Poverty researcher Kathryn Edin talks about the insights from her new Book, The Injustice of Place: Uncovering the Legacy of Poverty in America. “I'm realizing that you can't really understand anything about a place without knowing its history,” she says.

A new public data set revealed the crushing poverty in rural areas without the supportive infrastructure of urban places. “Rural is not monolithic. Rural is really multidimensional… we illuminate that rural America holds both the most disadvantaged and the most advantaged places in America.”

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In this very special episode, we re-visit our conversation with award-winning Chez Panisse chef and cookbook author Alice Waters who discusses the value of real, regenerative food for our children and our society as a whole. “Once you love nature, you can't make the wrong decision about anything. You don't want to do things that are really destroying the planet. You want to take care of her. Until we feel that way, we will never be able to make the right decisions,” she says.

Waters founded Edible Schoolyard, an experiential learning program at a Berkeley middle school that deepens students’ relationship with food, gardening and cooking skills, and capacity for critical examination of the food system, more than 25 years ago. “The kitchen classroom became a place to teach world history. It's a way to reach a person through all their senses and those are pathways into our minds,” states Waters. “We decided to put our money behind our values to educate the next generation to change the world. I so believe that education is the deep place where we can make systemic change.”

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ASPCA’s Matt Bershadker and VOW for Girls’ Clay Dunn made an impact at Share Our Strength, and now they are making impacts for animals and girls worldwide. “If you're going to create big change, you need to take big swings. My time at Share Our Strength taught me to take big swings, and it taught me to feel the work deeply,” says Bershadker. He started at ASPCA in 2001 and has been President and CEO since 2013.

Dunn chose an international cause, becoming the first CEO of VOW for Girls in 2019. “Across communities it is just the unfortunate truth that girls' lives and choices are valued less than boys' lives and choices. I think that's underpinning this issue globally in every community,” he says. Listen to hear how they took lessons from fighting child hunger to these critical missions.

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Originally recorded in December 2020, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Nicholas Kristof and Johns Hopkins Center for American Indian Health Co-Director Allison Barlow discuss the struggle for social justice in Native American communities.

“The Bureau of Indian Education schools only have a 53% high school graduation rate! We are failing them way before they fail us,” suggests Kristof. “One of the greatest prides for parents on a Native reservation is to celebrate their child’s high school graduation. If children there aren’t graduating from high school, it’s because of generations of trauma on top of a really ineffective education system,” Barlow says.

“We as a country have had this narrative that when people struggle, it’s because of a lack of personal responsibility and bad choices. When a child born in a certain county has a life expectancy shorter than that of Cambodia, that’s not because that infant is making a bad choice. It’s because we as a society are making bad choices about healthcare, education and jobs,” adds Kristof.

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Albertsons Companies Foundation President and Executive Director Christy Duncan Anderson talks with Billy Shore and Lillian Singh about what the grocery chain’s foundation is doing to fight hunger in neighborhoods across the country.

“We asked our neighbors and our customers what change they would like to see in their neighborhoods. The data came back and it was really astounding: people cared about a whole bunch of different issues, but hunger rose above all of them,” says Duncan Anderson.

The  Nourishing Neighbors initiative is a partnership between the foundation, Share Our Strength, and local food banks, soup kitchens, and community organizations to help get food to at-risk children, adults, seniors, and families. “[We need to] move the understanding of the issue of food insecurity beyond the feeling that, ‘I've put a can in a bin, and so therefore I've solved hunger.’ Food today is not necessarily a solution for tomorrow.”

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Social Security Administration Commissioner Martin O’Malley talks with Billy and Debbie Shore about how Social Security is lifting kids out of poverty, and what more it could be doing. “Social Security is the difference between almost a million kids living above the poverty line or below it,” he says. During this conversation, O’Malley and Share Our Strength commit to a renewed partnership to help reach eligible children who are not currently enrolled in Social Security benefits. O’Malley also debunks some common myths about the program. “The other big myth is that Social security is going bankrupt. Totally false. Social Security cannot go bankrupt because Social Security is a pay as you go program, which means that so long as Americans work, Social Security pays benefits.” Listen and be inspired.

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On this very special encore episode of Add Passion and Stir, interior designer and philanthropist Charlotte Moss and Darren Walker, the former president of the Ford Foundation and the newly announced president of the National Gallery of Art, discuss the importance of ending child hunger. Moss selected No Kid Hungry to be the beneficiary of her book, Home: A Celebration . Home is an ode to Edith Wharton’s The Book of the Homeless, which was a 1916 fundraiser to help refugees and children during WWI. Home features 120 artists, poets, chefs, designers, photographers, and writers offering personal reflections on the essence of home. Contributors include Drew Barrymore, Candice Bergen, Tory Burch, Seth Godin, Renee and John Grisham, Bianca Jagger, Annie Leibovitz, Jon Meacham, Bette Midler, Joyce Carol Oates, Al Roker, Gloria Steinem, Darren Walker, and Fanny and Alice Waters.

“This is really philanthropy at its best, when people come together for a single cause and give of themselves - in essence sharing their strength - is what you're all about and what this book is all about,” says Moss. Walker was compelled to write the book’s foreword. “It was a moment when we were all experiencing deep anguish in this country over the impacts of COVID which we immediately recognized as compounding the already deep inequality we have in this country… Charlotte used her privilege to raise awareness and consciousness of the conditions of poverty, particularly child poverty, which is the most difficult and pernicious poverty that we have in this country… Charlotte reminded us that there are far too many Americans who live without the dignity of shelter, of food, of nutrition, and particularly the most vulnerable among us, our children,” he says.

All royalties from book sales support No Kid Hungry’s essential mission to help end childhood hunger.

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The sisters-in-law behind fashion brand Veronica Beard, Veronica Swanson Beard and Veronica Miele Beard, talk about entrepreneurship and giving back. “Women are the same everywhere: we all want to look good, we all want to feel good, and we all want to do good,” says Miele Beard. The sisters give back to one nonprofit a quarter through deep engagement. “Our legacy is going to be bigger than the fashion that we designed and produced. It's going to be about the community that we created,” predicts Swanson Beard. Their brand-building experience also makes them supportive of other entrepreneurs. “It's not like [the fear] goes away, but I think if you've got passion and you have an idea and you have vision and you have drive and you have a dream, then go for it,” Swanson Beard says.

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As a former elementary school teacher and school principal, U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona knows about how hard it can be for hungry kids to learn. In the last episode of our Food Is the Most Important Food Supply series, he shares how he and his department are advocating for school meals. 

"The days of our schools just focusing on reading, writing, and arithmetic are long gone,” he reports. ”It's critical to recognize that the role of the teacher and the role of the school has evolved to providing food for many of our students."

He sees this as a challenge worth meeting. “If we cannot prioritize and address with urgency the needs of our youngest, our most vulnerable, then we have to do some soul searching as a country… The public education system, in my opinion, is the best tool that we have to not only help our children succeed, but continue to help our country prosper.”

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Back-to-school time can be difficult for the over 13 million kids in the U.S. that are living with hunger. However, people all over the country are working together and sharing their strength to feed kids in their communities. Hear some moving examples in another episode from our 2022 series exploring why food is the most important school supply.

Chef Lorena Garcia describes how her nonprofit Big Chef, Little Chef works in schools to help kids and families build better relationships with food.

2022 No Kid Hungry Youth Ambassadors Jason Ezell and Tansy Huang tell us about how they use their lived experience and recent college coursework to ease food insecurity in their communities.

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