to the dedicated volunteer who puts in the equivalent of a full
time job at the food pantry. Second Harvest reported 940,930 volunteers
among the food programs affiliated with its network. Additional volunteers
in non- Second Harvest food bank programs would certainly push the
number well over a million. For every volunteer who actually puts
in time, how many more people bring canned goods to a collection at
the church or send them to school when a child's classroom is conducting
a food drive, an increasingly popular activity for schools with "service
learning" programs? How many leave a bag of goods by the mailbox
for the annual letter carriers "Help Stamp Out Hunger" collection
or on the doorstep for a Boy Scouts Scouting for Food campaign? How
many people walk in a hunger walk-a-thon or sponsor someone who does?
How many bring canned goods as part of the price of admission to a
rock concert or a film festival, tee off against hunger at their local
golf course, check out hunger at their supermarket check out counter,
or charge against hunger with their American Express card? How many
write a check in response to a direct mail solicitation or a holiday
appeal for funds in the newspaper? How many attend a Taste of the
Nation event or charity cook-off? The number of ways to contribute
appears to be nearly endless, constrained only by the limits on the
fertile imaginations of the fund-raisers. In 1992, a pollster conducting
a random survey of registered voters asked respondents whether they,
personally, had done anything to combat hunger in their communities,
"such as being a volunteer at a soup kitchen or contributing
food to a distribution center…" A remarkable 79 percent
replied in the affirmative (Breglio, 1992. Pp 3-6). One way or another,
charitable food distribution touches nearly every household in the
United States.
REDUCTIONS IN PUBLIC SECTOR FOOD ASSISTANCE
The
expansion of charitable food assistance has been accompanied by steep
cuts in public sector provision for food assistance. The Omnibus Budget
Reconciliation Act of 1981, [OBRA] the vehicle for the Reagan administration's
early assault on domestic social spending, included cuts to food stamps
and child nutrition programs that removed $12.2 billion from the federal
food assistance effort over the combined fiscal years of 1982–1985
(Physicians Task Force, 1985, p. 148). Additional cuts followed in
1982. Efforts to secure restoration of many of these reductions finally
bore fruit a decade later with the passage of the Mickey Leland Childhood
Hunger Relief Act in 1993, but the victory was short lived. Before
several of the most important restorations took effect, the mid-term
congressional elections brought the conservative wing of the GOP to
power in the House of Representatives and the attack on entitlements,
central to the Contract With America, became part of the national
discourse. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunities Reconciliation
Act of 1996 [PRWORA]--welfare reform--escalated the process of destroying
food entitlements.
In the first
place, PRWORA effectively ended the non-categorical entitlement status
of food stamps. Since the early 1970s, the Federal Food Stamp Program
had been the only program that distributed income or an income equivalent
non-categorically, on the basis of need alone (as measured by income).
As Peter Edelman wrote in the aftermath of the passage of the welfare
reform bill, "one of the great strengths of food stamps until
now has been that it was the one major program for the poor in which
help was based only on need, with no reference to family status or
age. It was the safety net under the safety net. That principle of
pure need-based eligibility has now been breached" (Edelman,
p.48). Under the PRWORA, immigrants with very few exceptions were
made ineligible for food stamps, and able-bodied unemployed adults
without dependents (ABAWDs) were limited to three months of food stamps
in any three-year period. In both principle and reality, the entitlement
status of food stamps was severely compromised.
For those
in groups that remained categorically eligible for food stamps, a
series of smaller changes such as the reduction of the base for calculating
allotments from 103 percent of the Thrifty Food Plan to 100 percent,
freezing the standard deduction at its 1996 level, restoration of
the cap on excess shelter cost deductions, "de-indexing"
the gross income eligibility levels, and the vehicle cost ceilings
in the assets provisions, have the effect of reducing both benefit
levels and eligibility. The provisions sound technical, but the net
effect is large: over the seven year life of the legislation, about
$12 billion in reduced food stamp spending stems from these marginal
and incremental changes (Edelman, p.48). Overall, including both immigrant
and non-immigrant related cuts, the legislation was projected to reduce
food stamp spending by 27.7 billion over seven years, or nearly $4
billion per year (Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, November
1996). The food stamp cuts, of course, were falling on individuals
and families who were also losing cash assistance or being required
to incur expenses associated with participation in workfare programs.
The three
years since the passage of PRWORA have seen a precipitous decline
in the food stamp rolls. Between fiscal year 1996 and the first half
of fiscal year 1999, participation fell by 27 percent, from an average
of 25.5 million people to fewer than 18.5 million people. Some of
this decline is welcome, a result of improved incomes due to an expanding
economy, but prosperity explains only part of the decline. The nation's
official poverty rate fell from 13.7 percent in 1996 to 13.3 percent
in 1997, a drop of just under four tenths of one percent. The number
of people in poverty remained virtually unchanged, and with the exception
of immigrants and able-bodied unemployed adults not raising children,
almost everyone below the poverty line is eligible for at least some
food stamps. Some of the decline, of course, is a direct result of
the legislation. An USDA analysis of caseload declines between summer
of 1994 and the summer of 1997 found that reduced participation by
legal immigrants accounted for 14 percent of the total decline and
reductions in the number of childless adults explained 8 percent of
the fall. Much of the rest reflected a sharp drop in the number of
food stamp households receiving welfare benefits. A recent study by
the General Accounting Office sheds some light on the falling rate
of participation: it identified a lack of information to potentially
eligible persons and restrictive state practices as among the factors
contributing to Food Stamp Program participation declines (United
States General Accounting Office, 1999).
In some
states and localities, this may be a by-product of the confusion often
attendant on transition from one legal and bureaucratic structure
to another. Under the old welfare law, most people who received Aid
to Families with Dependent Children [AFDC] received food stamps automatically.
With the changeover to Temporary Assistance to Needy Families [TANF],
many states and municipalities failed to set up procedures to notify
people of their potential eligibility for food stamps. They also failed
to advise people leaving the welfare rolls for work that they could
continue to receive the stamps if their income fell within the federal
guidelines. A recent controversy in New York City illustrates these
factors and suggests that in at least some localities, the reduction
in food stamp rolls has been intentional, driven by the ideology of
welfare administrators and public officials, rather than an innocent
side effect of confusion and change. In the fall of 1998, advocates
alerted the U.S. Department of Agriculture [USDA] that people seeking
help from the "job centers," formerly the city's welfare
offices, were being referred to food pantries or told to look for
a job, but were not being offered food stamp applications. USDA undertook
a review of 600 cases and found that the city's workers not only failed
to make food stamp applications immediately available as required
by law, but also failed to screen families for emergency food needs,
required potential food stamp applicants to complete a job search
before receiving food stamps, and cut off food stamps to needy families
who were in fact, still eligible. Both Mayor Giuliani and Human Resources
Administration Commissioner Jason Turner have opined that food stamps
perpetuate dependency. "I count food stamps as being part of
welfare," Turner told a federal judge reviewing a suit brought
against the city. "You're better off without either one"
(Johnson, p.30).
The people
moved off welfare are at the food pantry door--some who got jobs at
wages too low to support a family, some who were "terminated"
for failure (inability) to comply with WEP, and an undetermined number
who got jobs but did not keep them (Revkin, 1999). As a nation, we
are replacing justice with charity, rights with gifts. In one direction,
the relationship between the reduction in public provisions and the
expansion of private, charitable efforts is obvious; conservative
policymakers have succeeded in cutting public supports; compassionate
people have responded to fill the gap. The relationship is not a one
way street. In fact, the expansion of charity may be causing, or at
least contributing to the retreat from justice in the form of public
provision. There are, I believe six primary ways in which the rise
of charity is undermining rights.
CHARITABLE FOOD ASSISTANCE AND THE EROSION OF RIGHTS
The Illusion of Safety
Because
of the extensive web of voluntary activity surrounding these charitable
programs--canned goods drives and walk-a-thons, direct mail solicitation
and radio and television appeals--charitable food programs have become
highly visible, engaging some degree of support and participation
from an extraordinarily large number of Americans. All of this activity
creates an illusion of safety, a perception that the non-profit sector
is able and willing to provide a safety net for those in need. This
illusion, in turn, makes citizens, lawmakers, and administrators alike
complacent about the risks and costs of cutting public sector provisions.
In the local
political and administrative arena, the connection has been quite
clear. As indicated previously, in hearings pursuant to a lawsuit
brought by anti-poverty advocates in New York City, the Giuliani administration
actually acknowledged that workers had referred people who reported
food emergencies to food pantries instead of screening them for expedited
food assistance. This practice along with several other practices
had the effect of blocking access to food stamps. These were not exceptional
or isolated incidents. After retraining some 3350 frontline workers,
the City was able to assure the judge in April that the percentage
of help seekers who were improperly denied expedited food assistance
was down from 51 percent in February to 25 percent in March (Swarns,
April 30, 1999).
At the diffuse
level of public attitudes, the connection between the visible charitable
food network and public support--or at least tolerance--for reductions
in entitlement programs would be difficult if not impossible to prove.
Numerous public opinion surveys, both before and after the passage
of the PRWORA, however, suggest that the act as finally passed went
substantially beyond the sort of welfare reform that the public was
demanding (Abramovitz, 1996, preface). Study after study has shown
high levels of commitment to helping poor people (as distinguished
from recipients of welfare as we knew it) and to acting to prevent
or alleviate hunger. Why, then, did the public tolerate the PRWORA?
Why was there so little public outcry about the food assistance cuts?
One possible explanation is the illusion of safety--they are counting
on the charitable food assistance programs to fill the gap. This is
not a reasonable expectation, as the leaders of the charitable organizations
have repeatedly pointed out. Second Harvest estimates that about a
billion dollars worth of food passes through its network in a year.
If it could double the size of its operation, it would replace
only one quarter of the $4 billion that the PRWORA removes from food
stamp expenditures yearly. But most people don't do this sort of math.
They don't look realistically at the size and capacity of the charitable
food network, and they don't feel obligated to make a careful assessment.
This leads us to the second way in which the rise of charity may be
contributing to the decline of rights.
The Moral Safety Valve
This
is a nation that is synonymous with agricultural abundance, and recently,
with food waste: a pound a day for every man, woman and child in the
nation in 1995, according to a USDA study (Foodchain, Feedback,
Summer, 1997, p.2). It is a nation, in which the primary food related
preoccupation of the majority of the populace is eating less, not
eating more. In this context of overproduction and overconsumption,
reports of hunger make people uncomfortable, morally uncomfortable.
Part of the special genius of charitable food assistance in the United
States is that a significant portion of the food collected and distributed
is food that would otherwise go to waste. From the unsuccessful test
market products donated to food banks by corporate food manufacturers
to the dented cans from the supermarket salvage, from the fruits and
vegetables harvested by gleaners to the unused brie and crudités
from an art museum opening collected by food rescue teams, from the
commodities procured by the federal government in price support operations
to the excess zucchini of the overzealous backyard gardener, the charitable
food system is the beneficiary of the nation's leftovers. The opportunity
to combine preventing food waste, a goal that was inculcated in most
of us at the family dinner table, and feeding the hungry, a primary
tenet of most of the nation's major religions, exerts a powerful moral
attraction. The charitable food system has made this moral bonus,
this "twofer" (two-for-the-price-of-one) offer easy and
convenient to accept. Just write a check, just drop in a can, just
charge something on your credit card, just click on the web site on
the internet. Once you have written or dropped or charged or clicked,
you can go on about your life, feeling that you have done your part.
"I hate canned food drives, I really do," the director of
a food bank told me, "because it lets people off the hook. It
gives them a warm, fuzzy feeling to give you a little bag of cans
which, in the whole scope of the thing, is meaningless. It's an easy
way out. I don't want people to have that easy way out. I want them
to look at the whole problem and what are we really dealing with...why
there is need" (See Poppendieck, 1998).
The warm
fuzzy feeling is what I mean by the moral safety valve and like the
safety valve on a pressure cooker, it functions to relieve pressure,
pressure for more fundamental responses to hunger, and to the widening
inequality of which hunger is a symptom. Significantly, this moral
safety valve function occurs, regardless of the scope, capacity or
effectiveness of the food assistance actually provided. People who
are using charitable food programs, consciously or unconsciously,
to make themselves feel better about privilege, about consumption,
about waste, have little motivation to assess the adequacy of the
response. Like the surplus commodity distribution programs of the
great depression (See Poppendieck, 1986), today's charitable food
projects collect some of the food that would otherwise go to waste,
and distribute it to some of the people who need it. However, they
serve their symbolic, token, moral relief functions independently
of the amount of assistance they provide to the needy or the percentage
of potentially wasted food they rescue. Furthermore, their private,
charitable status preserves them from accountability for the achievement
of either of these goals.
Diversion of Effort from Advocacy
The
charitable food project has channeled the energies of people concerned
about poverty away from public policy and into direct service. A food
banker in Florida told me in great detail of the enormous effort he
had spent to rehabilitate a building for his food bank, and his spectacular
success in eliciting contributions of materials and skilled labor
from the community--everything from free toilet repair to free exterior
paint. Then he looked at it, a bit ruefully, and commented "Some
days I feel as if I've created a monster and now I have to feed it."
The building's operating expenses keep him in a constant state of
anxiety. He'd like to spend more time on advocacy and public policy,
toward, in his words, "ending the causes of hunger," but
meanwhile, his next challenge is "financial stability."
"When I don't have to worry each month whether we're going to
make payroll, I will put my energies toward the causes of hunger…"
There is a day-today urgency about emergency food work that often
reduces the time available for more political activities of potentially
broader impact. "Should I spend the afternoon writing letters
urging WIC expansion," one food banker asked, "or should
I receive delivery of three tractor trailer loads of cornflakes?"
No contest. If she doesn't take the cornflakes now, they will not
be available tomorrow, and they may not be offered again next month.
The cornflakes are a relatively sure thing. The impact of letters
on the chances of WIC expansion is far less predictable. The WIC expansion
might do more good in the long run, but, as New Deal relief chief
Harry Hopkins once said, "people don't eat in the long run; they
eat every day" (Ellis, p.506). The diversion of attention from
advocacy is particularly problematic when the energy redirected is
the energy of skilled advocates whose primary work is in the field
of public policy. Many advocates with long experience in the "hunger
lobby" were drawn into the emergency food network when direct
providers turned to them for help in dealing with government. Anti-poverty
advocacy organizations have worked long and hard to build relationships
with churches and other organizations in poor communities. They could
hardly turn down requests for help from the people that they saw as
their constituents. But time spent working for the continuation of
TEFAP or a local soup kitchen assistance program is time lost to efforts
to expand support for food stamps or school meals. There has been
an "opportunity cost" to the involvement of advocates in
alliances with emergency food providers. Further, gradual diversion
of attention from advocacy leaves the way clearer for the opponents
of entitlements and thus hastens the retreat from rights.
Implied or Overt Comparisons with Public Programs
It
is not just the lost time and skill of advocates, however, but also
the content of the arguments they make that contribute to the assault
on entitlements. In seeking a continuation of TEFAP or fighting to
protect some local public funding from cuts, emergency food providers
and their allies in the anti-hunger advocacy community often use arguments
that undermine their larger agenda and reinforce the notions of those
who want to substitute charity for entitlements. Naturally they stress
the relatively low cost of helping people through soup kitchens and
food pantries, the private contributions that can be "leveraged"
by rather small outlays of public funds, the low cost benefits ratios.
In New York City, when the incoming Giuliani administration announced
a cut in the local Emergency Food Assistance Program that helps soup
kitchen and food pantries buy food and equipment, advocates rallied
to the assistance of the beleaguered front line providers. The Food
and Hunger Hotline distributed a flier called the "Emergency
Food Network Efficiency Fact Sheet." It showed that the cost
of the average meal served in the city's emergency food network was
"below the cost of school lunches and other mass feeding programs."
Of course soup kitchen meals prepared and served by volunteers cost
less to produce than school lunches prepared and served by cafeteria
workers, union members who receive not only paychecks but benefits
as well. But this is just the sort of argument that the opponents
of public provision would use in an effort to privatize school meals,
forcing school food service workers into the pantry lines.
The arguments
used to defend public funding for emergency food are, of course, closely
related to the arguments used to elicit private donations. Fund-raisers
for kitchens and pantries necessarily stress the amount of good that
can be done for each dollar's contribution, and by implication, they
are comparing themselves favorably with costlier public programs.
Inadvertently, soup kitchen/food pantry fund-raising contributes to
the process of promoting voluntary programs in lieu of public provisions.
Reinforcing Perceptions of Difference
At
a more subtle and pervasive level, the entire culture of the soup
kitchen and food pantry contributes to the retreat from entitlements.
This is a product of the relations that are daily reproduced within
such programs. There is a visible "us-and-them" character
to most charitable food programs. Food pantries are often set up with
a table or a counter serving as a clear demarcation--and barrier--between
the volunteers and the recipients. Soup kitchens are especially prone
to visible distinctions between the givers and the receivers. In many
kitchens, you will find the volunteers wearing surgical gloves and
uniform aprons, and they will have been provided with a place to stow
their outer garments and purses, while the "guests" may
be lugging bags and bundles and wearing a great part of their wardrobe
in layers. The volunteers are bustling around, too busy to eat. The
guests are patiently waiting in line or sitting at the tables. There
is seldom any difficulty telling who is who. In these situations,
social honor, difficult to measure but very real nonetheless, accrues
to donors and volunteers, stigma attaches to recipients. The two groups
leave the day's encounter separated by even greater social distance
than when they entered.
Many of
the kitchens and pantries I visited made conscious, vigorous efforts
to create a welcoming and dignified atmosphere, but the division into
givers and recipients persists and has subtle consequences for all
participants. Few of us can enact these dramas of social difference,
repeatedly, without internalizing them. "Don't you feel great
being Mr. Kind?," a guest at a Catholic Worker soup kitchen once
shouted at a volunteer within the hearing of psychiatrist and social
critic Robert Coles, provoking what he reported as "a painful
moment of recognition" (Coles and Erikson, p.48). How long can
any of us act out the role of "Mr. Kind" opposite someone
else's "Ms. Needy" before we begin to internalize both roles,
perceiving our beneficiaries as appropriate recipients of charity.
Charity, however, is not typically something we offer to people we
perceive as equals. It is a short step from perceiving people as the
appropriate recipients of charity to not perceiving them as fellow
citizens, as people with rights. The day to day enactment of the charitable
relationship depoliticizes the situation.
Images of Recipients
If
the depoliticized definition of the situation stopped at the food
pantry door, it might not have such pervasive impact. But it does
not stop there. The fundraising imperative takes its toll again in
the images of poor people that are broadcast back out into the culture.
By sending a message asking for funds or other donations for a soup
kitchen or food pantry, we are sending a message that this is an appropriate
way to meet the needs of poor people, and that the program's clients
are appropriately regarded as objects of charity. Far too often, we
take their pictures, looking sad and downtrodden before dinner, or
happy and grateful afterward, and these are the images of poor people
that are projected outward into the culture in the unceasing search
for funds. In interviews, many emergency food providers, in fact,
describe their programs as Band- Aids and stress the fact that they
are a stop-gap measure to meet an immediate need, not a solution.
But the constant search for resources--both funds and food donations--
sends another message; even the most clever fund-raising consultant
can not craft a message that inspires people to give while also communicating
the shortcomings of the whole approach.
Ironically,
as the cutbacks in entitlements are implemented and people are disqualified
from public sector food and cash assistance, they turn with increasing
frequency to private charitable providers, who must escalate their
search for resources in response. As the number of private charitable
providers grows, so does the ferocity of their competition for the
charitable dollar. The result is to shift the whole locus of activity
away from the politics of distribution--of taxation and spending--and
toward the fund-raising frenzy that constantly reinforces the depoliticized
definition of the situation. We end up with the substitution of gifts
for rights, and charity for politics. It is important to note that
all this is happening in the context of mounting inequality that is
addressed by other speakers at this gathering. The wealthiest one
percent of Americans, 2.7 million people, has as much after tax income
as the bottom 38 percent, 100 million people. The top 20 percent of
households will have slightly more income this year than the other
80 percent combined. We have five million millionaires in the U.S.
and 268 billionaires, including 79 new ones in the past year, a 42
percent annual increase. The wealthiest 400 Americans are now worth
over a trillion dollars; they have more net worth than the entire
1.2 billion-person population of China. This concentration of wealth
and income at the top, setting aside its potential to destabilize
the economy, bids up the price of housing, monopolizes the supply
of health care, and makes all of us less content with our lives. Meanwhile,
our focus on charity and hunger helps to obscure these troubling trends
and diverts our attention to raising funds and dishing out soup.
IMPLICATIONS FOR ACTION
When
I finished the research and analysis that went into Sweet Charity?
I was somewhat downhearted. I met so many wonderful people, pouring
their hearts and strength and creativity into work in food pantries
and soup kitchens. I felt that in some ways they were being used--that
the forces that want more inequality in our country, not less, were
foisting off the responsibilities of the public sector upon the kind-hearted.
Worse, these same forces were seizing the opportunities created by
the ways in which charitable work absorbs the attention and energy
of those who care about poor people, to enact policies--tax law policies,
labor union policies, and social spending policies--that further widen
the gap.
Since the
publication of the book, however, I have had many opportunities to
talk with audiences of emergency food providers and others concerned
about poverty and hunger, and I have come away from this process with
hope restored. The network of emergency food providers represents
an enormous potential resource for change in this country. Volunteers
and staff in these programs have special expertise--they are the people
close to what is happening on a day to day basis. More important,
they have enormous credibility with policymakers-- far more credibility
and influence than "professional" experts such as academics
do. I see three elements in a strategy to bring about change that
addresses the underlying causes of poverty.
Educate, Organize and Activate
First,
we need to educate, organize and activate the potential of the emergency
food network. We need to work with providers to help them see more
clearly the relationships between politics, especially public policy
decisions, and the length of the lines at their doors. I am not just
talking about cuts in public assistance, but also the ridiculously
low level of the minimum wage and the distributional impact of proposed
tax cuts. We need to offer the folks who volunteer at kitchens and
pantries opportunities to reflect on their work and to learn about
the relevant policy context, and then we need to offer them concrete
ways to take action--petitions, testimony, letters, lobbying. Furthermore,
we need to invest these opportunities for action with some of the
same characteristics that have made work in a pantry or a kitchen
so gratifying to so many volunteers. Throughout my research, I was
struck by the enthusiasm with which volunteers reported that they
enjoyed their work. They enjoyed the camaraderie of working
for a good cause shoulder to shoulder with people who were different
from themselves. They enjoyed the contact with people who would otherwise
just have been an undifferentiated mass of "the homeless"
or "the poor," enjoyed the banter, the teasing, the exchange
of ideas that accompanied routine tasks such as packing bags or stocking
shelves. We can make sure that writing letters to members of Congress
has some of these same characteristics if, instead of sending people
home or to the office to write letters in isolation, we find ways
to do it together, and interactively. Bread for the World has
had great success with its "Offering of Letters" campaigns,
in which participating congregations write letters during church services
and place them in the offering plate. How about a monthly pot lock
supper at the food pantry or soup kitchen, followed--or better yet
preceded--by a group letter writing activity. We could let the teens
prepare a meal for their parents and "sell" it--one completed
letter required for each serving.
While we're trying to activate the volunteers and staff, we need to
reach out and include the clients. Efforts to correct the passive
images of clients that we portray need to begin with ourselves. If
letter writing is a problem, what about using other means of communication.
One food pantry in California brought a cell phone to the food pantry
line the day before a crucial vote in the California legislature relating
to food stamp supplementation. The phone was passed down the line
so that every client who was willing to do so could tell the legislator--or
the staffer answering the phones--what had brought her/him to the
food pantry. Clients have voices; we need to help get them heard.
Transform Relationships in Kitchens and Pantries
The
inclusion of clients in the advocacy and policy work of the organization
leads directly to the second element in this strategy. We need to
transform the relations within kitchens and pantries so that they
are less like charities and more like cooperatives. We need to move
clients gradually into decision-making roles on advisory committees
or boards of directors, and tap their wisdom and savvy for the best
way to help people in need. We need to move from "us and them"
dichotomy to a cooperative "we." Many pantries and kitchens
have had good experiences with including clients as volunteers; now
it is time to begin to transfer control of these institutions to the
poor people and poor communities whom they serve.
A Movement for a Just Society around the
Common Needs of All
Finally,
we need to build a movement for a more just and equal society. Once
we develop our capacity to participate in the policy arena, we can
make sure that we use it to address the most fundamental issues. I
believe that we need to build a movement in this country, not around
the needs of very poor people, but around the common needs shared
by us all. Utopia Parkway is a good place to begin envisioning alternatives.
We all need there to be a sufficient supply of first rate, enriched
childcare and early childhood education in the country. We all need
access to adequate health care, to elder care, to education, to affordable
housing and transportation, to job training and retraining, to opportunities
for contribution and creative expression. We all need tax reform and
campaign finance reform, clean air, potable water, a safe and affordable
food supply. The more we can do things on a universal basis, to meet
needs that we all share, or needs that most people encounter at some
point in the life cycle, the fewer things we will have to do in separate,
stigmatizing, targeted programs for poor people. One example will
illustrate. We have a school meals program that distinguishes among
very poor children, who eat free, sort-of poor children, who can purchase
meals at a reduced price, and "normal" children who pay
a so called "full price" which is in fact heavily subsidized
by the federal government. School administrators hate the program
in part because of the work that has to go into determining who eats
at what price, and many poor children fail to take advantage of the
program because of the stigma of eating free, or do so and suffer
the attitudes of their peers. Meanwhile, studies show that families,
and especially women, at all income levels are struggling to balance
the demands of labor force participation with those of meeting family
needs. Why not do as most of our European counterparts do and feed
children--all children--as a regular part of the school day. From
the vantage point of a food pantry with a line down the block and
around the corner, or a soup kitchen running out of the day's entree
and scrambling through the freezer for something to defrost, this
may all sound like so much pie in the sky. I remain encouraged however
by the response I have received in my ongoing conversations with direct
providers. For me, a woman I met in St. Paul, Minnesota, sums up this
hope. She stood up during the question and answer period and confessed
that she had had misgivings about the charitable food phenomenon for
some time but had not wanted to express them for fear of "trashing"
the good works of her neighbors. After hearing our discussion, she
realized that many other people shared her misgivings and she saw
a new hope for effective action growing out of these good works. She
came up to me after the session, put her hands on my shoulders, looked
me in the eyes, and said, "There are more of us than we think!"
*Janet
Poppendieck is the Director of the Hunter College Center for the Study
of Family Policy. She is a former Assistant Dean for Academic Affairs
and Student Opportunities in the School of Arts and Sciences at Hunter
College of the City University of New York, where she also teaches
Sociology. She received her undergraduate degree from Duke University,
M.A. and Ph.D. from Brandeis University. She is the author of Breadlines
Knee Deep in Wheat: Food Assistance in the Great Depression and Sweet
Charity? Emergency Food and the End of Entitlement, along with
numerous articles on hunger, food assistance and public policy.
REFERENCES
Abramovitz, Mimi. 1996. Under Attack, Fighting
Back: Women and Welfare in the United States. New York: Monthly
Review Press.
Breglio, Vincent. 1992. Hunger in America: The Voter's Perspective.
Lanham, Md: Research/Strategy/Management Inc.
Buchanan, Allen. 1996. "Charity, Justice and the Idea of Moral
Progress," in J.B. Schneewind, ed., Giving:
Western Ideas of Philanthropy. Bloomington, Indiana University
Press.
Coles, Robert and Jon Erikson. A Spectacle Unto the World: The
Catholic Worker Movement. New York: Viking Press.
Edelman, Peter. 1997. "The Worst Thing Bill Clinton Has Done,"
Atlantic Monthly March 1997.
Ellis, Edward Robb. 1971. A Nation
in Torment: The Great American Depression, 1929–39. New York:
Capricorn Books.
Food and Hunger Hotline, 1995. Thirty Million Meals a Year: Emergency
Food Programs in New York City.
Foodchain, Feedback, 1995–1999.
Food For Survival, 1995. Who Feeds the Hungry? Mapping New York
City's Emergency Food Providers. New York: Food For Survival,
Inc.
Johnson, Kemba. 1999. "Stamps of Disaproval." City Limits,
Volume 24, Number 4, April 1999.
New York City Coalition Against
Hunger, personal communication, September, 1999.
Physicians Task Force on Hunger in America. 1985. Hunger in America:
The Growing Epidemic. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.
Poppendieck, Janet E. 1986. Breadlines Knee Deep in Wheat: Food
Assistance in the Great Depression. New Brunswick, New Jersey:
Rutgers University Press.
Poppendieck, Janet. Sweet Charity? Emergency Food and the End of
Entitlements. New York: Viking, 1998.
Revkin, Andrew. 1999. "As Need
for Food Grows, Donations Steadily Drop." New York Times,
February 27, 1999.
Second Harvest, Update, 1993-1999.
Second Harvest, 1998. Hunger 1997: The Faces & Facts. (Summary
available via internet at http://secondharvest.org.)
Swarns, Rachel. "City Agrees to Drop Delay in Food Stamp Applications."
New York Times. April 30, 1999.
United States General Accounting
Office, July 2, 1999. Food Stamp Program: Various Factors Have
Led to Declining Participation. Washington, D.C.:GAO
VanAmburg Group Inc. 1994. Second Harvest 1993 National Research
Study. Chicago Il: Second Harvest National Food Bank Network
top
of page or
return to index of articles for 1999
