An excerpt from Joel’s new paper for the Center for American Progress, “Feeding Opportunity: Ending Child Hunger Furthers the Goal of Cutting U.S. Poverty in Half over the Next Decade”:
“This paper will discuss child hunger in America, how it functions as both a cause and effect of poverty, and the significant policy reforms Congress can take this year in the child nutrition programs to make a significant down payment on ending child hunger and fighting poverty. The paper argues that to end child hunger federal child nutrition programs will need at least an additional $4 billion each year, and the nation will also have to strengthen other income and work support programs to tackle the root cause of hunger: not having enough income to purchase nutritious food for your family.
President Obama’s fiscal year 2011 budget proposal includes $1 billion extra per year for 10 years for the child nutrition bill as a serious down payment on ending child hunger. Congress must invest at least as much as the president’s request in the child nutrition bill to make significant progress, and it will need to undertake other efforts to create jobs and enhance work supports for low-income families.
The paper further argues that to end child hunger by 2015 the government must not only spend more money but make child nutrition programs even smarter through:
■Reducing paperwork and bureaucracy. An estimated $1 billion in tax dollars at the federal, state, and school district levels is spent each year solely on collecting and submitting required forms and daily meal counts for the school meals program (free, reduced-price, and full-price lunch and breakfast). Cutting this paperwork and simplifying applications could save a vast amount of money. And if the money saved were to be pumped back into feeding more children and making meals healthier that would help achieve both the hunger and obesity reduction goals.
■Expanding access to school breakfasts. I have previously argued that universal meals should be provided to all students. But policymakers’ concerns about the federal budget may delay such a goal. During this current reauthorization process, therefore, Congress should at a minimum make it a national priority to provide free, universal, nutritious breakfast to every student in a Title I school, which are those schools with the highest concentrations of poverty in the country. This would eliminate the costs and stigma associated with unnecessary paperwork for these programs and provide each child the opportunity to begin each school day with the fuel needed for effective learning.
■Improve and expand access to other meal programs. Children are in school 180 class days out of a 365-day year, and if every student received a nutritious school breakfast and lunch every day that would still equal only about 360 meals out of the 1,095 a child needs to eat each year. We must ensure that more children participate in summer meals, after-school meals, and supper programs so that they get the food they need.
■Rewarding states for improved performance in reducing child hunger, USDA should be authorized and funded to provide cash grants to governors to support innovative and effective state efforts such as reducing paperwork in the SNAPFood Stamp program, serving breakfasts in first period classrooms, or reducing the poverty that causes hunger.
These steps will also have the added benefit of reducing child obesity if they are implemented appropriately with an eye toward making available meals healthier. Ultimately, this would improve children’s quality of life throughout their lifetime while also decreasing the amount of money the nation spends on health care and other costs. Taking simple and cost-effective measures could end child hunger in America, and they would be an important down payment toward the Half in Ten Campaign’s goal of cutting U.S. poverty in half within a decade.”
Download the full report on the CAP website by clicking here.
Click here to watch a video of the event rolling out the paper.
Click here for more info on child hunger and to download the video to your mobile phone.
Posted on 15 June '10 by Joel, under Blog. No Comments.
Joel’s paper for the Center for American Progress, “Cutting Fat with Coordination,” makes several recommendations for coordinating the complex maze of government programs and activities that could help reduce childhood obesity in the U.S.
An excerpt from the paper:
“First Lady Michelle Obama recently unveiled the nationwide Let’s Move campaign that aims to reduce childhood obesity. Its goal is ambitious. Let’s Move strives to ensure that within one generation the one-third born today who now become obese will instead reach adulthood at a healthy weight.
The Let’s Move campaign believes it can reach its goal of eliminating childhood obesity by advancing four different priorities: helping parents make healthy family choices; serving healthier food in schools; expanding access to healthy, affordable food in all communities and neighborhoods, including low-income ones; and increasing physical activity.
What makes this initiative unique is that it requires interagency coordination. Government agencies typically operate in silos, so when a government policy falls under the jurisdiction of multiple agencies, the execution of such a policy presents a challenge to the normal patterns of coordination and communication.
Despite the challenge, the administration has already begun smart efforts to enlist a wide variety of federal agencies—sometimes working together and sometimes working on their own—to advance those priorities.
…
It isn’t always easy to surmount solidified agency jurisdictions. I worked during the Clinton administration with Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman who, with strong backing from the White House, launched a unique initiative that involved public-private partnerships and spanned various federal agencies. The Food Recovery and Gleaning Initiative increased the amount of excess wholesome food donated to feeding charities from restaurants, farms, cafeterias, and food manufacturers. The broader Community Food Security Initiative grew out of that effort and built partnerships between the federal government and nonprofit groups, businesses, and communities to reduce hunger and increase local food self-reliance. I also worked on cross-agency initiatives to promote the AmeriCorps national service program and boost volunteerism.
While coordinating the Community Food Security initiative, I learned that at least five different USDA agencies had responsibility for fostering farmers markets in the Department of Agriculture alone. Many employees from the varied agencies working on farmers markets had never even met each other, much less worked together collaboratively. But we began to improve how they jointly carried out their missions by starting to bring them together for common purpose in a joint task force that produced a comprehensive community food security action plan that included specific roles for all the relevant agencies.
Government-wide operations may be complex, but they are not impossible.”
Read the full paper by clicking here.
Posted on 15 June '10 by Joel, under Blog. No Comments.
An excerpt from Joel’s paper for the Center for American Progress, “Doing What Works to End US Hunger: Federal Programs Are Effective, But Can Work Even Better”:
“In this era of both soaring budget deficits and escalating poverty, there is a great need for the federal government to ensure it is spending its resources as wisely and effectively as possible on the needs of those Americans who require a helping hand during hard times. This objective fits within the mission of the Center for American Progress’s Doing What Works project, which was inaugurated by CAP earlier this year to ensure that each dollar government spends advances ambitious and carefully selected progressive goals.
There is no question that government must address the most basic of human needs—hunger and nutrition. Some federal programs focused on these needs are already very cost effective, among them the SNAP (formerly Food Stamp) and school meals programs, but they could be run even more efficiently.
These and other federal food programs are critical to millions of low-income Americans who are in crisis because of longstanding structural problems with the U.S. economy alongside existing holes in the nutrition and antipoverty safety nets. Both sets of problems are now exacerbated by the devastating consequences of the Great Recession. As recently as 2008 (before the worst of the economic downturn), 49.1 million Americans, including 16.6 million children, lived in households that suffered from food insecurity or hunger—unable to fully afford the food their families needed.1 This number exceeded the combined populations of the states of Illinois, Missouri, Indiana, Iowa, Arkansas, Kentucky, and Wisconsin.
Combating hunger and food insecurity is an important goal in itself. But it is also a sound investment. Voluminous data proves that hungry children learn less effectively, hungry workers work less productively, and food insecurity costs the nation tens of billions of dollars annually in health care costs. A 2007 study by the Harvard School of Public Health found that domestic hunger and food insecurity cost the American economy $90 billion annually. Given the massive increase in food insecurity since then, this paper calculates that the cost of domestic hunger to our economy now likely exceeds $124 billion. The price we pay for food insecurity in children alone is at least $28 billion.”
Download the full report by clicking here.
View the event announcing the paper here.
Visit the CAP website to check out the executive summary and other information.
Posted on 15 June '10 by Joel, under Blog. No Comments.
An excerpt from Joel’s paper for the Center for American Progress, “Can We End Child Hunger by 2015?”:
“President Barack Obama made a courageous but realistic pledge in the early days of his presidency to end child hunger in the United States by 2015 as a first step toward ending all hunger in the country. The president’s fiscal year 2011 budget provides a down payment on meeting that promise by proposing an additional $10 billion in spending over 10 years to strengthen the Child Nutrition and Women, Infants, and Children reauthorization bill under consideration in Congress. Yet the Senate isn’t exactly picking up the ball and running with it.”
Click to read the full paper on the Center for American Progress website.
Posted on 15 June '10 by Joel, under Blog. No Comments.
Joel was recently named a Visiting Fellow at Washington, DC’s prestigious Center for American Progress, a nonpartisan research and educational institute dedicated to promoting a strong, just and free America that ensures opportunity for all.
Founded in 2003, CAP works to find progressive and pragmatic solutions to significant domestic and international problems. The organization is headed by John Podesta, former Chief of Staff for President Bill Clinton and co-chair of President Barack Obama’s transition. CAP opened a Los Angeles office in 2007.
CAP’s policy priorities for U.S. domestic issues center on building opportunities for all Americans to share in the American Dream. Their work concentrates on the core engines that drive equal opportunity and shared prosperity—education, health care, government oversight, poverty, and women’s rights.
For more information on CAP and their efforts on poverty and economic opportunity, click here.
Posted on 15 June '10 by Joel, under Blog. No Comments.
Joel recently spoke at a variety of events in Burlington, Vermont, including giving the keynote address at the Vermont Foodbank’s Annual Hunger Conference.
You can watch Joel speak to graduating Community Kitchen students at the Chittenden Emergency Food Shelf here. Students from this culinary job training program prepare food for local emergency feeding organizations in the area.
Joel also was interviewed on Vermont Public Radio. Listen to his interview here. Or you can download the MP3 version: VPR Interview
Posted on 28 April '10 by Joel, under Blog. No Comments.
This panel discussion was timed to coincide with Joel’s new CAP paper, “Doing What Works to End U.S. Hunger.”
See the video here to watch Poverty Solutions that Work.
Posted on 9 April '10 by Joel, under Blog. No Comments.
Posted on 3 March '10 by Joel, under Blog. No Comments.
From the DLC website, here is their February 24, 2010 press release:
DLC | Press Release | February 24, 2010
UPDATE: Obama Administration Embraces DLC Idea of Targeted Anti-Hunger Grants to States
Key Strategy in Plan to End U.S. Child Hunger by 2015
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
WASHINGTON - The Obama administration’s just-announced strategy to meet the President’s goal of ending child hunger by 2015 included an idea, first proposed by Joel Berg and Tom Freedman in a DLC paper, to create a USDA grant program to reward states for innovative anti-hunger strategies.
In a speech at the National Press Club, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, a former DLC Chair, announced a new competition to help eliminate child hunger by 2015, saying: “We’ll provide competitive grants to Governors, working with stakeholders statewide, so that states can act as laboratories for successful strategies.”
In a 2006 policy paper for the DLC, Berg (the executive director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger and author of the book “All You Can Eat: How Hungry is America?”) and Freedman (President of the strategic consulting firm Freedman Consulting and a former senior advisor to President Clinton), proposed both that the next President set a five year goal for ending child hunger in America and that one tool of accomplishing goal would be creating a grant program to fund innovative state hunger-reduction strategies. Freedman and Berg reinforced those themes in a DLC memo to President-elect Obama in January of 2009.
In a subsequent DLC paper, Freedman and Share our Strength Founder Bill Shore further elaborated on how the federal and states governments could forge partnerships to end child hunger.
“By combining federal-level resources and accountability with state-level innovation and implementation, the administration’s new hunger proposal is perfectly in-line with the DLC’s agenda of responsibility and reform,” said DLC CEO Bruce Reed. “We are honored that Secretary Vilsack, a former DLC leader, is moving from theory to reality an idea similar to the one we proposed.”
While the nation’s bedrock anti-hunger programs (such the SNAP Program, formerly known as the Food Stamp Program, school meals, and WIC) are funded mostly by the federal governments, states have a great deal of flexibility in implementing them. “This is a smart step — leveraging federal programs and state innovation to reduce child hunger,” said Freedman, “this is a sensible approach by Secretary Vilsack to help our nation’s neediest kids.”
Said Berg, “The Obama administration is putting its money where it mouth is, funding new ideas to achieve its historic goal of ending child hunger in America. Too often, Washington decides how much money to hand to states based on how well they fill-out paperwork. By creating a new program based on how well states ensure proper nutrition for children, President Obama and Secretary Vilsack are taking a giant leap forward in both good government and good hunger fighting.”
For more information, or to speak with Bruce Reed, Tom Freedman, or Joel Berg, please contact Conor McKay at cmckay@dlc.org or (202) 608-1232.
The Democratic Leadership Council seeks to promote debate within the Democratic Party and the public at large about national and international policy and political issues. For additional information, web users may access the Democratic Leadership Council online at www.dlc.org.
Posted on 2 March '10 by Joel, under Blog. No Comments.
Published by the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI).
From The Progressive Fix, PPI’s blog:
Tens of millions of Americans need more nutritious, more affordable food. Tens of millions need better jobs. Just as the Obama administration and Congress have supported a “green jobs” initiative to simultaneously fight unemployment and protect the environment, they should launch a “Good Food, Good Jobs” initiative. Given that large numbers of food jobs could be created rapidly and with relatively limited capital investments, their creation should become a consideration in any jobs bill that Congress and the president enact.
Our hunger, malnutrition, obesity, and poverty problems are closely linked. Low-income areas across America that lack access to nutritious foods at affordable prices — the so-called “food deserts” — tend to be the same communities and neighborhoods that, even in better economic times, are also “job deserts” that lack sufficient living-wage employment. A concurrent problem has been the growing concentration of our food supply in a handful of food companies that are now “too big to fail.” A Good Food, Good Jobs program can address these intertwined economic and social problems.
In partnership with state, local, and tribal governments, nonprofit organizations, and the private sector, the federal initiative would bolster employment, foster economic growth, fight hunger, cut obesity, improve nutrition, and reduce spending on diet-related health problems. By doing so, not only could government help solve a number of very tangible problems, but it could fuse the growing public interest in food issues with the ongoing efforts, usually underfunded and underreported, to fight poverty at the grassroots level.
A Good Food, Good Jobs program could provide the first serious national test of the effectiveness of such efforts in boosting the economy and improving public health. The new initiative should:
- Provide more and better-targeted seed money to food jobs projects. The federal government should expand and more carefully target its existing grants and loans to start new and expand existing community food projects: city and rooftop gardens; urban farms; food co-ops; farm stands; community-supported agriculture (CSA) projects; farmers’ markets; community kitchens; and projects that hire unemployed youth to grow, market, sell, and deliver nutritious foods while teaching them entrepreneurial skills.
- Bolster food processing. Since there is far more profit in processing food than in simply growing it (and since farming is only a seasonal occupation), the initiative should focus on supporting food businesses that add value year-round, such as neighborhood food processing/freezing/canning plants; businesses that turn raw produce into ready-to-eat salads, salad dressings, sandwiches, and other products; healthy vending-machine companies; and affordable and nutritious restaurants and catering businesses.
- Expand community-based technical assistance. Federal, state, and local governments should dramatically expand technical assistance to such efforts and support them by buying their products for school meals and other government nutrition assistance programs, as well as for jails, military facilities, hospitals, and concession stands in public parks, among other venues. Additionally, the AmeriCorps program — significantly increased recently by the bipartisan passage of the Edward Kennedy Serve America Act — should provide large numbers of national-service participants to implement nonprofit food jobs efforts.
- Develop a better way of measuring success. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) should develop a “food access index,” a new measure that would take into account both the physical availability and economic affordability of nutritious foods, and use this measure as another tool to judge the success of food projects. All such efforts should be subject to strict performance-based outcome measures, and programs should not be expanded or re-funded unless they can prove their worth.
- Invest in urban fish farming. Given that fish is the category of food most likely to be imported, and given growing environmental concerns over both wild and farm-raised fish, the initiative should provide significant investment into the research and development of environmentally sustainable, urban, fish-production facilities.
- Implement a focused research agenda. The government should enact a focused research agenda to answer the following questions: Can community food enterprises that pay their workers sufficient wages also make products that are affordable? Can these projects become economically self-sufficient over the long run, particularly if they are ramped up to benefit from economies of scale? Could increased government revenues due to economic growth and decreased spending on health care and social services offset long-term subsidies? How would the cost and benefits of government spending on community food security compare to the cost and benefits of the up to $20 billion that the U.S. government now spends on traditional farm programs, much of which goes to large agribusinesses?
For a community to have good nutrition, three conditions are necessary: food must be affordable; food must be available; and individuals and families must have enough education to know how to eat better. This comprehensive proposal accomplishes those objectives. Moreover, in the best-case scenario, it could create large numbers of living-wage jobs in self-sustaining businesses even as it addresses our food, health, and nutrition problems. But even in a worst-case scenario, the plan would create short-term subsidized jobs that would provide an economic stimulus, and at least give low-income consumers the choice to obtain more nutritious foods — a choice so often denied to them.
Download the full report.
Posted on 2 March '10 by Joel, under Blog. No Comments.
