Australia’s Reverend Tim Costello is the former Chief Executive of World Vision Australia and a lawyer, minister, and social advocate. “A free society is an extraordinary moral achievement… It takes morality,” he says.

“When we start to see morality - which is we, not I - corroding and empathy evaporating, we are in trouble for a free society.” However, he remains hopeful of humanity’s goodness. “Hope is saying there will be love into the future and we're going to act now for that love to be also expressed into the future.”

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Navyn Salem, founder and CEO of the malnutrition social enterprise Edesia, discusses our shared humanity in caring for children all over the world. Edesia produces fortified, peanut-based products like Plumpy'Nut for humanitarian agencies like UNICEF, World Food Programme, and other NGOs working in emergency and conflict zones.

“We feed children everywhere because that's what humanity is, and we do not want to lose our humanity. We are smart enough. We have enough resources. We're creative and innovative enough to feed every child on planet Earth,” Salem asserts.

Edesia has been impacted by Trump Administration decisions around foreign aid in the last seven months. “I started speaking up and explaining to people that huge parts of humanitarian assistance that the US government does are a win-win for the world and they have to be continued,” she says.

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Retired Senator Debbie Stabenow discusses the importance of strong leadership, raising our voices about what we believe is wrong, and her continued advocacy for issues like hunger and mental health.

“I may have retired, but I have not retired my voice. At this time, where so much is at stake, nobody should be retiring their voice,” she says. “We should be electing people that show some leadership,” she continues. “Hunger is pretty basic. This should be a moral issue for all of us. It's a moral issue. It's an economic issue. It's a national security issue. It's about health and well-being.”

Host Billy Shore shares her sentiments. “My mantra has been to be civil but not silent. I think there's a way to talk about these things, but we've got to get people over the fear of speaking up about what they believe in,” he states.

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Chicago chef and restaurateur Curtis Duffy recounts some of the revelations in his new book, Fireproof: Memoir of a Chef on this episode of Add Passion & Stir. Duffy writes about surviving the tragic loss of his parents at a very young age. “If it's helping somebody else get through what they need to get through… and if it helps them, in some way, or if they're able to relate to it somehow, then that's a win for me. That is a big win,” he says about sharing his story.

“I think some of my darkest times are when I've created great food. I've been in a really, really dark place and I will spend the next three days nonstop hauling over an entire menu by myself with zero help from anybody.”

Listen and be inspired.

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Partnership for a Healthier America President and CEO Noreen Springstead discusses how to make America healthy again through high quality food and empowered communities. “Is the food system broken, or is it designed in the way that it's supposed to be operating today, which is around profit?,” she posits. “There is data that suggests if the food supply is healthier, it's available, it's affordable, it's accessible, we can actually change this. Apathy does nothing.”

Listen to this conversation between two powerhouses in hunger and food security.

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Bestselling author and No Kid Hungry supporter John Grisham gives listeners a behind-the-scenes look into how Share Our Strength founders and siblings Billy and Debbie Shore built their successful childhood hunger nonprofit from humble beginnings and a great idea. “In my memory, we knew that we had a really big and powerful idea… we just didn't know the path," explains Debbie.

“We also weirdly had a sense that this was going to take a long time to accomplish, that we were going to be committed to it for a long time. That actually took some of the pressure off of those very difficult early years where we didn't honestly have a lot to show for people,“ Billy adds. “I don't think we've ever had a year that felt like the year before. We've always added new initiatives, new ways of raising funds, new programmatic impact efforts, and it's just always felt different and growing,” he continues.

From a $2,000 cash advance and a sub-basement office, the Shores persevered to feed millions of hungry kids. "Childhood hunger in the United States is a solvable problem," both Shores often say. "Just two years ago, only 3 million kids were getting fed in the summertime. Today, with 37 states having opted in to that program, that number is 18 million kids,” Billy reports.

Grisham marvels at the Shore siblings’ ability to work so closely together for decades. "I have two sisters… we could not stay in the same room and work together for 40 minutes. I can't believe you guys have done it for 40 years,” he says. Listen for a rare opportunity to learn how impactful organizations are built and sustained.

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Well before the school year ends for American children , advocates like former USDA Deputy Under Secretary for Food, Nutrition, and Consumer Services Stacy Dean and Hawaii-based consumer advocate and substance abuse counselor Zahava “Zee” Zaidoff are planning how to feed kids over the summer. “The experience of hunger, in and of itself, is a terrible thing. But hunger amongst children is so much more devastating... They don't need food just to maintain, but also to grow and thrive,” says Dean.

Many layers of government, organizations, and individuals are ensuring that kids get access to meals during the summer months. “This is not just about the kids that we're trying to feed. This is about - fortunately and unfortunately - systemic change that has to happen around the entire system,” Zaidoff emphasizes.

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India’s children are hungry. Gauri Devidayal, Co-Founder and Director of The Food Matters Group, and Pankaj Jethwani, physician and Executive VP at W Health Ventures, are working to solve that problem. Devidayal is using her platform to draw attention and funding to the cause while Jethwani is helps run holistic nutrition programs.

“I think India's one of the greatest nations when it comes to hospitality. It's just something that comes innately to people,” says Devidayal. “That's ridiculous, as a child, to go through eight hours in the morning before a first meal and still expect to learn, still expect to thrive,” Jethwani believes. “We've served 400,000 children. It's a drop in the ocean. It's not even a drop in the ocean - it's a micro-drop in the ocean.”

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Two staunch child advocates, Bruce Lesley of First Focus on Children and Phoebe Boyer of Children’s Aid, talk about the detrimental impact of poverty on children and the crucial role of social safety nets and nonprofit organizations in mitigating this harm.

“Every aspect of the life of a child is negatively impacted by poverty. It impacts their health, their education, their early childhood, their nutrition, their housing situation, and also abuse and neglect,” Lesley states.

“I look at every child that comes into our programs as having incredible potential, and there are all these barriers in their way, and our job is to remove those barriers,” says Boyer. Both guests stress that all of us have a role to play in protecting children against proposed changes and cuts to safety net programs that threaten kids’ wellbeing and ability to thrive.

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Three social changemakers -

• Jeff Bradach of The Bridgespan Group,
• Daniel Stid of Lyceum Labs, and
• former US Treasury advisor Clara Miller-

discuss the impact of the current political climate on the nonprofit sector.

“It was a huge shock to the system to have international aid just cut like that and it created a whole ripple of fear. I felt it; I think we all did,” says Miller. “We’re in this very strange place where people are saying, ‘we’ve got to stop this disruption and the cutting of programs,’ and simultaneously saying, ‘but maybe there may be some opportunities to rebuild, resurrect, change the system going forward in some important ways,’"Bradach explains.

These experts do have hope for a way forward. “Private foundations have all the resources they need and aren't reliant on outside parties for their operating expenses, so if any entity in civil society could mount a spirited and sustained defense of their constitutional prerogatives and act on behalf of all of us who care about these freedoms... I would expect and hope they would,” states Stid. “We just have to stop being prairie dogs and going down into our hidey holes. I think we have to stand up and resist,” Miller believes.

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