[House Hearing, 117 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
ENDING HUNGER IN AMERICA: CHALLENGES, OP-
PORTUNITIES, AND BUILDING THE POLITICAL
WILL TO SUCCEED
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HEARING
BEFORE THE
COMMITTEE ON RULES
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED SEVENTEENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 28, 2021
__________
[GRAPHIC NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Available via http://govinfo.gov
Printed for the use of the Committee on Rules
__________
U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE
48-793 WASHINGTON : 2022
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COMMITTEE ON RULES
JAMES P. McGOVERN, Massachusetts, Chairman
NORMA J. TORRES, California TOM COLE, Oklahoma,
ED PERLMUTTER, Colorado Ranking Republican
JAMIE RASKIN, Maryland MICHAEL C. BURGESS, Texas
MARY GAY SCANLON, Pennsylvania GUY RESCHENTHALER, Pennsylvania
JOSEPH D. MORELLE, New York MICHELLE FISCHBACH, Minnesota
MARK DeSAULNIER, California
DEBORAH K. ROSS, North Carolina
Vacancy
DON SISSON, Staff Director
KELLY DIXON CHAMBERS, Minority Staff Director
------
Subcommittee on Legislative and Budget Process
VACANCY, Chair
JOSEPH D. MORELLE, New York, MICHAEL C. BURGESS, Texas,
Vice Chair Ranking Republican
MARY GAY SCANLON, Pennsylvania TOM COLE, Oklahoma
DEBORAH K. ROSS, North Carolina
JAMES P. McGOVERN, Massachusetts
------
Subcommittee on Rules and Organization of the House
NORMA J. TORRES, California, Chair
ED PERLMUTTER, Colorado, GUY RESCHENTHALER, Pennsylvania,
Vice Chair Ranking Republican
MARY GAY SCANLON, Pennsylvania TOM COLE, Oklahoma
JOSEPH D. MORELLE, New York
JAMES P. McGOVERN, Massachusetts
------
Subcommittee on Expedited Procedures
JAMIE RASKIN, Maryland, Chair
DEBORAH K. ROSS, North Carolina, MICHELLE FISCHBACH, Minnesota,
Vice Chair Ranking Republican
NORMA J. TORRES, California TOM COLE, Oklahoma
MARK DeSAULNIER, California
JAMES P. McGOVERN, Massachusetts
C O N T E N T S
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April 28, 2021
Page
Opening Statements:
Hon. James P. McGovern, a Representative in Congress from the
State of Massachusetts and Chair of the Committee on Rules. 1
Hon. Tom Cole, a Representative in Congress from the State of
Oklahoma and Ranking Member of the Committee on Rules...... 3
Witness Testimony:
Dr. Diane Schanzenbach, Margaret Walker Alexander Professor,
Northwestern School of Education and Social Policy......... 6
Prepared Statement...................................... 9
Dr. Thea James, Vice President of Mission and Associate Chief
Medical Officer, Boston Medical Center..................... 20
Prepared Statement....................................... 23
Ms. Heather Reynolds, Managing Director of the Wilson Sheehan
Lab for Economic Opportunities, University of Notre Dame... 26
Prepared Statement....................................... 29
Ms. Ayesha Curry, Co-Founder, Eat. Learn. Play. Foundation;
Ambassador, No Kid Hungry.................................. 33
Prepared Statement....................................... 36
Additional Material Submitted for the Record:
Statement from Congresswoman Gwen Moore dated April 28, 2021. 51
Statement from Congressman Gregorio Kilili Camacho Sablan
dated April 28, 2021....................................... 54
Statement from Luis G. Pedraja, President, Quinsigamond
Community College.......................................... 73
Letter from the Food Bank Coalition of Massachusetts dated
April 28, 2021............................................. 78
Letter from Defeat Malnutrition Today dated April 28, 2021... 86
Letter from the National Education Association dated April
27, 2021................................................... 89
Letter from The Root Cause Coalition dated April 28, 2021.... 94
Letter from Dartmouth-Hitchcock Health dated April 26, 2021.. 101
Curriculum Vitae and Truth in Testimony Forms for Witnesses
Testifying Before the Committee............................ 105
ENDING HUNGER IN AMERICA: CHALLENGES, OPPORTUNITIES, AND BUILDING THE
POLITICAL WILL TO SUCCEED
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WEDNESDAY, APRIL 28, 2021
House of Representatives,
Committee on Rules,
Washington, DC.
The committee met, pursuant to call, at 12:04 p.m., via
Webex, Hon. James P. McGovern [chairman of the committee]
presiding.
Present: Representatives McGovern, Torres, Perlmutter,
Raskin, Scanlon, Morelle, DeSaulnier, Ross, Cole, and
Fischbach.
The Chairman. The Rules Committee will come to order.
This is an important day for the cause of ending hunger in
this country, and it is personal to me. My first involvement in
the movement to end food insecurity began when I was a student
interning for Senator George McGovern--no relation. He was the
chair of the Special Select Committee on Hunger and Nutrition.
I watched him champion these issues in a bipartisan way, along
with leaders like Senator Bob Dole.
He saw the face of hunger in the United States, and he did
not look away; he did something about it. And that always stuck
with me. And I promised myself that I would never look away
either. Every person who has stopped me on the street, every
mother who visited my office to tell me about their struggle to
put food on the table has stuck with me. I have seen how hunger
makes it harder to learn, harder to grow, harder to work, and
harder to take care of our kids.
For all the good the government does today, it is clearly
not enough. In fact, the progress that Senator McGovern and
others fought so hard for has been heading in the wrong
direction, and, as chairman of this committee, I am going to do
something about it.
People need help. They needed help long before the COVID
pandemic hit, and they need it more urgently now. More than 40
million Americans are at risk of food insecurity because of
COVID-19, and 35 million Americans were already dealing with
food insecurity and hunger before the pandemic hit.
Think about that. The United States of America is the
richest country on the face of the Earth. That anybody--
anybody--goes without food is unconscionable.
We have everything we need to eradicate hunger in the
United States. We have the brainpower, we have the food, we
have the infrastructure, and, yes, we have the money. It is a
hell of a lot cheaper to solve this crisis than it is to let
someone go hungry, get sick, and end up in a hospital needing
additional care, or for seniors to take their pills on an empty
stomach and end up in an emergency room.
For too long, we have lacked only one thing: the political
will. I have always said that hunger essentially is a political
condition. If we have the political will, we can solve it.
Today we begin to change that, and we start building what I
hope will become a roadmap to end hunger in America--not to
tinker around the edges, not to get us where we were before the
COVID pandemic hit. I don't want to manage hunger. But, truly
and finally, I want to end food insecurity and hunger in this
country and to do it by 2030, as the United Nations has called
for.
The challenge before us is great, but I believe this goal
is in our grasp if we are willing to fight for it.
I get it; the programs that address hunger don't fall under
one umbrella. They are scattered throughout many programs and
across many different agencies. And even here in the United
States Congress, we can get a little territorial, which
prevents us from working together as well as we should. And,
you know, that is why this committee, the Rules Committee, is
perhaps best positioned to take this issue on, because we are
not hindered by any single jurisdiction. And since we have
never held a hearing quite like this before, we are coming at
things with a fresh perspective.
The committee is going to do its homework. We are going to
hold hearings, roundtables, briefings, and site visits, as
COVID precautions permit. And we are going to think
holistically, not just focus on one program or another--all to
build a record that encourages not only Congress to act but the
administration too, because we need, in my opinion, another
White House Conference on Hunger.
You know, the heads of food banks, hospitals, government
agencies, educators, the faith-based community, people with
lived experience, anybody who has anything to do with finding a
solution needs to be brought together in one room in the White
House. And they should develop a plan to tackle this, something
with benchmarks that better connects the dots between all the
different Federal programs.
This is an all-hands-on-deck moment, and it will take the
full weight of the Federal Government. I also want to get the
business community involved, because the government alone
cannot solve this problem.
We have a lot of work to do to change the reality in this
country, but if anyone doubts that that is possible, I want to
end my remarks by quoting someone I mentioned at the beginning,
and that is Senator Bob Dole, a Republican from Kansas. The
ranking member and I recently received a letter from him, and I
want to read it into the record right now.
He writes, ``Dear Jim and Tom, I am writing to commend your
joint efforts to address hunger in America. It sure brings back
fond memories of working with George McGovern many years ago.
Some thought we were an odd couple, but I still believe
bipartisanship can work effectively.
``The 1969 White House Conference on Food, Nutrition, and
Health was a call to action that led to the development of
critical programs that continue to support millions of
Americans five decades later. I remain proud of the work
Senator McGovern and I did then, and I endorse your effort to
secure a second White House conference to identify the next
frontier of programs to finally end hunger in America.
``Our Nation must keep making strides to end food
insecurity in America. I appreciate your work to bring the
topic of nutrition front and center in the United States
Congress. Thanks for all you continue to do.
``God bless America. Bob Dole.''
I want to thank him for such a thoughtful letter.
And I still think that we can do big things in this
country. And to all the doubters, let me say this: There was a
time when the sky was literally the limit. Then Americans
dreamed bigger. We put a man on the Moon--the same year of the
first and only White House Conference on Hunger, by the way. We
launched a Cancer Moonshot. NASA just recently flew a
helicopter onto Mars, reaching a world away for the very first
time. That is the kind of thinking we need to build a Nation
that is hunger-free.
And before I turn it over to our ranking member, let me
conclude with a story. You know, in the mid-1960s, a
documentary called ``Hunger in America'' ran on CBS. Like
scores of other Americans, my old boss and mentor, Senator
George McGovern, sat with his family and watched. Senator
McGovern's first thought was, why are they looking at hunger in
the United States? Many Americans believed hunger to be a
problem of other countries, not ours.
And as he watched, Senator McGovern saw a little boy tell
the interviewer that he had no food at school and was regularly
hungry. The interviewer asked the little boy how it made him
feel to watch other kids eat while he went without, and the
little boy said he was ashamed.
That night, Senator McGovern told his family, you know, it
is not that little boy who should be ashamed, it is George
McGovern, a United States Senator, a member of the Committee on
Agriculture.
More than 50 years later, we have made progress, yet more
than 40 million people are hungry in the United States today.
So I will say it: It is still not that little boy or the
millions of people who face hunger today who should be ashamed.
I am ashamed. We all should be ashamed.
The time has come for the promise of this Nation to be that
no person goes hungry in America--no person, period--not on my
watch, never again. So that is what I am working toward. That
is what I hope this committee will work toward. That is why I
am calling for this White House conference, because patchworks
and Band-Aids are not enough. They don't solve the problem.
So, before I turn to our ranking member, let me first wish
him a happy birthday, because today is his birthday. And there
is no better place to mark such a special day than right here
in the Rules Committee.
So, with that, I yield to my ranking member, Congressman
Cole.
Mr. Cole. Yes, Mr. Chairman, spending my day in the Rules
Committee is a dream come true on my birthday.
But I am genuinely pleased to be part of today's discussion
on a critical topic that faces far too many in our country.
And, Mr. Chairman, let me add personally, we all know your
passion for this particular issue, but I want you to know we
all respect your expertise as well. You have spent a lot of
years working on these problems in the Agriculture Committee.
You bring a commitment that is born of many, many years'
effort. And it is an unusual topic for our committee to deal
with, but I am glad you have chosen to take it up, and I look
forward to working with you on this important topic.
Despite the fact that our country is the most prosperous
Nation on the planet, far too many of our fellow citizens
continue to face the heartbreaking challenge of hunger. In my
home State of Oklahoma, it is estimated that one in five
children still do not get the nutrition they need to grow up
happy and healthy. Moreover, Native Americans nationwide are
literally four times as likely to report experiencing food
insecurity compared to the rest of the U.S. population.
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has made this problem even
worse, particularly for those who are out of work or who cannot
leave their homes.
But, while it is easy to identify the challenge, addressing
the complex root causes of food insecurity and poverty remain
elusive, even for Members of Congress. The answer is clearly
not just increasing funding to existing programs, though that
may well be required, but modernizing programs to meet the
current challenges that those in poverty face. We must view
this problem holistically and approach our solutions the same
way.
According to research done by our colleagues at the Ways
and Means Committee, low-income individuals are eligible for
more than 80 different programs, all of which are siloed to
provide a specific benefit, at a cost to the Federal Government
of well over a trillion dollars a year.
I think the answer lies in a theory put forward in the 14th
century by logician and theologian William of Ockham: quote,
``The simplest solution is almost always the best,'' unquote.
In addressing the issues of food insecurity and poverty, I
think it is critical that we approach it with three goals in
mind:
One, supporting effective programs. With more than 80
programs on the Federal level designed to address poverty,
policymakers need to know which ones are effective and which
ones should be redesigned to become more effective or even
consolidated.
Two, addressing the income cliff. During my terms on the
House Budget Committee, we dove into this issue a lot.
Unfortunately, the way many of our programs are structured,
there is no way for people to transition off of public
assistance programs. They reach a certain income level and all
of a sudden their benefits are gone. And so people make the
rational choice. When given the option to work more hours, they
choose not to because they become worse off as a whole. That is
something clearly we should be working on and remedying.
And, three, working with the private sector. There is
clearly a role for nonprofits and religious organizations in
addressing the issue of poverty that must be encouraged by the
Federal Government. Groups like the Regional Food Bank of
Oklahoma, who provided more than 47 million meals in 2020 with
almost 1,400 partner agencies, must be part of the equation.
I want to thank our witnesses for appearing before the
committee today. I look forward to hearing their testimony and
perspectives. I look forward to continuing to examine this
critical issue and potential solutions in the weeks and months
to come.
And, particularly, Mr. Chairman, I look forward to working
with you on a problem that is genuinely bipartisan and where,
as you pointed out in your opening remarks, we have worthy
predecessors in Senator McGovern and Senator Dole, who showed
us that, working together, we can make considerable progress.
So I look forward to being your working partner in this
endeavor.
And, with that, I yield back.
The Chairman. Well, thank you very much for your opening
statement. I appreciate it very much.
And I am delighted to welcome an incredible panel that we
have here today. This is the first--this is our kickoff
hearing. So we are really delighted that all of you have been
able to join us.
So let me read the witnesses and their backgrounds, and
then we will hear from them directly.
Dr. Diane Schanzenbach is the director of the Institute for
Policy Research at Northwestern University. She is an economist
who studies policies aimed at improving the lives of children
in poverty, including education, health, and income support
policies. Her work traces the impact of major public policies
such as SNAP, school finance reform, and early childhood
education on children's long-term outcomes.
Dr. Thea James is the vice president of mission and
associate chief medical officer at Boston Medical Center. She
is the director of the BMC Violence Intervention Advocacy
Program and associate professor of emergency medicine at Boston
University School of Medicine. Dr. James has primary
responsibility for coordinating and maximizing BMC's
relationships and strategic alliances with local, State, and
national organizations to foster innovative and effective
models of care that are essential for patients and communities
to thrive.
Heather Reynolds is the managing director of the Wilson
Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities, LEO, an antipoverty
research lab at the University of Notre Dame. Ms. Reynolds is
an expert speaker on poverty and nonprofit strategy. She has
served as the CEO of Catholic Charities Fort Worth for 14 years
before joining the Lab for Economic Opportunities team.
Ayesha Curry is a chef, two-time New York Times best-
selling author, philanthropist, television host and producer,
and entrepreneur. In 2019, Ms. Curry and her husband launched
their family-founded charity, Eat. Learn. Play., with a mission
to end childhood hunger, ensure universal access to quality
education, and enable healthy and active lifestyles. She is
also an ambassador for No Kid Hungry, an organization working
to end childhood hunger.
Again, I am really thrilled all of you accepted our
invitation to be on this panel.
And, Dr. Schanzenbach, we will recognize you first.
Welcome.
STATEMENT OF DIANE SCHANZENBACH, PH.D., MARGARET WALKER
ALEXANDER PROFESSOR, NORTHWESTERN SCHOOL OF EDUCATION AND
SOCIAL POLICY
Ms. Schanzenbach. Thank you. Chairman McGovern, Ranking
Member Cole, members of the committee, thanks for the
opportunity to appear before you at this hearing on ending
hunger in America.
So my name is Diane Schanzenbach. I am the director of the
Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern, where I am also
a professor and economist who studies the role of SNAP and the
economy on hunger, food security, health, and economic
security.
Let me start by briefly describing the current state of
hunger in the United States.
Now, even during a strong economy, there are several
million Americans who experience hunger. In 2019, 35 million
people were food-insecure, which means that they didn't have
the consistent and dependable access to enough food in order to
live an active and healthy lifestyle. Now, 12 million of these
food-insecure individuals were also categorized as hungry.
Hunger or, in USDA's terminology, ``experiencing very low food
security,'' is a more severe measure than food insecurity.
During COVID, hunger has swelled. Between August and March,
on average, 36 million Americans, or 11 percent of the
population, lived in households where they reported that they
sometimes or often didn't have enough to eat in the past week.
They were hungry. Rates of hunger have been especially high
among households with children and among children themselves
during COVID.
Now, typically, measures of food hardship increase when the
unemployment rate increases. So high rates are not surprising,
given what has happened to the economy.
Some good news is that we have seen strong progress against
hunger over the last 3 months. Rates of hunger peaked in
December, with 46 million reporting that they sometimes or
often didn't have enough to eat in the prior week. By the end
of March, the numbers fell to 30 million, the lowest since the
pandemic began.
This recent progress reflects a range of factors, including
the relief packages passed by Congress and also the
strengthening job market. And I must emphasize that rates of
hunger would have been even worse this past year were it not
for government programs already in place, the emergency
measures passed by Congress, and a surge of charitable giving
and aid from food banks and other organizations.
The centerpiece for Federal efforts to address hunger and
food insecurity is SNAP. It already does a lot to reduce hunger
but could be made even more effective with some modest policy
changes. SNAP supplements the cash resources that a family has
to purchase food so that, between SNAP and their other income,
a family should be able to afford to buy a sufficient and
healthy diet.
SNAP is efficiently targeted to families who need benefits
the most, and it is effective. It reduces the likelihood that
families have trouble affording food and also serves as an
automatic fiscal stabilizer in times of economic downturn.
SNAP also offers vital long-term benefits to children.
Research that I conducted found that those who had access to
SNAP benefits as children were more likely to graduate from
high school and grew up to be healthier and more economically
successful.
SNAP serves a very diverse caseload. A large share has
children at home, and the majority of these families are
employed, but they don't make enough to afford the food they
need on their own. For them, SNAP helps stretch their grocery
budget and reduces the likelihood that they suffer hunger or
food insecurity. Now, a lot of these families cycle on and off
of SNAP, using it temporarily when their jobs or hours are
unstable or when they experience temporary unemployment.
Another large share of SNAP families have elderly or
disabled members. They generally will be eligible for and
participate in SNAP for longer periods of time, because their
incomes tend to be stable but just too low to afford the food
they need without additional help.
The remaining one in five households in SNAP tend to be
very poor, many with incomes below half the poverty threshold
or even with no cash income at all. Many of these participants
face substantial challenges and barriers that make finding
stable employment very difficult for them, and, in many of
these cases, SNAP is the only assistance program available.
SNAP can serve such a diverse caseload because it is well-
designed. The benefits are flexible, topping up purchasing
power for those who lack enough money to buy the food they need
on their own, and also provides a floor for food consumption
for our Nation's most vulnerable. A key reason for SNAP's
success is that it relies on our very efficient private sector
to provide access to food through grocery stores and other
retail outlets.
By increasing resources available to purchase food, SNAP
does a lot: It increases food spending. It stimulates the
economy. It lifts millions of people out of poverty. It reduces
hunger and food insecurity and improves both the quantity and
the quality of foods purchased. When families receive SNAP,
they are able to buy more nutritious foods that they otherwise
could not afford.
SNAP is effective, and it would be even more effective if
the benefit were better aligned with families' needs. So, even
before COVID, there was wide recognition that SNAP benefits
were inadequate to buy and prepare healthy foods. The benefit
amount is based on an out-of-date foundation called the Thrifty
Food Plan. But we can fix that.
We also need to make sure that those in need can access
SNAP benefits. And participation rates here are especially low
among the elderly, and we can fix that, too, with a more
streamlined application process for them. And we can talk about
other policy and community solutions over the course of our
conversation.
Over the last year, we have seen the highest rates of
hunger in the United States since we began systematically
measuring it. And as we continue to emerge from the national
crisis caused by COVID, we should not be satisfied with just
reducing hunger back to its previous level; we can eliminate
hunger in the United States entirely.
And we can do this by better using the tools we have
already developed. We can enhance SNAP. We can improve
participation in other nutrition programs. We can make
permanent these recent expansions to the earned income tax
credit, the child tax credit, and Summer EBT. Each of these
will also surely reduce hunger.
Bolstered by stronger income and nutrition support
programs, also, the nonprofit sector will be made even more
effective in filling the remaining gaps and addressing some of
the root causes of hunger.
Thank you, and I look forward to our conversation.
[The statement of Ms. Schanzenbach follows:]
[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
The Chairman. Thank you very, very much.
Dr. James.
STATEMENT OF THEA JAMES, M.D., VICE PRESIDENT OF MISSION AND
ASSOCIATE CHIEF MEDICAL OFFICER, BOSTON MEDICAL CENTER
Dr. James. Thank you, Chairman McGovern and Ranking Member
Cole and distinguished members of the House Committee on Rules,
for holding this hearing and providing me with the opportunity
to speak today about hunger in America and our bold intentions
to collectively put an end to it.
Again, my name is Dr. Thea James. I am vice president of
mission and associate chief medical officer here at Boston
Medical Center. This is also where I trained for my residency,
and I have been honored to serve as an emergency physician here
for the last three decades.
Boston Medical Center is the largest safety-net hospital in
New England, and it ranks among the 10 busiest trauma and
emergency services centers in the country. Our patients, the
patients we serve, are predominantly low-income, with
approximately half of our patients covered by Medicaid or the
Children's Health Insurance Program, or CHIP--the highest
percentage of any acute care hospital in Massachusetts.
Hunger, malnutrition, and food insecurity are all too
common among our patients. In fact, of the more than 100,000
patients we have screened for health-related social needs to
date, 1 in 5 identified as food-insecure, double the national
rate. The current pandemic and economic crisis has further
exacerbated this need among our patients.
In the emergency department at BMC, I see firsthand the
ways in which hunger directly impacts health. Patients present
for heart failure, diabetic emergencies, and these are things
that could have been avoided with proper nutrition. I treat
complications of conditions that are not adequately managed,
like seizure disorders and COPD, because patients are having to
choose between paying for food or paying for medicines.
Treating illnesses in the emergency department that are the
downstream effects of hunger is not only disheartening, it is
the most expensive way to intervene. At BMC, we know we can do
better by our patients if we move further upstream. And we are
proud of our long history of addressing the root causes of what
makes our patients sick, including the inability to afford
enough food.
And we know from clinical experience and decades of
research that when our patients are hungry their health
suffers. This is why BMC is committed to advancing solutions
that reduce hunger among our patients and the communities in
which they live.
Our clinicians and staff are trained to look outside our
four walls and move beyond healthcare to understand the social
factors that impact our patients' health. At present, we have
over 40 programs that address health-related social needs, and
many of them have been replicated nationally.
Over the past 40 years, our anti-hunger work has grown from
a pediatric subspecialty clinic called the BMC Grow Clinic.
This clinic treats babies that are diagnosed with failure to
thrive, and it is an integrated, hospital-wide program that is
designed to meet the full array of our patients' food and
nutrition needs.
Emblematic of these efforts, our Preventive Food Pantry,
which has been in service since 2001, has grown to distribute
over 1 million pounds of food annually to our patients and
families facing food insecurity or specific nutritional
challenges at home. Our patients are actually referred to the
food pantry by a prescription from their clinicians in the same
way that they would to receive medicine from the pharmacy. Our
program began as the first hospital-based Preventive Food
Pantry in the country, and now our staff regularly advises
other hospitals and health systems on how they can launch their
own.
People are often surprised to learn that our urban hospital
campus also has a 7,000-square-foot rooftop farm and a state-
of-the-art teaching kitchen, which are integral to the BMC food
and nutrition program.
The rooftop farm, which is in its fifth year, plays host to
more than 20 crops, providing fresh local produce to
hospitalized patients, hospital cafeterias, the Preventive Food
Pantry, the teaching kitchen, and a weekly in-hospital farmers
market.
The teaching kitchen provides patients with opportunities
to learn how to cook healthy meals specific to their clinically
prescribed dietary needs as well as how to utilize the foods
that come from the Preventive Food Pantry.
In addition to these efforts, decades of research from
Children's HealthWatch, which is a research and policy network
headquartered at BMC, has shown that enrollment in the USDA's
SNAP program reduces food insecurity and improves health. Given
these findings and other compelling evidence on the health-
promoting impact of SNAP, we recently launched an initiative to
enroll likely eligible patients in SNAP through a robust
outreach strategy and streamlined enrollment process for
patients when they are applying for Medicaid.
As an academic medical center and health system and an
anchor institution for our local community, we are acutely
aware of the power we hold to impact the health of our patients
and community, given our role not just as a healthcare provider
but also as an employer, a purchaser of goods and services, and
an investor. Given this role and commitment to moving farther
upstream, BMC has made targeted investments in the community to
address systemic causes of food insecurity and hunger among our
patients.
As a part of a multimillion dollar investment in affordable
housing and community-based programs, BMC provided a $1 million
no-interest loan to establish a healthy food market alongside a
new affordable housing development in the Roxbury neighborhood
of Boston. Through this investment, we intend to disrupt the
status quo by increasing the availability of healthy,
affordable food options in the places where people live and
people with low incomes live.
While we work hard, really hard, to respond to the
realities of hunger among our patients, we know that we cannot
end hunger, even in our little corner of the world, on our own.
We welcome the Federal Government to play a bigger role in
ending hunger, not only as a convener and coordinator but also
as an incubator and accelerator, helping to ensure the scale of
the solution matches the scale of the problem.
I will close my remarks today by offering this anecdote: In
a recent survey to patients in our hospital Preventive Food
Pantry, we asked the question, what would it take for you to
never need this food pantry again? As a physician, some of the
responses to this question were heartbreaking. Many people we
talked to said they could never imagine not needing to rely on
the food pantry.
To me, this highlights why, as a country, we must reimagine
our commitment to ending hunger. In doing so, we must seek
solutions that respond to its root causes, instead of
perpetually filling in the gaps that people have, and
prioritize thriving for people in order to truly alter the
quality of their life course trajectory.
Holding this hearing today sends a signal that hunger is a
solvable problem if only we can step outside of business-as-
usual practices to chart a new course forward.
Thank you for your time, and I look forward to the
discussion.
[The statement of Dr. James follows:]
[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
The Chairman. Thank you very much. Appreciate it.
Ms. Reynolds.
STATEMENT OF HEATHER REYNOLDS, MANAGING DIRECTOR OF THE WILSON
SHEEHAN LAB FOR ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITIES, UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE
DAME
Ms. Reynolds. Chairman McGovern, Ranking Member Cole, and
members of the committee, thank you for your time today.
My name is Heather Reynolds, and I have the privilege of
serving as managing director of the Wilson Sheehan Lab for
Economic Opportunities, or LEO. LEO is a research lab at the
University of Notre Dame that helps service providers apply
scientific evaluation methods to better understand and ensure
effective poverty interventions.
Prior to coming to Notre Dame, I spent almost two decades
at Catholic Charities in Fort Worth, the last 13 as CEO. My
time at LEO and at Catholic Charities have both shaped my
insights on the audacious goal of ending hunger in our country.
A wise man once said, ``We have the food, the ability, and
the means to end hunger in America. What we lack is the
political will and moral courage to act. We must change that.''
Thank you, Chairman McGovern, for this source of
inspiration. I have three points on how we can achieve your
vision.
First, ending hunger begins with the safety net, but it
does not stop there. The safety net plays a key role in
combating hunger. The SNAP program ensures people, most notably
children, are not hungry today. While SNAP provides a modest
benefit, an average of $1.39 per person per meal, it is part of
a critical foundation for the well-being for vulnerable
Americans.
The social safety net lessens the impact of poverty on
families in difficult situations, treating the symptoms of
poverty and not their root causes. The causes of poverty vary
considerably across people: lack of skill, a mental illness,
the absence of a parent in the household, a physical
disability. Unfortunately, the social safety net cannot alter
these underlying conditions. Rather, it can only help provide
what poverty is preventing: health insurance, three hot meals a
day, a roof over a family's head.
A coordinated effort to eradicate hunger must, then,
include programs whose larger goals are to move families
permanently out of poverty. These programs work hand-in-hand
with the safety net and can only be successful when the safety
net is effective.
Service providers and local governments are implementing
innovative programs aimed at generating upward mobility. These
programs, with economic stability as their goal, work in the
context of the broader safety net programs.
At LEO, we are running several studies--one in Texas,
Indiana, and South Dakota--all aimed at getting students with
low incomes credentialed and degreed to support a goal of
increased earnings. Our evidence shows really promising
results, but it also shows that providers must balance the
short-term needs of clients with the long-term need of
financial stability. People cannot work on their education if
they worry that their child will not have food on the table
tonight.
The safety net is needed in our country, but its role is to
ensure people are not hungry today. Tomorrow's hunger needs to
be solved differently, which brings me to my second point: To
achieve an end to hunger, we need comprehensive, family-
centered solutions to poverty. We need a comprehensive approach
that provides not just food, not just housing, not just job
training, but also the human support and interactions that
drive changes and choices in the face of despair. These
solutions need to be family-centered, individualized, and
comprehensive.
Simple declarations such as getting people employed, they
just fall short. We need to look no further than the SNAP
program to see this. As of 2018, 79 percent of all families
receiving SNAP had at least one person working. I found this to
be true from my experience as a service provider. We served
over 100,000 people a year. More than 70 percent of our clients
had full-time jobs, yet they were still walking through our
doors needing assistance.
The Padua program, operated by Catholic Charities Fort
Worth and studied by us at LEO, is designed to take all this
complexity that poverty brings and address each element through
supportive case management.
This holistic approach begins with assessment and a case
plan, engagement in the safety net as a first step, small
caseloads for staff, case managers serving as both connectors
and coaches, and the ability to serve clients for the long
haul. Padua is designed to support participants to reduce
dependency on benefits, earn a living wage, accumulate savings,
and reduce bad debt.
Our study at LEO showed that participants saw a 25-percent
increase in full-time employment. But Padua was particularly
successful for those who were not already employed at the time
of enrollment, with a 67-percent increase in the probability of
working full-time and a 46-percent increase in monthly
earnings. Health conditions improved by 53 percent.
Participants who lacked stable housing when they entered the
program saw a 64-percent increase in housing stability.
This program demonstrates that weaving the social safety
net with holistic programming for those who need it can have
the greatest impact. To achieve an end to hunger, a more
comprehensive solution to poverty, like Padua, is needed.
So why do I believe solutions like this are what our
country needs? Because not only do I see the clients, know
their stories, and believe in this approach, but I have
evidence to back this up, which brings me to my final point:
Ending hunger will not happen through hunches, assumptions, and
good intentions. Ending hunger will happen with evidence-based
programs and policies.
LEO evaluated the Excel Center program in Indianapolis.
This program works with adults to help them complete their high
school degree. It does so with holistic support by
accommodating students' work schedules, providing childcare,
and helping them navigate the challenges that come along with
completion.
Our research showed that going to the Excel Center leads to
significantly higher earnings and a move from the service
sector to health- and education-sector jobs. Graduates have
higher earnings than adults who instead complete the more
typical GED program. Programs like this work with low-income
individuals to improve their financial outcomes, support a move
toward economic stability, and, thus, achieve food security.
The social service community contains the innovations that,
when studied, can show us what works. At LEO, we spend our time
engaging with those poverty fighters on the front line and
bring to the table the research rigor to shine a light on the
impact of their services. We do this because we believe people
in poverty deserve interventions that work.
We conduct causal evidence building, typically through
randomized controlled trials with providers across the country,
to learn what works and then to ensure that evidence is used.
We have witnessed our partners discover something they are
doing doesn't work and then they pivot and change their model
for the good of those they serve. We have also seen our
partners learn that something does work and they scale it up so
they can serve more people in their local communities or break
into new markets with this proven intervention.
We need you as policymakers to see this as well. The gap
between policymakers, academics, and social service providers
is why we need local innovative solutions implemented by
dedicated service providers, paired with academics to help
discover evidence of what works, and then scaled up by your
investment in them as policymakers.
In closing, ending hunger begins with the safety net, but
it does not stop there. We need comprehensive solutions for
families to live a life outside of poverty. Evidence-based
programs and policies will ensure we are offering families
services that work.
Chairman McGovern, I love your quote, and I share your
belief. I would just suggest one little addition. We have the
food, the ability, and the means to end hunger in America. What
we lack is the political will, the evidence-based programs and
policies, and the moral courage to act on them. And I am with
you, Chairman. We must change that.
[The statement of Ms. Reynolds follows:]
[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
The Chairman. Thank you very much.
Ms. Curry, welcome.
STATEMENT OF AYESHA CURRY, CO-FOUNDER, EAT. LEARN. PLAY.
FOUNDATION, AND AMBASSADOR, NO KID HUNGRY
Ms. Curry. Hello. Chairman McGovern, Ranking Member Cole,
and members of the committee, thank you so much for the
opportunity to appear before you today to testify to the
importance of ensuring that every child has the nutritious food
they need to thrive every day.
My name is Ayesha Curry, and I am the co-founder of Eat.
Learn. Play. Foundation and an ambassador for the No Kid Hungry
campaign.
Millions of children, as we know, in the United States live
with hunger right now, including many in the community of
Oakland, California. I have seen firsthand the impact hunger
and hardship have on kids and families. Through my foundation,
Eat. Learn. Play., and our partnership with No Kid Hungry, I
have seen how national and local programs can work together to
reach as many of those kids as they can. But it is truly not
enough. We need Congress to strengthen the programs that keep
food on the table for kids.
This hunger crisis in America is extremely urgent. More
than 13 million kids are living with hunger in our country, and
this hunger affects everything from their ability to learn,
their physical and mental health, the opportunity to reach
their full potential, and so on and so forth. It is completely
cyclical. And every missed meal counts for a kid, because an
empty stomach that hurts today also hurts their futures.
This is especially true for kids from families of color,
who face hunger, poverty, and hardship at even higher levels. I
have personally seen hunger in the community of Oakland, but I
know that no community--urban, suburban, rural--is free from
this issue.
Food is not an essential school supply; it is the essential
school supply. And when kids don't get the food they need, it
is harder for them to learn or focus in class, affecting
everything from test scores to graduation rates. There are
numerous studies that back this up and show proof and evidence
of that.
I am a working mom, and my husband and I have three little
ones at home. And, as a mom, I know what it is like to want to
build a strong, healthy, and successful life for my children. I
know how important a good breakfast is for all of them to help
them focus and learn and how, I am sure as many of us know, you
know, with the Zoom school and the pandemic, how cranky they
can get when they are hungry. Things just don't work the way
that they should.
Families are already working so hard to make ends meet, but
no mom or dad should ever have to deal with the pain and stress
of wondering how they are going to put enough food on the table
for their kids tonight. So that is why I am also an advocate.
The work of Eat. Learn. Play. is rooted in being a village for
those who don't always have one. And the effects of COVID-19
created an unprecedented challenge in our community.
So I want to take the time to just share a story of a
loving mother who, like many, faced incredible hardships this
past year. Christina is a Black woman from the San Antonio
neighborhood in Oakland, California. She is a single mom of two
children who attended an elementary school there called
Garfield Elementary School. It is a part of the Oakland Unified
School District. And Christina's children are among the 18,000
students that have counted on their schools for a significant
percentage of their nutritional needs.
March 13 last year, OUSD school buildings shut down because
of the pandemic, and parents like Christina were left wondering
where their child's next meal would come from. Shortly after
that, Christina was laid off from her service-industry job
because her business closed when local shelter-in-place orders
went into effect.
I know you guys are hearing this story and saying, this is
nothing new. And that is devastating to me, because Christina's
story is very similar to the 10,000 Oakland families who showed
up twice a week to receive meals during the pandemic at OUSD
meal distribution sites and throughout the Nation at
distribution sites just like it. This is thanks to critical
Federal nutrition programs and the heroic work of OUSD school
workers. Oakland students have continued to have access to
healthy and nutritious meals.
This past year has shown us how critical nutritious meals
are in order to keep children healthy and on track to reach
their full potential. Like Congressman McGovern said, childhood
hunger is completely solvable--completely solvable.
And Federal nutrition programs are essential for kids to
get the food they need, no matter where they live or what time
of year it is. But to reach as many kids as we need to reach
right now, we need these programs to be stronger. And that
means action from Congress.
For example, like we have heard today, programs like SNAP
and WIC are grocery benefits that make sure parents can feed
their kids at home. Increasing these benefits means families
can purchase more of the groceries their kids need when they
need them.
School meals make sure kids have the nutrition they need to
focus and stay nourished during the school day.
And, finally, summer. Summer is actually the hardest time
to reach kids with the food that they need, but, last year, we
actually saw what happens when schools and organizations were
allowed to modernize their programs, letting parents pick up
multiple meals at a time or dropping meals off directly to a
child's house.
I do want to take the time today to applaud Congress and
the White House for expanding the Pandemic EBT program through
the summer, when kids and families struggle the most, and
building on P-EBT by proposing to make Summer EBT permanent. We
will need continued help from Congress to make sure programs
help hungry kids during the summer, the hungriest time of year,
so I am very excited for this and hope that we can solidify it.
I have seen our foundation be a part of the hard work
happening on the ground with hunger heroes in our community who
are doing amazing work to feed kids every single day. Like I
said earlier, it truly takes a village to meet the level of
food insecurity caused by the pandemic.
Our collaborations with organizations like No Kid Hungry,
World Central Kitchen, the Alameda County Community Food Bank,
OUSD, and so many other wonderful organizations has made an
incredible impact for hungry kids and families, but charities
alone cannot fill the gaps to make plates full and children
whole.
So, today, I am really coming from a place as a mom, an
advocate for change. You know, I came to the United States when
I started high school, and I thought that, you know, it was
going to be like an episode of ``Friday Night Lights,'' and
that turned out not to be true.
You know, the person sitting next to me, you know, could
come to school without a meal. Who knows, the person sitting
down the table, when they had their last meal. And just to know
now, as a mom, that my children can be going to school with
children who have not eaten or don't show up to school with a
lunch or don't have food during the summer is just baffling to
me.
And, as Chairman McGovern said earlier, you know, this is
completely solvable, and the money is there. So I really feel
like we need to get together and solve this thing, because it
is completely solvable and we really need to change this.
So what I am trying to say is, Congress, kids need your
help. You have the power to change this. And with your
leadership, these programs can be stronger, more flexible, and
reach more kids. People used to say hunger is a nonpartisan
issue, and I really want to stand here today, or sit here
today, in front of you and say that we all need to be kid-
partisan, without question.
So I urge Congress to support and strengthen Federal
nutrition policies to close the summer meal gap, strengthen
school meal programs, and ensure benefits like SNAP and WIC are
reaching the kids and families who need them.
And, finally, I would like to invite all of you to come out
and see our work here in Oakland, to meet the people behind
these stories, to learn their triumphs and struggles firsthand
and see the difference that these Federal nutrition programs
make in their lives.
In closing, thank you guys so much for allowing me to meet
with you today and speak my piece, and I am so grateful for our
time together. So thank you.
[The statement of Ms. Curry follows:]
[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
The Chairman. Thank you very much, Ms. Curry.
Thank you to the entire panel.
And, Ms. Curry, if the COVID restrictions get lifted and we
can travel, we would love to visit Oakland. And I appreciate
you telling us the story of Christina, because, you know,
sometimes when we talk about this issue we get inundated with
statistics, graphs, and trend lines, and sometimes we lose our
human ability to feel.
I talked to a group of people who are struggling with
hunger and food insecurity in preparation for this hearing the
other day. And, again, everybody's story is unique and
different and complicated. And I think if we are going to move
forward, we need to hear from those with lived experiences,
because they are the ones on the front lines, you know, who are
struggling.
And one of the reasons why I personally believe there ought
to be a White House conference is because I think we need to--
as everybody here has said, that we need to address this issue
more broadly and more holistically. You know, the way Congress
operates, we talk about SNAP when the farm bill comes up, and
that is under the Agriculture Committee. And then if we are
talking about school feeding programs, we wait until the child
nutrition reauthorization bill comes up, and that is under Ed
and Labor. And then Ways and Means does the child tax credit.
And so we talk about little bits and pieces, but not the whole
picture.
There is no one committee that deals with hunger here, and
there is no one committee that deals with nutrition here in
Congress. There is no one agency in the executive branch that
deals with hunger or deals with nutrition. It falls under USDA,
it falls under HHS, it--to the extent that housing is relevant
to this discussion, it falls under the Department of Housing
and Urban Development.
I had a conversation yesterday with the new Secretary of
Transportation, Secretary Buttigieg; many of us on the Rules
Committee had a conversation with him. And there is a piece of
this that falls under Department of Transportation. People need
to get to and from places. In addition to infrastructure--
refrigerated trucks, and how do we rebuild our schools so that
every school has a kitchen, things like that.
So, I began by referencing George McGovern and Bob Dole.
Well, you know, back then, I think they understood that. They
created a Special Select Committee on Hunger and Nutrition
because they knew this issue fell under so many different
jurisdictions and nobody was waking up every day and saying,
how do we solve this?
So I think a White House conference is what we ought to aim
for. And what we are trying to do is build a record, do all the
groundwork, if you will, so that, if we can get the Biden
administration to agree to this, that it is not just a press
conference, that it is real and substantial.
You know, we had a White House conference 52 years ago. I
look back on that. It produced a lot of good things, but there
were lots of things that were missing in that conference.
People with lived experiences were not part of that conference.
It wasn't as inclusive as it should have been, given the
population in this country. So what we want to do is figure out
ways to build on the best of what happened 52 years ago but
make it even better.
So, let me just say, again, thank you all for your
testimony.
Let me start where I think we all agree. So each of our
witnesses--and tell me if I have anything wrong here--everyone
here agrees that hunger is a solvable issue, that there is no
one silver bullet to solving hunger, and that we need
government, nonprofits, the private sector, and others--that we
need them all working together--our medical institutions--we
need to be all working together in order to solve it.
Are we all in agreement on that?
Everybody is ``yes''? All right. Nobody disagrees. Okay. We
all agree on that. All right.
So each of you has discussed how economic opportunity plays
a significant role in the hunger problem. We all agree that
there is dignity in work, but, for too long, work hasn't work
for most workers. And what I mean is that people work sometimes
two or three jobs and they still can't get the financial
security that the middle class promises, that the American
Dream remains out of reach for many of them.
This presents families with a series of impossible choices,
whether it is deciding between housing and food or healthcare
and food or education and food or work and food. You know, the
cost to the lives of people experiencing hunger is profound.
So, to each of the witnesses, when you think about what it
will take to solve hunger, to what extent should Congress be
thinking about economic opportunity?
And we can begin----
Dr. James. Chairman----
The Chairman. Yeah, Dr. James.
Dr. James. May I take a crack at that?
The Chairman. Sure. Go ahead. Yes.
Dr. James. You know, one of the things that I have had the
privilege to learn over the last three decades of being an
emergency physician at the largest safety-net hospital in New
England is to ask patients all the time what it would take for
this not to happen again, this repeat visit, this repeat
hospital admission, this, sort of, cycle of perpetual
instability.
And the one thing that I have learned is that--and Ms.
Reynolds asked the question. What is--she was talking about
safety nets. We have had the opportunity, after all these
years, of asking ourselves not that long ago, what is the role
of a safety net and for, in our case, a safety net hospital? Is
it, in fact, charity exclusively into perpetuity, or is it
equity?
And I would say the difference between the two is--you
know, we have had, as I mention in my remarks, over 40 programs
in our hospital, but what has been the role of those programs?
What they mainly do is fill the gaps that people have. We are
preventing people from falling down. We are preventing people
from, you know, falling off the cliff. The intentionality of
those programs has not necessarily been to eliminate the gaps.
Because I believe that only through eliminating those gaps is
it possible for people to become self-sufficient, have
financial security, economic mobility, and even opportunities
to build wealth.
So I think a lot of it is, what is the intentionality of
our resources and our subsidies? And when I think about, for
example--let's just take public housing for example. And I
think subsidies are fine, but I think they are designed to fill
a gap for people.
I think we could do better if we designed them for people
to become self-sufficient and have financial security versus
penalize them for trying to do so. You know, you are limited as
to how much income you can earn, living in public housing,
without losing the housing.
And I am not suggesting that people should have these low-
cost housing units into perpetuity, but--I don't believe that
at all. But I think that they should be designed to enable them
to be like the rest of us and able to, you know, move forward
in life, move up in life, to change socioeconomic status,
change socioeconomic lanes, to get out of the line of need, so
that ultimately, by having financial security and economic
mobility, you know, you are actually able to contribute to the
GDP, for example, or contribute to the economy versus relying
on it.
Because when we don't take that opportunity to be able to
provide that sort of pathway and life-altering trajectory for
people, we wind up having to subsidize to take care of them
anyway. And so, on some level, I mean, I think, monetarily, we
all could--it is a win-win situation all the way around.
And the last example I will use is, during the height of
COVID, when we had the $600 unemployment, you know, payment for
people, the exchange for that was to remove SNAP. And so I
think that doesn't, like, really help anyone. I think if all of
us imagine ourselves, if we had $600, it is not like now we
have enough to thrive. It is basically just people surviving.
So I think the main thing is intentionality, you know, to
move from filling gaps to eliminating them, and aiming for, you
know, financial security and economic mobility and
opportunities for people to build wealth, and to not choose
pathways or make decisions for others that we would not make
for ourselves or our families. Because we all want the exact
same thing, which is thriving and being able to contribute to
the betterment of our country and our economy.
The Chairman. Thank you very----
Ms. Reynolds. And I will just add on to what Dr. James----
The Chairman. Ms. Reynolds. Okay. I will get to everybody,
but, Ms. Reynolds, go ahead.
Ms. Reynolds. Great. I will just add on to what Dr. James
said.
You know, to address hunger, I feel like we as a country
have got to address poverty. Because the realities are, is
that, you know, people walking through the doors trying to
receive safety-net programs, walking through the doors of
social service agencies, they are coming there for today's
needs, but I can't tell you how many times, when I was at
Catholic Charities Fort Worth and would work intake, the
humiliation that often was present with the ask and the
outreach for whatever was needed. And people want a life
outside of poverty. People deserve a life outside of poverty.
And so I think if we could solve this in a comprehensive
way, where we are not just looking at solving hunger but
solving upward mobility and creating economic opportunities for
Americans, I think it will go a whole lot further. May be a
little more pricey at first, but I think will save our country
so much in the long run by what it will achieve for our Nation.
The Chairman. Thank you.
Dr. Schanzenbach.
Ms. Schanzenbach. Yeah, of course, broad-based economic
growth is going to be our best friend in terms of eliminating
hunger, but I want to, sort of, remind everyone that, you know,
a large fraction of people on SNAP are working, and they are
working a lot. And they are in, you know, what we think of as
good jobs. They are health aides, they are cashiers, they are
cooks. But we haven't seen wage growth in that aspect of the
economy in a very long time.
And so I think, of course, it is appropriate for SNAP to
come alongside and make sure that they have enough to eat, but,
without question, as the economy grows and we see the wages
improve, see more people become employed, the cost of these
programs will go down because people won't need them anymore.
But it is just the fundamental--the economy, you have to start
there.
The Chairman. Thank you.
Ms. Curry.
Ms. Curry. Yeah. You know, for me, I think, if we could
find any silver lining in the pandemic, it is, with our
nonprofit, we were able to build out this program that, in my
opinion, does show economic growth and the cyclical nature of
what happens when we do solve hunger. And for us, I feel like,
with solving hunger, we have also been able to solve other
issues when it comes to restaurants and farming, which are so
important.
And so, for us, we built out this infrastructure where, you
know, we were able to have restaurants get back into business
because they were providing the food for the community. And the
farmers were providing the produce for the restaurants. And so
it was this big cyclical nature and effort that I think has
really worked.
And I think it is just going to require a big, giant
meeting of the minds with Congress and the White House to
really figure out how to build out a plan for everybody in
their small communities. And I think that sometimes we are
thinking so big-picture that we forget to think small like this
and have people start in their own communities and build out a
program that way.
And I think that, if you were to use something as a model,
I think what we have built in partnership with World Central
Kitchen has actually been working out here. So it would be
interesting for you all to take a look at it and see how it
works, because I feel like it is something we could implement
in many places across the Nation.
The Chairman. And I think that is a good point. I have seen
lots of initiatives throughout my travels that are really quite
extraordinary.
Dr. James, I have been to the Boston Medical Center many
times. I have seen your food pantry, and I have seen your
Growth Clinic, and I say, why doesn't every hospital do this?
Right.
And you see lots of different initiatives in different
areas that one wonders whether they could be expanded. But,
obviously, it takes some seed money to help others to be able
to follow suit.
Some of it can be replicated; some of it can't. But, one of
the things we hope to look at is what is right now working,
whether on a large scale or small scale? And if it is on a
small scale, how can we replicate it?
I appreciate, too, the fact that everybody is always
reminding us that a lot of the people who are hungry in this
country work. I sit on the Agriculture Committee, and a great
source of frustration for me has been that, during debates on
the farm bill, when we talk about SNAP, I am not sure that fact
is appreciated, because people usually say, ``We should have
people go get a job.'' Well, the bottom line is, the majority
of those who are able-bodied who can work are working, and they
still earn so little they qualify for SNAP.
So these people are doing everything they can to try to get
ahead, but they can't. And then you add to the equation the
cost of housing, and then you add the cost of healthcare, and
then you add transportation costs to and from--I mean, it
becomes overwhelming, right?
So it is not as simple as people who are on SNAP just need
to go out and get a job. The majority of people on SNAP, by the
way, are children. But, of those able-bodied adults, people
work.
And I think so much of our discussion has been very
punitive. If you are an able-bodied adult without a dependent,
you can only be on SNAP for 3 months, and if you are not in a
work training program or don't have a job, then you are out for
3 years, as if somehow if you are hungry you are going to be
more employable or you are going to be able to find a job
easier.
So I appreciate the fact that everybody here has made the
point that this hasn't fallen to these--you have helped
correct, I think, what is a false narrative.
And I should also point out for the record when people say,
``Oh, you know, you guys just want to expand government
programs,'' well, there may be a need for expansion, or there
may be a need for consolidation or, thinking out of the box,
reimagining how we do this. I mean, you know, those are
perfectly legitimate areas of discussion.
But if people are really concerned about the bottom line
and the dollars and cents, I mean, there is a cost to hunger.
There is a cost to the status quo. You know, Ms. Curry talked
about children, and, I mean, children who are hungry cannot
learn. I mean, that school meal is every bit as vital to that
child's ability to learn as a textbook or a laptop. If you are
hungry, you can't focus. A worker who is hungry, they are not
productive in the workforce.
And there was a 2014 study that found that food insecurity
cost an estimated $178 billion--billion with a ``B''--that year
in direct healthcare costs, lost work time, and additional
education expenditures.
And Dr. James mentioned, in Massachusetts, Children's
Health Watch did a study that said hunger costs at least $2.4
billion a year in health-related expenditures alone due to poor
health, pulmonary disease, diabetes, mental health, obesity,
and more.
This is a healthcare issue too. And yet a big chunk of our
healthcare industry does not treat this issue, Dr. James, as
Boston Medical Center does, for example. How do we change that?
How do we get--I mean, I have learned that, if I want to
become a doctor, then I can go through medical school and not
have to take any courses in nutrition. Food is medicine. I
learn how to prescribe a pill, but I don't learn how to tell
you to live a healthier lifestyle so that you don't have to be
on all these pills, you don't get these chronic diseases.
But, anyway, I have some more questions, but I want to
yield to my ranking member, Mr. Cole, at this point, and then I
will get back to you. But thank you again for your wonderful
opening statements.
Mr. Cole. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I agree with
you; they were very good opening statements, very robust
discussion.
I would just posit, I don't think there is much doubt that
a rapidly growing economy is kind of a precondition. It is not
an end-all and be-all, but it helps when you have, as we did
pre-COVID, the lowest unemployment rate in 50 years, the
fastest economic--or the highest consumer confidence in a
generation, and we saw, literally, fast wage growth at the
lower end of the spectrum.
So that is something we need. And it is the first but not
the only way of dealing with it.
But, even when that was happening, we still had hunger in
the United States, we still had problems that the country
faced. And we were still spending a considerable amount of
resources on all this. And I am not arguing that we shouldn't
do that, but I am not sure we are very good at program design
when it comes to dispensing those resources and getting them to
where people need.
So a lot of people on this panel have really extraordinary
experience in program design.
Ms. Reynolds, let me start, if I may, with you, because you
studied this in a whole variety of contexts, from the nonprofit
side through the academic research, variety of States,
different people in different circumstances.
We have, again, an enormous number of programs, and I am
not saying we only need one program. There are different
aspects of poverty that you need to treat, and I think that
takes care of a lot of the problem with food insecurity. If
people aren't poor, they are able to go get what they need.
So, if you had to look at our Federal programs, in
particular, and pick out some principles that you would say,
okay, if I am designing a program that is going to effectively,
number one, get somebody out of poverty and put them in a
position to be food-secure, what are the sorts of principles I
would, you know, focus on? What are the things I would do, or
what would be the lessons I have learned that I would try to
learn from, try to avoid mistakes we have made in the past?
Ms. Reynolds. Uh-huh. Well, great question. Thank you for
presenting that to me.
Just to kind of start off, there are two things that come
to mind. I think first is--and we kind of hit on it earlier--we
need to understand what our goal is in each of these Federal
programs and then, from there, understand did we achieve the
intended goal.
So let me just give you a very simple example. All across
the Nation, there are these call centers. In communities, they
are called 211 or 311 lines. People in need in communities can
call those to find out, you know, where they can get utility
assistance or rent assistance if they are about to be evicted.
So they are for people who have had a big crisis. And all
across the United States, we offer these.
Yet it was really interesting to us, because, as we at LEO
started looking into some of these call centers, what we
learned is, the goal of the call centers were to prevent
homelessness, yet really how the call center was tracked as
being productive and hitting their goals was the numbers of
calls they answered.
And so it was really exciting to us because one of these
call centers, in the city of Chicago actually, is run by
Catholic Charities in Chicago there. And so they asked us to
come in and do a study so we could understand, you know, did
the call center, who was answering calls, who was giving out
assistance to people who were about to be homeless, did the
call center, did the support work?
And so what we were able to do through a quasi-experimental
design at LEO is we were able to evaluate this program and we
were able to show that those who received the funds saw an 88-
percent decline in being homeless after 3 months and a 76-
percent decline after 6 months.
And so what this meant was the goal of the call center is
to prevent homelessness, and it actually works. The research
shows that it works. And so that would be an example of, if the
goal is to prevent homelessness, investing in emergency
financial assistance programs across our Nation are a really
great thing to do.
But then again, if the goal is something different, such as
community college completion, an example of that is a project
we ran called Stay the Course at LEO. And this was
comprehensive case management to get people to complete
community college so they could increase their earnings for the
long haul.
The goal of this program was completion. And so the
intervention that was needed here was entirely different. We
didn't need emergency financial assistance. That may have been
a little part of the intervention. But what was needed was
comprehensive navigation and support, is what the evidence
showed, in order to drive the intended outcome that we wanted
to have, which was completion.
And so, you know, Ranking Member Cole, the way I would just
explain it is, in each of these programs, we have to know what
is our intended impact, and then we have to build evidence to
know, does this specific intervention achieve the intended
impact of that program?
Mr. Cole. Well, you are clearly doing that from a nonprofit
standpoint. In your experience, which is considerable, do you
see us doing that in government very much? In other words,
going back and--we all talk about this as Members of Congress
in our respective committees. We try and legislate, and I don't
think we very often go back to see if the legislation we passed
actually works, or the program we created. We just don't get a
lot of feedback, I think, sometimes. We just get caught up in
what the next thing is.
Do you see some efforts in the Federal Government or
something you could point us to that we could, like, build in?
And we all know we have a government accounting agency. We use
them from time to time. I think they do very good work for us.
But I don't know that we systematically evaluate all these
different programs and say, ``Hey, this one is working very
great, we should probably invest more money in it; this one,
maybe not, and maybe that money could be diverted over here.''
Do you see very much of that?
Ms. Reynolds. You know, I think that is why you have
economists, like we have at Notre Dame or Northwestern or other
places across our country, who want to do this work and answer
those questions for you.
An example that I could point to is the Housing First
model. This all started through some experimentation that was
going on in New York City where we, as a country--in New York,
folks were saying, ``Oh, my goodness.'' Like, 10 percent of the
homeless in New York were taking up about 90 percent-ish of the
resources. And so what kind of came from that is some studying
to understand more, some RCTs that were run. And then,
ultimately, under President George W. Bush, the Housing First
initiative was born and funded in a big way across our Nation.
And then it was expanded under President Obama to include HUD-
VASH for veterans and other things.
And so that is an example to me of the Federal Government
leveraging provider knowledge--which, a lot of these ideas came
from local innovations--paired with economists and other
academics overlaying their expertise into things to show what
works, as well as to continue to study it.
So that would be an example I would point to to say a time
where we as a country and all of us have done a really good job
of pushing forward a policy that makes sense and works.
Mr. Cole. Yeah.
And, Dr. Schanzenbach, let me go to you and talk a little
bit and get your perspective on, you know, sort of, income
cliffs, if you will, which I think we create a lot of in the
Federal Government. And then we get mad at people because they
are perfectly rational and decide they are not going to engage
in some sort of behavior that we think is desirable that then
costs them benefits, that they are living standard goes down,
even if their income went up, because we have been very
inartful about designing an exit from a particular program to
self-sufficiency, which is, I think, where we want to get as
many people as we can.
So can you give us some thoughts on what we can and should
do?
I think--you know, we are having this problem right now. I
am sure some of my colleagues have this same problem. I can go
through my district right now, and some of my employers will
literally tell me, ``I can't get people to work here right now
because the unemployment benefit is higher than I have
historically paid them.'' And they are making the perfectly
rational decision, ``I think I will stay where I am making more
money, as opposed to go back to work. And when I have to go
back to work, I will.''
And we can argue a lot as to whether or not that is wages--
although, again, that is a big problem. I think you mentioned
the $600--I know one of you did--$600 additional unemployment
benefit we had. Believe me, that is one thing in New York City;
it is quite another in Wewoka, Oklahoma. I mean, really, the
one-size-fits-all, geographically, creates a real problem for
you.
So I know some of my colleagues might not even experience
this problem because the dollars don't go as far in their
respective areas and economies as it might in a relatively
small town in rural Oklahoma.
So, anyway, any thoughts or guidance you can give us on
this so we could more constructive to really help people get to
self-sufficiency, instead of saying, ``We have gotten you to
this edge, we are kicking you off,'' or, ``We are mad that you
won't jump off, even though you are going to end up with less
benefits for you and your children''?
Ms. Schanzenbach. Yes. So many great questions there. Let
me start by sort of addressing your broad question about, so
what is well-designed and what is less well-designed?
And I want to say that, sort of, the two big workhorses for
antipoverty, especially for families with children, are the
earned income tax credit and the Supplemental Nutrition
Assistance Program, SNAP.
When I teach my undergrads, we always start by reading
Milton Freeman and him thinking about, what is our optimal way
of designing a program? And he had a couple of things that he
said. One of them was, people should always be better off if
they are working. So, you know, when we have to take away the
resources--which we do; we have to phase them out--but do it
slowly over time.
And so then we pivot and look to see, how is SNAP designed,
how is the earned income tax credit designed? And they are
really very much in line with exactly what Milton Freeman
suggested, you know, way back, you know, 50-plus years ago.
And there are a couple aspects of that, first, that the
earned income tax credit actually gives people more than a
dollar back for every dollar that they earn, versus a certain
part of it. And we have tons of research on this, you know, as
Heather said, mostly done by economists, you know, in academic
outlets. And we know that the earned income tax credit induces
people to work, and then there are all sorts of other positive
benefits that come from that.
Similarly, with Supplemental Nutrition--with SNAP, you
know, we don't really see the big benefits cliffs with that
because we have designed it.
Now, I will warn you that, in recent months, even as part
of Senator Romney's child tax credit, they want to, you know,
make some changes to some of these programs that I think
unintentionally would make those cliffs worse.
And I agree with you, we want to phase things out, you
know, we want a soft landing, so that if you work an additional
hour you earn more. And there are some places, you know, where
that doesn't happen, but not in, sort of, the big workhorses
here.
And so for sure, you know, we can work on fixing some of
the incentives around other smaller programs, but I will tell
you that the earned income tax credit and SNAP are well-
designed. And I am really excited about the potential for the
new child tax credit to, you know, help along that as well. And
the way they have designed that, you know, it persists for a
long period, and so families aren't going to get the rug yanked
out from under them when they start working.
Mr. Cole. Good. Thank you.
Dr. James, we talked, and the chairman touched a little bit
on this in his exchange with you, about the food pantry that
you have at Boston Medical. And, you know, how common is that?
And coupled with that, I assume there is, you know, an
immediate-needs problem, obviously, but also long-term
nutritional advice that families really need, as to, you know,
thinking about how you put together, literally, you know, a
menu for your family over a week so that they are not only
getting fed and they are not hungry but they are actually
getting the nutritional needs that they need as well.
Dr. James. So, Mr. Cole, you are asking how common----
Mr. Cole. Yeah.
Dr. James [continuing]. Does this happen? Well, I mean,
pretty often. Every single day. I mean, we feed about 7,000
people----
Mr. Cole. Oh, no, excuse me. I meant how common in terms
of, do you see other institutions like your own doing this? In
other words, are you a shining example out there all by
yourself, or have other people begun to emulate you?
Dr. James. Well, I mean, we were the first, you know,
prescription-based food pantry, you know, connected to a
hospital in the country. I do believe that, you know, more
people are focusing, but I don't think that is extremely
common, because we are advising others who have asked us about
how we did this and how to do this. So it is not that common.
But these are the kind of things that we have used to
operationalize innovation, you know, to try to create a
transformative pathway versus just stay where we are. Because
what generally happens is, when this translates to unstable
disease, we are really treating people and resetting them back
to baseline but then just discharging them back to exactly what
is driving it.
And I would say, the previous speaker just spoke about
earned income tax credit. For example, two pediatrics residents
came up proposing an idea to operationalize earned income tax
credit in their pediatrics clinics. So, for 5 years now, we
have been doing people's taxes in the pediatrics clinics to,
you know, sort of, you know, have people be able to avail
themselves of that. And we have gotten back, I don't know, $8
million, $9 million, you know, over these years for people.
And then we are taking back to another level by, you know,
working with these families to leverage the HUD Family Self-
Sufficiency program that says people can earn more money and
they don't fall off the cliff. The extra money goes into escrow
for either home ownership or even education because everyone in
the family is eligible for it.
So we are constantly, you know, trying to operationalize
things forward to, you know, enable people to get towards self-
sufficiency and financial security and that type of thing.
Mr. Cole. Any thoughts on how we would incentivize other
people to do what you are doing?
Because, you know, a lot of times, when I see a hospital, I
mean, they think immediately the physical wellness of the
patient. You know, they are coming in, they are either ill or
they are, you know, going to deliver a baby or something like
that, and we are going to take care of that problem, and then
off you go, you know, and we have done our part.
You seem like you do an awful lot more, in terms of
thinking about the long-term health and outcome of the patients
and how do we set them on a better path going forward than just
take care of the immediate problem.
Dr. James. Yeah, I think it is a transformation in even
medical education. It kind of starts there. Because it
basically focuses on disease. Honestly, it just focuses on
disease. It barely connects it to a human being. And when it
does, it presents an ideal human being who has an ideal life,
unencumbered, unchallenged by anything, you know, and
particularly some kind of systemic barrier.
And so, you know, how we have tried to incorporate that in
the culture of our healthcare system is, for example, when new
doctors start as interns in June and July, they go through
hospital-wide orientation to learn about the electronic medical
record and patient quality and safety measures, but they also
have to go through this, you know, a determinants-of-health
orientation, both in simulation as well as didactics.
So we want them to be looking through that lens before they
ever sit in front of a patient----
Mr. Cole. Wow. Very good.
Dr. James [continuing]. So that they can understand from
the very root what is driving whatever they are doing. Because
without knowing that, they will unintentionally, you know, just
be treating disease and not understanding what is driving it.
Mr. Cole. Thank you very much.
Well, I am like everybody else on this panel, Mr. Chairman;
I could go on and on just asking questions. So I will yield
back, because I know we have a lot of other people who want to
participate. But thanks again for putting together the panel, a
great panel.
And thank all of you for your testimony and sharing your
observations and wisdom with us.
The Chairman. Thank you.
Let me ask unanimous consent to insert into the record
letters from two of our colleagues, Congresswoman Gwen Moore of
Wisconsin and then Congressman Gregorio Kilili Camacho Sablan
of the Northern Mariana Islands.
I consider both of them incredible partners in the fight to
end hunger, and I appreciate their advocacy for policies that
will help alleviate and ultimately end hunger once and for all.
So, without objection, I will include their statements in
the record.
[The information follows:]
[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
The Chairman. Mrs. Torres.
Mrs. Torres. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for hosting this very
informative and very important hearing today.
And I want to also extend my gratitude to the professionals
that are with us today providing critical input on how we can
address this, you know, what I see as a growing issue of hunger
in our community.
First off, I want to say how uncomfortable it makes me when
I hear the term ``food insecurity.'' You know, I think by
continuing to call it out, ``hunger''--to continue to call out
hunger as being just food-insecure, you know, in my mind, we
minimize the impact that that has on not just children but on
our society as a whole. And, as Americans, you know, it is
certainly a black eye, you know, to our Nation to have children
go hungry every single day--and not just children but also
adults.
I want to pose a question to Ms. Reynolds.
I just want to say how much I agree with so much of what
you said, starting with weaving, you know, the safety net
around the issue of providing food to people that are hungry.
You talked about providing childcare. That is such a critical
component to ensuring that parents are able to work and to get
the type of jobs that are actually going to help them pay for
the basic needs of their families.
I happen to represent a community, a very working-poor
community, the Inland Empire. You know, our families struggle
just to get to work every single day. They spend 2 or 3 hours
one way in a commute, a terrible commute, which really leaves
our local municipalities to struggle with this ongoing problem
of people leaving, you know, home, mass exodus at 5:00 a.m.,
and they don't return until 7:00 or 8:00 p.m.
So what happens to the kids between, you know, 5:00 and
8:00 a.m. when they are supposed to be in school--I mean, let's
just put the pandemic, you know, aside, and let's just talk
about, you know, the past normal lives that we have had--and
what happens to the kids between, you know, 3:00 p.m. and 7:00
p.m.? You know, our communities are challenged every single day
with having to provide before- and after-school programs for
kids.
So, when a parent, you know, a head of household is earning
minimum wage, that leaves very little money left to spend on
childcare. So childcare becomes this luxury that--you know,
poor people see it as a luxury, but, you know, we see it as a
threat, a threat to continuing this pipeline, you know, to
prison that I think that we continue to feed. And it is so much
more expensive to try to prevent recidivism, you know, at the
tail end, when we can prevent children, you know, from having
to go in that direction.
So four out of the six school districts that I represent
are in the 80th percentile of free and reduced meals. I think
these are sort of old numbers because some of my school
districts have recognized that there are a lot of kids whose
parents are not applying for this free or reduced lunch, so it
is easier for them, it makes more sense, to just feed
everyone--which I am thrilled that they have taken that
attitude, to just feed everyone.
But I wonder if, you know, our panelists could speak a
little bit about, you know, that issue.
The lack of graduation--our graduation rates, you know, are
horrific. I am ashamed to even, you know, call them out. But it
is a growing problem. And it is not the fault of our teachers,
you know, or our schools. It is the fault of society not paying
attention to this growing problem of the working poor. It is
not their problem; it is our problem.
So I wonder, starting with Ms. Reynolds, can you comment a
little bit, you know, around that? I know that you have said a
lot around this issue, but, look, we have an infrastructure
bill that the President has put before us. And, in that bill,
the women of Congress--I want you to know that we are demanding
that childcare be a part of that infrastructure bill. Because
if we don't put families and children ahead of everything, a
new road, a new bridge, you know, broadband isn't going to help
us get out of these poverty levels that we are seeing in our
communities.
So, with that, Ms. Reynolds, you know, if you can begin
this conversation, I would love to hear your comments around
that.
Ms. Reynolds. Absolutely. And I love so much about what you
said about prevention. We know prevention saves so much money.
And it is more than about money; it is about human dignity,
when we can prevent people from experiencing these traumatic
things that they experience that comes with poverty. So I love
the concept of prevention. I just want us as a country to be
brave enough to do it.
I love how you brought up childcare. And it just, for me,
really goes back to the point I made about the need for
comprehensive services. I mean, we are not a bunch of little
pieces; we are whole beings.
And probably the story that resonates the most with me
about what you are talking about is a woman that we had the
privilege to serve at Catholic Charities Fort Worth. Her name
was Perla. And Perla came into our organization because of a
very basic need. We said ``yes'' to that basic need, because,
again, if you don't take care of today, there is no tomorrow.
But then we also offered a longer-term journey out of poverty,
about understanding what Perla's hopes and dreams and her
bigger, brighter future was for her family.
And her bigger, brighter future was a dream of a black
suit. And I will never forget this, because Perla wanted a
black suit because she envisioned, at the end of the night,
sitting around her kitchen table with her husband and her son
and them being proud of her because of what she achieved that
day.
And so we set out at Catholic Charities to make Perla's
bigger, brighter future of a black suit happen. But it fell
short time and time again, because we would get Perla a job and
she would leave, we would get her a job and she would leave.
And so it would be really easy, if you were in a
relationship with Perla, to make a lot of assumptions, that
Perla is not real serious about that black suit. But the
reality was, Perla was very serious about that black suit, but,
you know, she didn't have a living-wage job at the time, and
she would drive to drop her son off at childcare, and she would
drop him off at a place that she did not feel comfortable with.
And like all of us mamas on this call, I can't imagine the
lump that formed in Perla's throat as she drove away, leaving
her son somewhere that she may not have felt like he was going
to be okay. And that was causing Perla to leave her job again
and again and again.
But, again, because Catholic Charities was in a
relationship with her, because they were doing life with her,
because Catholic Charities understood that poverty is not
just--you just leap out of it because you get some sort of
assistance but that it is a day-by-day walk to achieve that
bigger, brighter future, you know, they knew the details of
what was going on, and they were able to problem-solve with
Perla.
And so, in that specific case, they had Perla find a
childcare center that she couldn't afford but felt safe with,
and then they matched, dollar for dollar, the money for Perla
to be able to send her child there until Perla got to the place
where she could afford that on her own.
And I think, like, that this just brings up so many points
to me of: We have got to be comprehensive. We have got to be
individualized. We have to be in a relationship with people.
You are right, Ms. Torres, we can't, you know, have
families spending 2, 3 hours transporting back and forth. You
know, the family is the core of society, and it takes away so
much of that when we don't have those things in place.
So it is my belief that all of these things need to be
solved, but they need to come together in a comprehensive
solution so we can really support families toward a long-term
end goal of economic stability where they really are thriving
as families.
Mrs. Torres. So what you are saying is that, you know, in
essence, we really need a youth and family master plan for
America, one that recognizes, you know, public transportation,
you know, has to be a priority, one that recognizes, you know,
childcare and education and a livable wage and access to, you
know, healthcare.
You know, how do we do that? How do we find the courage,
the political courage, to say, you know, this 35-year-old who
is going to work every single day, maybe working two or three
jobs, is deserving of food stamps because the wage that that
person is earning, what that employer is willing to pay for
that job, isn't enough for them to provide for themselves or
even their families?
Ms. Curry, can you speak a little bit to that?
Ms. Curry. Yeah, absolutely. I feel like--just going back
to your previous question as well, I feel like there are so
many layers here to just peel back.
But, for me, you know, as a mom and coming from the
hospitality industry, it really comes back to the food for me.
Food is foundational. Food is nutrition. Food is healthcare, in
my opinion.
And so, for me, I feel like there are some missed dots that
need to be connected. And I feel like we are looking at it so
big-picture, that we need to look at the small picture, and I
think that there are some missing dots that we can connect here
to help drive the change.
You know, you spoke to some people's commutes in your
community being 2 to 3 hours, and that is between the hours of,
what, 3:00 and 8:00 you said. And then you talked about the
graduation rates. And so, in my head, for me, that goes back to
knowing the fact that, you know, children that are sitting
around the dinner table with their families, you know, are
having bigger, brighter futures because they are doing better
in school and having better education. And if these parents are
commuting and missing out on that opportunity to gather with
their children, something as simple as that to give them this
bigger, brighter future, that is so unfortunate. And it is
something that, again, is so easily solvable right there, but
how do we connect the dots with transportation and with
childcare and nutrition at the forefront to make the change?
And so, I mean, I have a lot of questions too. I know I am
not answering your question, but I do feel like--I just feel
like there are a lot of dots that need to be connected on that
front. And I am hoping that it is something that somebody on
this call can speak to, maybe Dr. James, from a nutritional
standpoint, just, you know----
Mrs. Torres. Yeah.
Ms. Curry [continuing]. Connecting those dots.
Mrs. Torres. Dr. James.
Dr. James. Yes. Well, you know, I think that, just to
answer that specific question, you know, statistically, we all
know that people who have lower income have lower health
status, and so do their children, because they are mere
beneficiaries of their parents' resources. And people who have
lower education also, you know, have lower health status and
also don't live as long as everyone else does.
And to sort of, like, get at that, I feel like the lowest-
hanging fruit always, at every turn, is to begin--particularly
as we talk about the smaller picture versus the larger picture,
the easiest thing is to ask the people who are living this
experience themselves, ask them--we don't have to sit around
and, you know, make assumptions and come up with things. We can
ask them. And they can tell us what it would take, you know,
for them not to have these issues and these problems. They
could tell us what it would take for them to be able to
literally just thrive.
And I think one of the things we would learn from that is,
we jump all over the subsidies, probably, and not use them as a
solution but, you know, more as a bridge. So I always, you
know, feel like we should start with the people; the people can
tell us.
And I also, you know, go back to this question of--I am not
so sure whether it generates any thought or whether it even
makes a difference, you know, when I ask a question like this,
but I think it is really, really important for us to ask
ourselves with everything that we intend to do--and I would
say, again, starting with asking people first, but whatever
solutions that we think are solutions they come up with, are we
making a different decision or creating a different intent than
we would choose for ourselves?
I think that is foundational. Because we know what we need
to thrive. So ask ourselves that to begin with, because that,
in and of itself, will, you know, tell us right away what the
intent is going to achieve, for sure.
So I don't think--you know, these things are basic, but I
don't think we generally think that way. So, you know, I think
it requires that sort of level of a thought process, a
transformation to thinking in that manner.
So just two basic things: asking ourselves that and asking
people with lived experience what it would take for them to be
able to thrive.
Mrs. Torres. Thank you for that.
And before I turn it back over to Chairman McGovern, I just
want to add and encourage my colleagues to, you know, shop at a
grocery store in the poorest part of your district. I often do
that. And, you know, I love to, you know, walk in and challenge
the management of those stores. You know, why is the bread next
to the beer? You know, why are certain things, you know, that
we know are not good for children, you know, next to, you know,
the candy aisle? You know, things like that. And why don't we
have, you know, access to more fruits and vegetables? You know,
there is a lot of, you know, canned items or, you know,
microwaveable food. I am not trying to say anything negative
around that, but--the balanced nutrition that kids need in
order to grow up healthy and be able to learn and do all of the
things that we are asking them to do.
Fresh food just isn't available for many of the people that
I represent. Supermarkets, you know, are far and few in between
in these neighborhoods. So we need to challenge the corporate
world also, corporate America, to invest in bringing fresh food
into our communities. You know, that is something that, you
know, we should not neglect in this conversation.
Community gardens are a great way to teach kids about
proper nutrition and to help them learn how to grow their own
food, but the reality is, that is not a reality. You know,
working people need to be able to go to the store and have
access to fresh fruits and vegetables, and that simply is too
big of a challenge in some of our communities.
So, with that, Mr. Chairman, thank you again for bringing
light to this issue, and I will yield back to you.
The Chairman. Thank you.
Mrs. Fischbach.
Mrs. Fischbach. Thank you very much. Thank you, Chairman
McGovern for putting this together. I really appreciate it.
And thank you to all of the witnesses. Lots of good
conversation, and I appreciate it.
And I appreciate Chairman McGovern said there is no silver
bullet. And we are hearing a lot of great programs, about a lot
of great programs. And Ranking Member Cole asked about maybe
some principles that we could use, you know, to really focus
things and how we could tailor it at the Federal level.
But one of the things that struck me is, I am hearing a lot
about local innovation. You look at Dr. James and the things
that are going on there. And my fear is that the Federal
Government isn't good at local innovation and that we really
need the guidance in order to make sure that we are allowing
that innovation to happen at the local level. Because that is
where--you know, Dr. James talked about talking to the people.
That is where you are talking to the people. And so we need to
make sure that we do provide that.
And so I am just kind of, I guess, throwing it out as maybe
a discussion, if anyone would want to respond. Maybe focusing
on those principles, what would make sense for us to be looking
at on the Federal level? And I understand the whole issue of
the holistic approach, but, maybe, how do we do that and create
the innovation?
Because there are wonderful programs. Ms. Reynolds talked
about a great program, and I know that when I was in the
Minnesota Senate we talked about those kinds of local programs.
And it never failed that, when we tried to make it go
statewide, it just didn't have the same oomph.
So I am kind of trying to find the answer to, how do we
make sure that we are continuing that innovation? And if
anybody would like to respond, I know that is kind of a big,
kind of, question, maybe more of a comment. But if anyone would
like to respond to that, I would love to hear it.
Ms. Curry. I would like to step in, and hopefully this
makes sense.
But, for me, it starts with agriculture. So with food
insecurity, I feel like the produce, the--all of the things,
they are already there. There is so much waste that happens
each year in the farming community. So the food is there that
could be distributed.
So, in my mind, it is, how can the Federal Government
incentivize these local farmers and agricultural communities to
get that produce and food to the right spots, to those food
deserts and to the places where people don't have that? Because
we can kind of bridge the gap there a little bit.
So it is, how do we incentivize, you know, the farming
community to get everything to the right places? Again, I am
all about connecting dots, so how do we connect those dots to
get the fruits and vegetables to the right place, and what
incentives can we give that community? I think that would be my
question.
Mrs. Fischbach. Thank you.
Ms. Reynolds. I would encourage rewarding successful
outcomes.
So one of the things--today, at LEO, we just launched a
cohort of seven new organizations who are local innovators in
topics of income poverty, asset poverty, topics of community
college completion, all sorts of things in all corners of our
country. And they are going through a 3-day process, which they
will learn all about impact evaluations and start designing
their research projects.
And these are organizations who, you know, are very local,
very determined to achieve a certain outcome, and want a
research shop to come and tell them about their impact. Because
they are, many times, social workers who got into this work
because they wanted to see change happen, and now they want to
understand if that change is what they think it is.
And so what I would say is that--what I would encourage is
that more and more Federal programs started pointing toward
evidence, that where evidence exists, using it, or where
evidence doesn't exist, making sure that evidence is built.
And I think the way that is built is through the Federal
Government saying, ``This is what we want to achieve,'' and
then local innovators say, ``I will achieve this outcome,'' and
they run their intervention, but then it is tested by, again,
economists and other academics who can bring that research
rigor to the table.
So that is how I think about it.
Ms. Schanzenbach. And if I could just add a few more
things.
One is recognizing that having a strong foundation of, you
know, income support programs and Federal nutrition assistance
programs really helps the local innovators have the space to do
the work that they do best, which is understanding, you know,
how to address the root causes of poverty. But they are much
more stretched if there is a line around the corner, where
everybody just needs sort of a basic amount of food.
And so, when we are building on top of, you know, strong
basic programs, then we can do the innovation, we can do the
studies, you know, we could have the White House conference
where we share ideas and, you know, sort of, learn best
practices and share knowledge.
Mrs. Fischbach. Thank you. I appreciate that.
And then just one other question, and I will throw it out
to everybody. But where do you see the role of the private
sector in some of this, I guess? Because we are talking a lot
about the Federal Government coming in and doing different
things, but there has to be a role for the private sector.
Dr. James. Well, I would like to just add one thing to
answer that question.
As a hospital, we realize that hospitals can't achieve
these things alone. And so we actually have not achieved them
alone. We have recognized that it requires multisector
partnerships to be able to do this, and, you know, partnerships
among not only hospitals--which is kind of unprecedented, but
the hospitals in our city have invested together as anchor
organizations that actually belong to a D.C.-based organization
called Healthcare Anchor Network that focuses on building more
inclusive, sustainable local economies--but also working with
banks. You know, we have worked with JPMorgan Chase, for
example, to create an ecosystem in an area that has
traditionally been disinvested, to create opportunities for
ownership of businesses and equity ownership in these
businesses and this type thing.
And also philanthropy. You know, we also, you know, talk
to, you know, people who are philanthropically oriented to help
build this thing.
And government. I would say, city and State government as
well, you know, we have worked with them as well. And, in fact,
that program, that is what I just referenced about JPMorgan
Chase. That is a multisector project that we are doing, and the
city is very much a part of it. It is the Department of
Economic Development, you know, from the city of Boston, for
example, and other hospitals and people who are involved in
career training and financial literacy for people.
So I would say multisector partnering, to answer your
bigger question, multisector partnering is the best way to
leverage resources and assets to achieve common goals.
Ms. Curry. I would like to second what Dr. James said. It
is really not about reinventing the wheel, because there are so
many small local places doing great things. So it is really
about helping to amplify those strategies and structures that
are already in place.
Ms. Schanzenbach. I had a few other things that the private
sector plays in this space.
So, for example, in my work with the Greater Chicago Food
Depository, I know that we send our trucks out to deliver food
to the local food pantries. And then, on their way back, they
stop by participating restaurants and stores that have fresh
foods that they discard at the end of the day.
Well, they don't discard them anymore. They give them to
us, and then we repurpose them, getting them out. So that is
one great example.
Of course, lots of grocery stores make substantial
donations to food banks, food pantries, especially when the
expiration dates are getting close but aren't here yet. So, of
course, the food is still safe.
But the grocery stores know what they need to do to keep
the food moving. And they have been very generous. They have
been a tremendously important partner in terms of making sure
that people get fed.
Mrs. Fischbach. Thank you very much.
And, Mr. Chair, I yield back.
The Chairman. Thank you very much.
Mr. Perlmutter.
Mr. Perlmutter. Just quickly. I appreciate the questions
that have been asked and the panelists' testimony today. And I
am taking away from this two things--or several things. But a
holistic view of the individual, the person and their family
and what has got them in this position.
And, I mean, the Chairman has started off with a gigantic
subject, which is hunger. And, in effect, we have expanded that
in a number of ways beyond that discussion. But I am looking at
it as a holistic kind of approach, housing and poverty, income,
and food.
I agree with Norma, food insecurity kind of glosses over
what I feel is the question of hunger.
So holistic view, holistic view of how to approach it with
a Federal overlay, State and local government, private sector,
individuals, charities, to try and as efficiently as possible
bring relief here. So that is the second piece.
Ms. Schanzenbach, you raised Milton Friedman, who I never
really put him in this category. And so I am kind of interested
to ask you that, because I have always thought of Milton
Friedman as there is no such thing as a free lunch, a pretty
rough character who was not particularly--I never even thought
of him in these terms of hunger.
So could you expand on that a little bit?
And, with that, I would like to yield my limitless time
after that to whoever comes after me.
Ms. Schanzenbach. Yeah. You know, I really do promise I
have my students read ``Capitalism and Freedom.'' One of the
last chapters is all about, how would you design an antipoverty
program?
And he takes a step back and thinks about incentives and
how do we make sure that as we are phasing out benefits--
because we do have to phase them out eventually.
We call that the old iron triangle, that if you give them
to everyone it costs a lot more money, and so you have got to
phase them out at some rate. And so he thinks about what is the
rate at which we should phase it out.
You might have heard of he called it the negative income
tax. And in fact, during the Nixon administration they ran some
real randomized controlled experiments on the negative income
tax, found some really important findings from that, that it
did some real good.
And then I really will say that a lot of our programs are
based on that same sort of foundational way to design programs,
and it works.
Mr. Perlmutter. Well, all I can say is you are a lot nicer
than Milton Friedman. So you are putting a nice component to
sort of his economic principles, where I think there are two
things going on here. Milton Friedman would be more of a
monetary politicist. He just focused on particular incentives.
But there also has to be setting these goals and directing
it in a fiscal way, which then can put some power behind the
incentives, that this is the direction we want to go. And I
know the Chairman's goal here is let's eradicate hunger. And it
is going to take about everything we have got to do that.
And I know in a wealthy country like ours we should be able
to do it. But it really is going to take a good look at the
individual and a holistic approach involving all of government,
the private sector, and hospitals, where there are good ideas.
So I am going to yield back to the chair, but if Ms.
Scanlon wanted to grab my time or--I don't want to give it to
Mr. Morelle, because he will use it forever. I will yield back
to the chair.
The Chairman. So I should say to the witnesses, Mr.
Perlmutter is kind of joking about his limitless time. But as
you probably have figured out by now, the Rules Committee is a
little bit different than other committees. In other
committees, questions and answers are within 5 minutes, which
is good and bad. It is good because you get the hearing over
with. It is bad because sometimes you can't have the kinds of
conversations that we are having here today. And I think these
conversations are incredibly important.
And, again, the Rules Committee, every bill that comes to
the floor goes through us. We are like, I don't know, like the
Wizard of Oz, no one quite knows what we all do here. But the
bottom line is that we bring everything together. And so we are
the perfect committee to kind of head this effort up.
And, again, I go back to the White House conference. There
are lots of different ideas that are being talked about here
today. Ms. Curry talked about connecting the dots, which is
incredibly important. It is hard to connect the dots in the
system that we have, because we only talk about little bits and
pieces of this, depending on what committee you are on.
And so that would be the hope of the White House
conference. Similar to the select committee that George
McGovern and Bob Dole were on, the White House conference could
be that vehicle to connect the dots to bring all this together
and to develop a road map that involves everybody. I mean, not
just government, the private sector, medical institutions,
educational institutions, everybody. And so I appreciate that.
So I am now happy to yield to Ms. Scanlon of Pennsylvania.
Ms. Scanlon. Thank you so much, Chairman McGovern. As you
know, I have been really looking forward to this hearing.
I am sorry. I am just pulling things up as I am bouncing
between too many hearings. So I just need one second.
So I have had a fair amount of engagement in this area over
time, working with community gardens and local food banks. I
was on a school board where we were implementing the 2010
nutrition regulations for school breakfasts and lunches.
And I represent Philadelphia, which is the poorest of our
large cities. And, therefore, I think the statistics
prepandemic were that we had one in four people in our city
were hungry. So this is a longstanding issue for the region
that I represent.
Obviously, during COVID-19 our food banks have seen a huge
increase--I think 60 percent is the figure that we see--a huge
increase in need, with a lot of people having to turn to food
banks for the first time ever.
Since the pandemic began, I have made a point of attending
food drives, food distributions, and farm markets just about
every week or weekend in our district. So I have been able to
talk to a lot of our constituents as well as people who are
doing what they can to try to meet this need. But, as Dr. James
suggested earlier, for many people dependency on food banks has
become a constant even prepandemic.
We have great local organizations that have been fighting
hunger in the Philadelphia area, folks like the Greater
Philadelphia Coalition Against Hunger, Philabundance, which
began as an organization that collected food from corporations
and other places that had excess food to distribute it, but now
is our major food bank in the region. And then we have had
Delaware County Human Services and Citizen Corps. Almost every
weekend they have a food drive drive-thru where the local food
banks come, open the back of their car, take what they need,
and then go use it.
I have got a constituent, Desiree' LaMarr-Murphy, who runs
a food pantry in her backyard every week for her neighbors.
So we are really grateful to all those folks who have
stepped up, but we need to address the underlying issues, as we
have been talking about here today. We need additional funding
for the food banks. We need to make sure that the safety net is
there and working when people need it.
And I am really encouraged by the way we have been able to
implement programs throughout this pandemic, whether it was
increasing SNAP benefits, providing summer lunches to students
who wouldn't otherwise have access to food, expanding the child
tax credit, and taking some of these other measures that I
think do need to be made permanent.
So, obviously, as a school board member, I have had a
strong interest in the school lunch, school breakfast program,
what we can do to make sure that is more nutritious. And I am
concerned about the fact that we saw some rollback in those
regulations in the last couple years. But there are additional
issues we need to introduce there.
And I am also interested in the WIC program. I am a member
of the Black Maternal Health Caucus. And we know that the U.S.
has such a terrible track record, much worse than any of our
peer nations, with respect to maternal mortality. And I
understand there are some things we could do with WIC that
might help address some of those issues.
The good news is we have a base to work from, the work that
was done 50 years ago, and programs like SNAP and WIC do exist
and give us someplace to start, which is great.
Dr. Schanzenbach, can you talk a little bit about how WIC
and the child tax credit may be helpful with respect to the
issue of social determinants of health, maternal mortality, and
infant hunger?
Ms. Schanzenbach. Yes. So we absolutely know that that
early life period, so from in utero through age 3 or 5, is just
extremely important. It is extremely important for brain
development. Our number one priority, frankly, should be
protecting people in that age range, especially in times of
economic downturn.
And let me say clearly, we did an exceptionally poor job of
that during COVID. We know that that is important and,
nonetheless, we let rates of hunger increase more for families
with kids.
But we do have programs. I am extremely excited about the
potential for the child tax credit, which we think will halve
child poverty next year.
And another feature of that which will be really useful is
that it is paid out on a monthly basis. And so that means that
when families sort of get into a bind at the end of the month,
they are going to still have money. They don't have to wait
until their next tax payment in February or March. So I think
that is going to do some real good.
Now, let's talk about WIC for a minute. There is a lot, of
course, to admire about this program, but I do think that it is
in need of some modernization or some incentives, frankly.
So it does a fantastic job with making sure that infants in
the United States have access to the formula or the breast milk
that they need. Participation rates are very high. Something
like 80 percent of infants who are eligible participate.
But where it falls short is both in those prenatal
conditions, which we know that if maternal nutrition is
adequate the baby is going to be born at healthier birth
weight. There are all sorts of health problems down the road
that get sort of headed off if mom is in good health.
And then, similarly, participation rates really drop off
dramatically as kids get age 1, 2, 3, and 4, even though we
know how important it is to protect kids in that age range from
hunger.
And furthermore, there is this gap. So you age out at WIC
on your fifth birthday. Sometimes you are not in kindergarten
for another couple of months. And so there is just nothing,
even though we know how preciously important this time is.
So I think it is in my comments in the record. It is past
time to set up performance standards for WIC. And we can let
States and local areas figure out how to address why is
participation falling off so much. But some incentives I think
will go a long way there.
Ms. Scanlon. Thank you.
I think you also wrote some about SNAP and the need to work
on recalculating the amounts that are necessary to produce or
to put healthy food on people's tables. Can you talk about that
a little bit?
Ms. Schanzenbach. Oh, yes. Thank you for that question.
So we are in the midst of rethinking the Thrifty Food Plan.
You might remember that Congress ordered the Department of
Agriculture to take a look at the Thrifty Food Plan as part of
the last farm bill, and they sort of dragged their feet a
little bit on that.
So let me just sort of paint a little bit of a picture for
you. Basically, no matter how hard they try, the Department of
Agriculture can't figure out a way to just make the numbers add
up, to sort of make you capable of purchasing a healthy diet
for the amount of money that they have. And so they try.
And so my favorite example is that the Thrifty Food Plan
calls for a family of four to drink over 20 pounds of orange
juice per week every week, and to top that off with five more
pounds of fresh oranges. I love orange juice, I am sure you do,
too. That is about five times what families actually consume.
Similarly, the plan calls for more than twice the normal
weekly consumption of milk, of potatoes, of rice, of bananas.
So it will go a long way to sort of have this Thrifty Food
Plan a more reality-based plan.
Another one of my favorite examples is it assumes that it
costs the same amount to feed a toddler as it does a teenager.
And let me tell me you, I have two teenage boys in my house,
that is empirically false. Teenage boys are a lot more
expensive to feed.
I. know that the Department of Agriculture is working hard
on this, on let's relook at the Thrifty Food Plan and make it
more based in reality. And I think that is going to go a long
way to this goal that we have of ending hunger.
Ms. Scanlon. That sounds right. Having had teenage boys in
our house, I could not agree with you more.
You mentioned, I think several people have mentioned the
impact on academic performance for when children are hungry.
And we have talked a little bit about in the K through 12
context.
But I have got 19 colleges and universities in my district,
and I had not realized before getting into this line of work
what an issue it is to have hunger on college campuses and the
fact that most of our colleges now have to have a food pantry
to keep people fed.
Have you looked at that issue at all?
Ms. Schanzenbach. I agree that that is extremely important.
It harkens back to that 1968 documentary, ``Hunger in
America,'' that the chairman started by quoting from. I will
always remember that one of the quotes from that was that the
mind comes in second when the belly is empty.
And so, to be sure, we see that having access to SNAP,
having more consistent access to SNAP, all of those things mean
that kids do better in school.
So when it comes to colleges, there are just a lot of
thorny issues around that. It is definitely the case that the
college rules for SNAP are antiquated and just aren't
reflecting the fact that many people are going back to college.
It is not just 18- to 22-year-olds who are in college anymore.
A large fraction are over age 25. Even 10 percent, I think, are
over age 40.
And so I do think that we need to take a careful look at do
we have those right. I know that there was some change in some
of the relief packages.
But we need to sort of take that on more systematically,
because the last thing we want is for people not to finish
their degrees, which can then be a path to sort of better jobs,
more stability, because they can't feed their stomach in the
very short run.
Ms. Reynolds. And if I could just add one point to that
comment, is that there has been a growing body of evidence over
the last decade on what it takes to get people to persist and
to complete their college degree.
I think that there have been about six RCTs that show
successful interventions that are working. And a common thread
is helping college students, low-income college students deal
with personal barriers, poverty obstacles that they are dealing
with.
And so where we have done a great job is in, like, getting
to the point of access. We just have so much further to go with
persistence and completion.
And so much of it is because, again, if you were in poverty
and you don't know how you are going to feed your child tonight
and you are in school, education is going to be the first thing
to go if you can't first take care of today's needs.
Ms. Curry. I would like to build on that a little bit and
just provide a little bit of perspective from the fact that, it
is true, every school should have some sort of a food pantry
when it comes to college education.
Because I think it is just ironic when you look at needing
to focus that food really is medicine, but it seems as though
it is easier for college students these days to have access to
an Adderall prescription rather than some brain fuel from their
local college food pantry.
So I think that really is something to look into.
Ms. Scanlon. Okay. Thank you.
Playing off the theme that food is medicine, I was going to
direct a question to Dr. James.
I know at CHOP, Children's Hospital in Philadelphia, a few
years ago they initiated a program, yet another PPP program for
my congressional colleagues, but this one is the Prescription
Produce Program. So trying to address nutritional needs of
children by prescribing produce and other healthy foods to
them.
I that related to some of the things you are doing in your
program, Dr. James?
I think you are muted.
Dr. James. Thank you. I am sorry.
I at least one of them for sure, and as well as the food
pantry, because we have the Grow Clinic. And one of the things
it does is prescribe the sorts of nutrition-heavy foods that
children need to actually grow.
We have seen countless--every year we have a fundraising
event--seen countless ``look at me now'' stories, from a
picture of a little baby to a grown person in college even.
And part of what goes along with that program is not only
providing people with access to those nutritional foods, but we
have, as I was mentioning earlier, a teaching kitchen that
actually helps people to prepare those types of foods, and
actually not only in one way of preparing it.
We have the most diverse patient population in our city.
And so there are ways of teaching people and orienting them to
actually prepare these healthy foods in their own cultural
sorts of ways as well.
So we first of all provide them with access to these
nutritional foods, and then also help them with learning about
how to prepare them. So it sort of runs the entire gamut.
Ms. Scanlon. One thing that kind of has masked some of the
hunger issues in our country is we also have this obesity issue
moving forward. Can you speak a little bit to how someone could
be obese but not be getting adequate nutritional food?
I mean, we have seen in the school lunch context that as we
rolled out healthier alternatives, it started to address some
of the obesity issues, because kids were eating better and not
eating so much junk.
Can you talk to that link?
Dr. James. Obesity is complex. It is a really complex
thing. First of all, what might be considered obesity in one
culture may not be considered obesity in another culture.
And so we create these sort of standards by which we
measure people. And in some healthcare settings, the honest
truth, they judge people. And it is not really good, because
the patients feel that.
I actually saw it, I saw a doctor tweet about that the
other day, about how she herself was not enjoying being a
doctor because of the perceptions people have about obesity.
And she considered herself that, I guess.
So I think it is that, that is first of all. I mean, I
actually once did a study on that in our emergency department,
asking people whether or not they considered themselves obese,
first of all. And I know I am not getting to your answer--your
question yet, but I will.
We were asking people whether or not they considered
themself obese, and then we measured their BMIs and things like
that. And there were huge discrepancies in what people
considered as obese and not based on culture.
And the other thing I asked people was would they ever be
interested in exercising, learning about health and fitness and
this type thing. And 85 percent of the respondents said they
would absolutely be interested in those things if they could
just manage the stress in their lives first. And those things
were all focused on, like, food insecurity, housing insecurity,
lack of resources to be able to even prioritize their health.
And so a lot of the things that people have access to, to
eat, to answer your question, they are just things that aren't
things that add nutritional value. They may be things that just
pack on calories. They may be things that are just like heavy
in like carbohydrates, heavy in sugars, and this type thing.
And, listen, I have always had this notion in my head,
actually it is a mantra, and it is, given any opportunity,
barring things like with the exception of mental illness and
substance use disorder, given any opportunity, people will not
choose suffering. And so there is always a reason for these
things. But we just have to understand and take the opportunity
to understand what the reason is, just by asking people
themselves.
Ms. Scanlon. I suspect you may agree with a pediatrician in
Philadelphia who wrote an op-ed a little over a year ago. He
said that a friend asked me the other day what would do the
most to improve the health of the children he sees in his
clinic, and he said, raise the minimum wage.
And it speaks to these other issues, the fact that people
have so much on their plate and they can't afford the housing
or the medication, and it is just this cascade of things,
including food insecurity. So I have found that something I
cite quite a bit.
Going back to Dr. Schanzenbach, one of the things, you were
mentioning reducing barriers and access to nutritious food. And
that is something we tried to work on over the summer, trying
to make the ties between farm markets and our local
populations, making sure that people could use SNAP and EBT at
the farm markets, that folks could get deliveries from the farm
markets.
Are there other things in that reducing barriers to access
that we should be looking at?
Ms. Schanzenbach. I think sort of besides expanding access
and farmers markets and things like that and delivery--both of
those I think are pretty first order--another is, about a
decade ago the Department of Agriculture ran a randomized
controlled trial, so really top-quality evidence, about what
happens when we give people a price break when they buy fruits
and vegetables. And so we will give them 30 cents back for
every dollar they spend.
So recognizing that cost of these have been increasing
disproportionately, lo and behold, maybe to no one's great
surprise, it increased the likelihood--or increased the amount
of fruits and vegetables that people buy.
I think that is more than ripe for primetime, and I would
love to see us implement that sort of on a large scale through
the SNAP program.
Ms. Scanlon. Ms. Curry, you have done a lot of work around
school food programs, and I spent some time in the trenches on
that one as well, whether it was trying to make sure that kids
who were using the free and reduced lunch and breakfast didn't
feel stigmatized, making sure that the quality of the food was
good, et cetera.
Can you speak to what you are seeing in that realm and how
we could do better?
Ms. Curry. Yes, absolutely.
So it is so interesting, speaking about obesity, Oakland
actually has high obesity rates and high rates of food
insecurity. And it seems so counterintuitive, but they are
definitely linked. And it is because healthy food is more
expensive than the other things that people have access to.
And so I think what you were speaking to is great with the
incentivizing. The 30 cents back for every dollar I think is a
great thing to implement.
But what we have found to be really helpful for us to
change that is to, working with our--getting these local
organizations like ourselves to work with the local farmers to
actually bring the produce to the schools and the different
school districts and to the people in the communities that way,
and just kind of have this direct-to-consumer model I think has
been very helpful for us on the ground.
And we find that people, they want the healthy foods. They
just don't have access to them or can't afford them. And so
kind of bridging that gap I think has been really helpful, in
our eyes, and we have found people to be really grateful for
the help.
Ms. Scanlon. You also had some interesting statements in
your statement about philanthropy cannot solve everything, and
I have certainly been concerned about that, attending food
drives where the pantries that show up at those food drives are
dependent on whatever happens to come in that day.
Can you speak to that a little bit?
Ms. Curry. Absolutely. So you are saying that people
receiving whatever comes in that day. Yeah, absolutely. We are
completely dependent upon people volunteering and showing up to
help and to really be boots on the ground. And people kind of
take what they can get, and that is the sad truth of it.
But we have been fortunate that we are here in California
and have had some amazing, like, local farmers and dairy
providers come and help.
And we have also implemented having our local hospital,
Kaiser Permanente, have a huge help. And I have found that to
be extremely helpful from both a mental health perspective for
the community and nutrition.
And so I would encourage us to figure out how to connect
other local nonprofits with their local hospitals, because I
feel like it makes a huge difference in amplifying.
And I think awareness is a huge thing, too. A lot of people
don't realize that the help is there. And so figuring out how
to raise more awareness about the help that is available to the
community I think is really important. And for us, partners
like Kaiser and our local food bank have really, really helped
in doing that.
So, again, I hate to repeat myself, but really connecting
those dots on the small things has been so important for us
from the ground level up.
Ms. Scanlon. And I think that goes back to the barriers
issue, and particularly when we have had to rely so much on
internet and not everybody has access.
But that would keep me going on for a lot longer. So thank
you very much, and I will yield back.
The Chairman. Thank you.
Before I yield to Mr. Raskin, I just want to ask unanimous
consent to put into the record a statement from Luis Pedraja,
who is the president of Quinsigamond Community College in my
hometown of Worcester, Massachusetts.
[The information follows:]
[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
The Chairman. He wrote to tell me how students are facing
food insecurity today at levels obviously compounded by the
COVID pandemic. And let me quote. He says:
``Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, a 2018 study done by the
Wisconsin HOPE Lab found that 49 percent of students had low or
very low food security and went hungry on a regular basis, 11
percent were homeless and 54 percent were in an insecure
housing situation.
``Shockingly, 7 percent of students experience hunger,
housing and homelessness together, all three, while 66 percent
experience one of these basic needs insecurity, and the
pandemic has only compounded these concerns.'' End of quote.
So nobody is immune from this crisis and we have to act.
And by the way, this statement was submitted through the
Rules Committee's new online portal at rules.house.gov. I want
to encourage anybody who is watching this today to take a
moment to log on and share your story, any research you have,
or whatever you think we should know as we continue this work.
And, again, I think the conversation has been really
superb, but it all points to the same thing: We have a hunger
problem in this country. And it involves not just one program
or not just the government. It involves all of us.
And, again, part of what we are trying to do here is to
highlight some of the challenges, but also move toward, again,
connecting the dots, as Ms. Curry says, because I think that is
how we solve this.
This is a big problem. It is going to require some big
thinking. And we have to get everybody who has a role together
and figure out what our road map is going to be.
So, having said that, I am now happy to yield to the
gentleman from Maryland, Mr. Raskin.
Mr. Raskin. Thank you, Chairman McGovern, and thanks for
convening this excellent discussion.
And I want to express my appreciation to the panelists for
their really terrific contributions.
My congressional district in Maryland is in certainly the
top 25 percent of congressional districts in terms of wealth,
in Montgomery County, Maryland, in Frederick County, and
Carroll County. But I have been very focused on this issue, and
we have seen some terrible outbreaks of hunger and poverty over
the course of the COVID epidemic.
And one way of seeing it is with a group that I have worked
with for a long time called Adventist Community Services of
Greater Washington, which is not far from my house. They
basically went, during the course of the first several months
of the crisis, they started serving ten times the number of
people as they had seen a year before.
And then whole new groups arose. In our school area, we
call it the Takoma Park Middle School Cluster, a new food
support group was founded by my friend Wendy Kent. They started
by serving 33 families a month, and they went to serving
thousands of meals a month, because the demand was so
overwhelming, with people skipping meals and not able to feed
their families nutritious lunch and dinner.
So it is a serious problem even in areas that sounds to you
like they might not have a problem, like Montgomery County,
Maryland.
The question that I want to ask, given this amazing
outpouring of human compassion and solidarity that we saw, not
just in Montgomery County but in Frederick County and Carroll
County and throughout, is whether we should continue to depend
on that.
In other words, do we want to work with and mobilize these
networks that have formed in our area around school clusters,
or is that a manifestation of the failure of our broader food
systems and a failure of the government?
So I am just curious as to how you integrate the emergence
in civil society of efforts to transfer grocery gift cards and
canned goods and fruits and vegetables from farmers market
directly to people who are hungry versus trying to think of it
as a more systemic issue.
And I don't know, Dr. Schanzenbach, maybe we could start
with you.
Ms. Schanzenbach. Yeah. You know, great questions. And it
was certainly heartening to see just the overwhelming response
when needs surged so much.
I do think that we will want to continue to nurture these
networks, but the expectation and hope is that, as the economy
continues to improve, as we sort of fix some of the
shortcomings of SNAP, just the pressure will be taken off of
those.
And so then we can really turn to thinking about some of
the more fundamental causes of why you are having trouble
making ends meet, what can we do to be more sustainable here.
But I do think, of course, we want local organizations, we
want grassroots people to be part of the solution. I think we
are going to need them to be part of the solution.
Mr. Raskin. Yeah.
Ms. Schanzenbach. But they are going to be better on top of
SNAP.
Mr. Raskin. Well, and, Ms. Curry, I wonder if you would
reflect for a moment about the dynamics of the kinds of things
that have happened in my community, and I am sure it is not
unique across the country.
It is wonderful to be part of food drives where people are
bringing food, people are bringing canned goods, people are
contributing money. There have been, like, drive-thrus where
people come up, we hand them bags of groceries, and so on.
Is that ultimately what anti-hunger initiatives should look
like in America, or do we want something that is more systemic
and more structural and more sustained to be taking place?
And what are the dynamics in terms of how people feel about
it, both the people who participate in giving and the people
who participate in receiving? Is it better to have that kind of
face-to-face thing? Is it embarrassing? I am just curious.
Ms. Curry. Right. Right.
I definitely think that programs like ours and many others
should definitely continue going forward with the added benefit
of the strengthened SNAP program.
But I would say I haven't seen embarrassment, as you said.
I have seen more graciousness and gratefulness from a family
perspective, especially during this time.
And what happened here was a pandemic. So we had to do what
we had to do and get things to people the way that we needed to
get them as fast as we could. And so that model really worked
for us.
And with our partnership with the World Central Kitchen,
who has implemented this same program in many different places,
it just works, and it has that back-end benefit of helping the
hospitality industry as well. And so that part of things has
been really great structurally.
But I think systemically, absolutely, it would make more
sense to have more structure there. But I think that there is a
world where both things can live, because we are not going to--
until we see this completely end, I feel like we are going to
need all of the help that we can get and then some.
And when this pandemic ends, we are not going to see,
unfortunately, this go away right away. If anything, I think it
will get worse, a little bit worse, before it gets better,
because we will be in that rebuild stage.
So I think it is really important to have strong forces
behind the hunger initiative to make sure that we are taking
care of everyone until we get to a place where we know that the
SNAP and WIC programs that are put into place are truly
working, if that answers your question.
Mr. Raskin. Yes. And I want to thank you for what all of
you are doing. I want to thank Adventist Community Services in
my area, and I want to thank Wendy Kent from the Takoma Park
Middle School Food Support Cluster, and I want to thank
everybody who has stepped up at this moment.
And let's just hope that we will be able, through these
different legislative initiatives, to strengthen the overall
resiliency of our nutrition network in the country.
I yield back, Mr. Chairman.
The Chairman. Thank you very much.
I want to ask unanimous consent to insert into the record a
letter from the Food Bank Coalition of Massachusetts in support
of today's hearing and the need to convene a White House
Conference on Food, Nutrition, and Hunger, and our goal to end
hunger in the United States by 2030.
[The information follows:]
[GRAPHIC NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
The Chairman. I am now happy to yield to Mr. Morelle.
Mr. Morelle. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, first of all, not
only for convening this hearing today, which is so important at
this point in our Nation's history, but your long history of
working on this. And I am very, very grateful to you for your
leadership and to all the witnesses who have stayed now through
a couple of hours-plus answering our questions. And I think the
questions have been great. I think the subject is important.
I actually was going to ask something about hunger, but I
have been inspired by the chairman's call to talk about this in
a bigger way. And I was also inspired by Ms. Curry's story
about Christina, I think she said the young woman's name is. So
if I can just take a moment.
Four years ago I was the majority leader of the New York
State Assembly and we had just come through a bruising State
budget battle. We pass our budget, adopt it in April. And what
I was frustrated by was how many different groups, well-
deserving, well-meaning, came to ask for money. And I represent
Rochester, New York, upstate New York, second-highest child
poverty rate in the country, sadly.
But I was reflecting on my frustrations. There were so many
people, sometimes in the same space, asking for State funds.
And I was thinking about, boy, we are doing so well. All these
groups would come and say, we get so much return on our
investment. If you invest a dollar, you get three dollars back
in avoided cost.
And I thought, all these services are great, all these
organizations will claim to be so successful, but in some ways
we are not helping people. It is just people are getting worse.
Our situation in our community was getting worse. And I thought
it is like the organs of the body are doing well, but the
patient is dying.
And so I was haunted, too, by a story, and this is the
story part. My wife was an English language arts teacher in
seventh grade. And we were near the end of the school year this
time of year, and she had come home talking about this boy
Dasani. And Dasani had been one of her favorite students, 12
years old, a lot of personality, very smart, but there was some
issues in Dasani's life.
And she came home one day--and she had talked about him a
lot, so I knew who she was talking about. She said, ``Dasani
got suspended from school today.''
And I said, ``Oh, I am sorry to hear that. What happened?''
She said, ``Well, he got in a fight with some other
students because they were teasing him. He has been sleeping on
the playground and sneaking into school buildings at night
rather than going home.''
And I said, ``Gee, that is unfortunate. Why? Why would he
be doing that?''
And she said, well, his older brother, who my wife had also
taught, had been killed in a gang-related shooting, and the
mom--she was a single mom--was having mental issues dealing
with her son's death and the violent way in which he died.
So I said, ``What is going to happen to him?''
And she said, ``I don't know.'' And she never saw him
again.
So I was haunted by that story and haunted by what had been
this bruising State budget battle. So I convened in my office
at the time the local United Way, my two major hospital
healthcare systems, and the Rochester City School District,
which had all kinds of challenges. It is an urban district,
very, very poor achievement rate.
And I said to them, I don't understand why, as adults,
well-meaning, caring adults, with a lot of services, why we
have these terrible results and why we don't integrate social,
health, and educational services. Why a classroom teacher
doesn't know that a child that they have and their family, the
fact their family have housing issues, have food insecurity.
When you go to discharge folks from the emergency room at
our hospitals, I would hear the emergency room attendants tell
me, ``We didn't discharge the person, not because of a medical
reason. We don't know what is going to happen to them and they
are on the precipice of falling apart.''
So I challenged these four or five people gathered around
my room.
So 4 years later, I just want to talk about what we have
done in Rochester, New York. We have now 50 organizations that
meet every month for several hours. I have work groups with
hundreds of people. We have a staff of about six, seven, it
continues to grow. Because I convinced the State of New York to
allow me to start creating a pilot program in Rochester to
start integrating services, health, education, and welfare, not
to create a single program. There are plenty of silos. It is
just the silos aren't connected in any meaningful way.
So we have been at it for 4 years. We are about to enter
into a big agreement. We are funded by the State of New York,
gave us $15 million to integrate services.
So we have built a shared language protocol, an ecosystem.
We have gotten all these different agencies in the health,
social, and educational space to agree to share data with one
another. And we are building, again, no new services. It is
really about alignment and integration.
But out of that, what we hope to build--and we have got
pilots we are about to implement--a holistic, human-centered
design, with a big lens towards racial equity. We have an
Equity Review Board that looks at everything. Even the
algorithms we are building with IBM, who is our selected
vendor, we brought in a company to look at the algorithms to
make sure there is not racial bias in the algorithms. We have a
huge community engagement piece to this.
But the frustration--and this really gets to what the
chairman was talking about--is when I described it--part of the
value I bring to this--so I co-chair this with another longtime
friend who is a member of the State Board of Regents and is in
the healthcare space.
And so I bring these folks together and I spend hours on
this every month. And the real kind of reason I am there is I
don't know that much about healthcare policy or educational
policy or housing or hunger. But they will come to meetings, if
then the majority leader of the assembly convenes them or now
the Congressman convenes them.
And so what I do is I troubleshoot. When one of the
hospitals is thinking maybe they are going to design something
that deals with social determinants, I called the head of the
hospital. I said, ``You have been in these meetings, you know
this is important, you are committed to this collective work.''
So they will go and make sure that people are brought in, and
we have continued. That is why we have hundreds of people now
working on work groups.
So we are on the cusp. It is really hard. I mean, we talk
about this in rooms like this, virtual or otherwise. And it
sounds easier than it is, but I know all of you know how really
difficult it is. You deal with egos. You deal with programs
that are designed for 10- to 12-year-olds, but then when you
become 13 you might still be hungry and you might still be
homeless, but you are no longer in that program. So we don't
have really good funding streams.
But the worst part this--and, Jim, you mentioned this, so
that is why I am getting so animated about it--is if I weren't
in that room I am not sure it would work well in Rochester, New
York, because I sort of say I am the muscle in the family, I
make sure everybody is at the meeting.
Now they have gotten to the point after 4 years where they
work together. There is faith. There is trust. We are all part
of this belief system that we are going to change the world and
we are going to have the first fully integrated health, social,
and educational services. And the hospitals talk to social.
And there will be no what we call warm handoffs, and no one
will fall through the cracks. You are at one settlement house
and then your family moves, and now no one knows what happened
to you. Whatever information about you while you were at the
settlement house was great, except you have moved to a new
neighborhood and no one knows who you are and no one knows what
interventions have happened in your life or your family's life.
So I relate this not because I am pessimistic. I am very
optimistic. I mean, we are doing some things. We have consulted
with San Diego 2-1-1, which is doing some great things. We know
about the project in Fort Worth, Ms. Reynolds, that you talked
about.
But I guess the question that I think we should all sort of
be contemplating is how to build--and maybe it is through--when
I talk to--I will just say this one other thing, then I will
get to the question. Sorry.
When I talk to the folks in the Ed and Labor Committee
staff, of which I am a member, or I talk to other folks in
public policy and I say to them, ``We really need to break down
barriers and bring people together in a holistic way,'' and I
think everybody sort of intuitively says, ``Boy, that is really
what we are all trying to do.''
But the way we design things in government and public
policy makes it almost impossible. I am going to have a fight
tomorrow with the State of New York about some requirements on
how we enter into this agreement with our integrator, because
they just don't--they helped me invent the program, they came
up with the funding, and they still don't know how to do this
because they are stuck in the old way.
So I guess the question is, maybe less for right now but
something to think about and help us with, is how to really
have a serious conversation about true integration. That those
silos that we have built, well-meaning people over decades and
decades because there was a problem they wanted to address, how
do we break it down? How do we create regional or State
approaches that really worry about a community but really at
the end of the day worry about the individual and the families?
Because for all the other things that we do, if we are
not--and moving people from crisis and the fragility that
poverty puts on people to--I heard the word ``self-
sufficient.''
I don't want to get people self-sufficient. I want them to
thrive well beyond self-sufficiency, so they are thriving, they
don't fall back into poverty, they don't fall back from--they
are out of the program for 2 weeks. They get a flat tire. They
lose their job because it is the third time they have been late
for work. They are now back in poverty again.
So we have got to do much more than just getting them over
some arbitrary line, the poverty line. We have got to get them
in a whole different place.
So sorry for the rambling, Mr. Chairman. I really apologize
for that. But this is something that I and so many people here
in town have dedicated themselves to. But it is tough. It is a
slog to even get people to think creatively about, how do we
break this down, how do we truly get to integrated, holistic
solutions?
With that, I am going to shut up. And maybe I can just ask
each of you to just offer a little thought about things that we
could do to make that better.
The Chairman. Why don't we begin with Dr. James.
Dr. James. Mr. Morelle, I just want to really congratulate
you on this really upstream, transformational way of thinking,
really focusing on root cause. I want to thank you for not
accepting the status quo but believing it can be better and
being willing to push that.
And then I like the notion of pushing toward equity. And
here is the thing about equity that I have discovered, is that
equity is really tricky. I like the way that you kept
emphasizing well-meaning people. We are, indeed, well-meaning
people, well-meaning.
And even as well-meaning people, when we don't or if we are
not able to recognize inequity when we see it, even when we
might be inadvertently participating in it, it is hard to
create something that reflects equity, because we don't know
what inequity looks like. And there have been some recent
examples of that, for example. So it takes a lot to actually
focus on equity first.
And so I would say that in this city right here the
hospitals have been working together really, really well,
especially since 2019, when we did a community needs health
assessment together. And then we created--what emerged from
those needs assessments became our community health improvement
plan. These are things that are required by the Affordable Care
Act every 3 years.
And so in achieving something that you are actually talking
about right now our goal and our aim was to push toward equity.
For our own hospital, one of the first things we did when
we decided that we would choose equity over charity exclusively
was to look inside ourselves, look at our policies and programs
and outcomes to see where we might be inadvertently
participating in things that reflect inequity.
And to nobody's surprise, of course, we found things,
because that is what we wanted, because that is the sort of
information we needed and insight we needed to be able to
choose a path that reflects equity.
But what I have found, particularly working in groups with
others, other organizations, other hospitals and things, is as
we are creating transformational types of initiatives, what I
have seen is that oftentimes you propose something and then
people will sort of like undo it, unravel it, take parts of it
away until they get it back to a place where they are
comfortable, and that is generally a place of inequity.
And so it is really hard, it is a challenge, it is a
challenge to get people to, like, shift their mindset on this
thing. But what you have to do sometimes is draw the line.
And in the beginning, I didn't realize what was happening.
I couldn't understand why people weren't getting it, why were
they pushing against this thing that clearly was a
transformation and would take us to a different place. But I
realized that it is inequitable, but they don't recognize it as
such. And so they are comfortable in this space of inequity,
the status quo.
And so that is when we really started to do things like,
honestly, as recently as this week, Monday, like drawing the
line and saying to people: This is what is happening here. You
probably don't recognize it, but I want you to realize what is
happening here. This is what you are doing. And I know you are
well-meaning and you don't mean to do this, but this is not
working and we have to push beyond this.
And so, I mean, that is what I would say. And I would just
encourage you please not to give up on it and not allow others
to take it back and lose the opportunity to create and capture
value in each and every human being you encounter, because that
is where the transformation lies and that is where the changes
in outcomes and data happen.
Mr. Morelle. Thank you.
Ms. Reynolds, I don't know if you had any comments. You
looked like you wanted to say something.
Ms. Reynolds. I do. I just have a few quick points, or
three points, really.
One, just congratulations on that focus on silos and
breaking those down. There is a huge problem in the industry at
every level, and I so appreciate that.
My biggest thought on that, which is kind of point number
two, is I think what is really needed in this space is that we
become extremely person-centered. Who is the end user? Who is
the person struggling in poverty? Because we have silos at the
Federal level, we have silos at the community level, and we
often, coming from a large multiservice organization, we have
silos within those organizations.
And I used to say all the time at Catholic Charities, it is
my job to make the accounting team and compliance team's work
extremely difficult, not easy. Because what was often so
tempting is you got a new funder to give you something or a
government grant or whatever it may be, and so you started a
new program, a/k/a a new silo, for a client to come into. And
so instead of it being the headache of accounting and
compliance, it shifted to the client, and that shift has to
change.
And then the last thing I just wanted to note is, do
remember, even though busting down silos, as you do that, take
it the step further and, even with all the well-intentioned
organizations you are pulling together, build evidence about,
are what are they doing really working.
I know when we built evidence at Catholic Charities Fort
Worth with the new WEE is a program of theirs but not sure this
is the right one WEE at LEO, there was so much I thought, I had
a hunch as a social worker was working and, frankly, it really
wasn't. And so having that evidence, that causal evidence,
really can make a difference.
And you should be really proud in your district, because
LEO has studies going with the city of Rochester on the earned
income tax credit program as well as Action for a Better
Community and Catholic Family Support Center, all on intensive
case management to move the needle on poverty. So you guys are
already off to an amazing start there.
Mr. Morelle. And I will say, Catholic Family Center, Action
for a Better Community, the city of Rochester, all part of our
systems integration work.
And you make a really good point, which is people forget
what we are trying to do. And trying to get the best practices
is tough, because--I hate to say this, it pains me--sometimes
poverty is big business for some people. And they are good.
``We are like good where we are. We are fine. It is good.''
Just it is the wrong thing and it doesn't focus on the outcomes
that we need to focus on.
So anyway, I appreciate everything people have done to
contribute to this and to all of your work. And, hopefully, we
will be able to meet again offline or at a different venue.
But thank you, Mr. Chairman. I will yield back.
The Chairman. Let me just say, Dr. Schanzenbach or Ms.
Curry, I don't know if they want to respond to your--are you
all--are we all set or----
Mr. Morelle. I didn't want to impose, but I would love to
hear if they have any comment.
Ms. Curry. Yeah, I will say something.
First of all, I think what you are doing and have
implemented already is just so incredible. And I just, like, as
a mom and an empath in general, just your story of your wife
and Dasani, it is just heart wrenching, and it makes me feel
like I just wonder if there was something that could be done.
You know what I mean?
We raise our children and tell them every single day: You
are unique, you are special, you are an individual. But then
the healthcare and the nutrition and the plans that are put in
place for them just aren't special or unique. They are just
very broad, and everybody is kind of thrown into a bucket. And
you are right, I think people need to be addressed on an
individual level.
So I wonder if there was some sort of database with all of
these local organizations that you put together, if there was
some database that they all could access to see people's charts
and their medical history and their mental health history and
have something that is accessible in each community, still on a
confidential level, but just so that it could be seen. I wonder
if that might help start change.
Because I do think about somebody showing up to the
hospital and not wanting to discharge them because you don't
know what they are going to do, it is true. And you don't want
to have to ask the question because nobody wants to unpack
their past again and go through their history and their record.
Mr. Morelle. I don't want to interrupt you, but that is a
great question. One of the things we do is there is going to be
a dashboard that brings together your health [inaudible] and
social. But the permission will be granted by the individual so
that no one will see the information that they are unwilling to
give.
But that is part of building this shared data ecosystem and
the shared language, so that a hospital worker knows what the
housing specialist is talking about because we have built this
shared language protocol.
And we also share the same--there is, like, several
domains, and we have all agreed on the empirical data which
would say this person is in crisis around housing or food or
proper age-appropriate development from a behavioral health
point of view.
So that is really important. And, yes, one of the things
that will make this work is everybody, basically the adults who
touch the lives of this child or adult, could be a senior
citizen in crisis, that they all have common data points that
they are working off of and this dashboard which--but, again,
because of privacy issues, it would be activated on someone's
smartphone or however that individual regulates who has access
to their information and their data. But it is a great point.
Ms. Curry. Yeah, I think that is great, and then it allows
each organization to address each person's needs as they come
through and they are able to filter through who needs what.
So I think that is great. So I feel like the model you are
building out then is great, and it is just about implementing
it into different communities.
Mr. Morelle. Yes. Thank you.
The Chairman. All right. Let me ask unanimous consent to
insert in the record a letter from Defeat Malnutrition Today
calling for action on the national level to combat older adult
food insecurity and malnutrition, which is, sadly, a growing
problem.
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The Chairman. And I also ask unanimous consent to insert
into the record a letter from the National Education
Association emphasizing the importance of providing healthy
school meals to all students at no charge to them.
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The Chairman. Let me now yield to the gentleman from
California, Mr. DeSaulnier.
Mr. DeSaulnier. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Really, thank you
for a terrific hearing. Thank you for your passion about this
subject matter.
And I also want to thank all of the panelists and invite
you to the San Francisco Bay area, to Oakland. I had the
pleasure of--Ayesha, I think you used to be a constituent, I am
told, when you lived in Walnut Creek, California.
But my wonderful friend and neighbor, Barbara Lee, who
represents Oakland, we have done a lot of things together in
the 80 corridor, in Richmond, California, and we have really
done some good work. And I would encourage you to come out
here. Good partnerships with the nonprofits, the Bay Area
Partnership amongst them.
And in that regard, like Mr. Morelle, when I was in my
previous life in the State legislature in California, at the
request of the Bay Area Partnership, I headed a task force that
was bicameral where we went around the State of California to
look at nutrition issues for kids in particular.
So if we are going to deal with hunger--I appreciate how
much time we have spent on this--is that we could focus
generationally.
And having had another career as a restaurant owner and
been engaged many years ago, owning a restaurant in Berkeley,
with school gardens and a colleague/competitor, Alice Waters,
at Chez Panisse. And I would invite you all to come to the
Martin Luther King Middle School in Berkeley, of which the Vice
President and I have talked about. Having grown up there, she
is very familiar with these programs. But that was about
letting kids have the tools.
So I remember being on this task force in a disadvantaged
community in South Central L.A. as we went around the State
talking to young persons on after-school programs--that we
funded, by the way, in a bipartisan way. Then Governor
Schwarzenegger was very supportive of these.
But I asked a young man who had been in gangs why he was
spending his time in after-school programs out in the garden,
learning to cook and learning about nutrition, not just food.
And he said, ``When I go home, my mom is a single mom, and I
get to teach her how to bake bread from scratch with the
ingredients I bring from the school in South Central L.A.''
So that to me is another anecdotal story that really
informs us about how we can make generational change.
Mr. Chairman, I think, to go to your comments and Mr.
Morelle's comments, in our hearing yesterday with Secretary
Buttigieg that you referred to, when I mentioned these silos--
and it is like I have to go to therapy when we start talking
about it, having been involved--but if we could be focused on
the clients with performance standards.
And we can look at other public health models. Teen
pregnancy. This country did a great job of informing young
people, particularly in disadvantaged communities. So we
dropped those for the betterment of everybody.
So we can take those models, focus on the client, and I
think we can really start to move the dial.
So to Ms. Curry, we have programs that work. And I am all
for starting new programs. But as we looked at this, look at
what the chairman of the Appropriations Committee was able to
do just in the child credit and the earned income tax credit.
We have got all kinds of research that shows that by doing
those together, we already have the infrastructure, we have
lots of benefit from that.
Similarly, we have infrastructure in this regard. And I
know in the Bay Area, and I am very familiar with these
programs, I have a high school in East Bay, Pittsburg High
School, it is a disadvantaged community. I have been out there
multiple times. Every Friday before COVID, every product, even
to those students, came from a farm within 50 miles of that
school, in an urban area, granted, closer to San Joaquin
Valley.
These are all farm-to-fork nutritional foods that give big
value. And to see young people in a community like that to
respond and have that value generationally I think is really
where we turn the dial in the long term, Mr. Chairman.
So maybe any of the panelists, just to respond to that, how
we can focus on the child and how we can support programs that
already work in communities.
And I would love, Ms. Curry, I know your work and your
passion. Some of your husband's teammates once teased me at an
event when you lived in Walnut Creek that your husband might
want to run for Congress. And I said, ``I am more worried about
your wife.'' But I think I would be supportive.
So if you could respond to that. Your experience informs so
much of this. And I would add my experience. And we partnered
with multiple superintendents of education.
And then for my colleagues, my predecessor who chaired the
Education and Labor Committee in the House, George Miller, for
40 years was so instrumental in this.
So we have got a lot of history is what I am trying to get
at. Let's bring these programs to scale and really show that
they can work, but also have performance standards and let the
community be active partners with that.
Ms. Curry.
Ms. Curry. That is exactly what it is. And when we launched
Eat. Learn. Play. it was the July right before that pandemic
hit that next January, February, and so we had to be boots on
the ground and learn very, very quickly.
But what we came to realize was that the infrastructure was
there and that there were amazing organizations doing amazing
things. And it really was about bringing people together to let
people know, ``Hey, so and so is providing produce over here,
and this organization is helping to scale jobs over here. How
do we bring them together and have this all make sense?''
And so really you are right, the infrastructure is there,
and it is about that awareness and the amplification of all of
the amazing things that are going on so that everybody can help
one another out in the community.
And that is really what we do with Eat. Learn. Play. And we
have seen that the model works. And we have a very scalable
model, I think, with a lot of facts and evidence to back it up.
So I would love for anybody here on this call today to reach
out to my team and I to hear more about it.
But I agree with you, the structure is there. It is just
how do we amplify it.
Mr. DeSaulnier. I am looking forward to getting the
chairman to leave Worcester, Massachusetts, which he loves
dearly and I spent 4 years of my life, to come out to the Bay
Area and see these programs.
Mr. Chairman, unless another panelist wants to respond, I
just want to thank you again. And, lastly, promise, we can save
so much suffering but also save a lot of money. We go upstream
and help these kids, they are hitting performance standards
throughout their lives, and their kids are going to be
significantly improved, whether it is educational retention or
their physical and emotional health.
Thank you, Mr. Chair. Unless any other panelists wanted to
quickly respond, I know we are near the end of the hearing.
The Chairman. All right. Okay. Before I yield to Ms. Ross,
let me ask unanimous consent to put into the record a statement
from the Root Cause Coalition in support of today's hearing.
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The Chairman. I am proud to say that I have worked with
this coalition since day one. Barb Petee, the executive
director, has been a friend and important partner in my work to
end hunger. Tom Dorney, the director, worked for our late
friend, John Lewis. I think of John often, and I am so grateful
for Tom's work. And I am looking forward to working more with
Barb and Tom as this project moves forward, and I appreciate
their support.
And now I would yield to Ms. Ross.
And thank you, Ms. Ross. I know you have been very patient
and you have been in other hearings. The floor is yours.
Ms. Ross. Well, this is an important issue, and it is worth
all of our time, not just today but going forward. And I want
to thank the chairman and the ranking member for their
bipartisan leadership on this issue.
For the panelists--and I will not take more of your time, I
know what it is like to sit for 3 hours and look straight ahead
and be attentive.
I do want to raise an issue, after I tell you a little bit
about my State, that I would like to add to the bucket of
systemic issues that the chairman hopefully will get a White
House conference on.
I am from North Carolina. In North Carolina, more than 13
percent of households are food insecure, which is higher than
the national average. Every night in North Carolina almost
600,000 households don't have enough to eat. Thirty-eight
percent of the households receiving SNAP have children. One in
seven North Carolinians struggles with hunger and one in five
children. And almost a million children in North Carolina are
at the risk of going to bed hungry every night.
And then, of course, we have problems in the school system.
But in North Carolina, nearly 60 percent of the students
enrolled in the public schools qualify for free and reduced-
price lunch.
And I know that we have touched on a lot of these issues
throughout the last couple of hours, so I am not going to ask
you to revisit them. But I am asking you to think about this in
a different lens, and I will just tell you a very brief story.
I, too, was a State legislator. I remember going to the
neonatal intensive care unit at one of my hospitals, which was
known as one of the best neonatal intensive care units for
having premature babies do better and eventually do okay.
And I said to the doctor, ``Well, this is wonderful, what
you are doing, but what could we do to prevent these children
from being born premature in the first place?''
And he said, ``Respect women. Respect the mothers.''
And so I really think that fundamentally, since so many
people who are food insecure are women with children or elderly
women who don't have retirement income, that one of the ways to
remedy this problem is to have economic equality for women.
We know that when women earn a fair wage they are going to
invest it in their families first. We know that so many women
live longer than men, and they don't have a pension, and they
don't have that retirement security, and that is why they are
food insecure.
So I want to ask you, because we have got four pretty
diverse women here, if we lift women up financially--and we
just passed a pay equity bill on the House floor--will this
help with hunger?
Ms. Schanzenbach. Absolutely, without question. Women's
economic empowerment has really driven a lot of our growth as a
Nation. I edited a book a few years ago called ``The 51
Percent,'' which is about women's economic activity, and I am
going to send it to you right away.
You are absolutely right that women face a disproportionate
amount of hunger, of poverty, of food insecurity at all ages of
the distribution, especially those elderly, but then younger
women with children.
There is a lot that we can do. And I agree with you that
certainly issues around building that human capital, that
childcare, elder care options, and opportunities for education
will really go a long way.
Ms. Ross. Thank you.
Does anybody else have anything to add?
Ms. Curry. I 100 percent think that that would help. You
know, I watched my mom growing up work 12-hour days, sometimes
15-hour days, 6 days a week, never to have time for herself and
always to take whatever it was that she was bringing in and
give it back to us kids. So I 100 percent think that that would
help bridge that gap.
I mean, as a mom, like any mom on this call knows, that
whatever is coming in, it is going straight to the kids, I
mean. So I think that that would definitely help, if women were
respected in that way a little bit more--a lot more.
Dr. James. I, too, agree--1,000 percent actually--because I
think, just as the previous two speakers just stated, I mean,
women are always sacrificing. They are always thinking about
their families first, always thinking about their children
first.
And I would say, even in the work world, I am not so sure
that women receive the kind of respect that they should. There
is wage inequality.
In the academic world, like in medicine, you don't see
women rise to the ranks of profession and things like that at
the rate that men do, and it is because they are making
sacrifices, making their families first.
But they should not have to lose out because they are
raising their families. They often get made to start all over
again when they take time out for maternity leave and these
types of things.
But I think women are natural entrepreneurs, to be honest
with you. I mean, raising your family is a bit of an
entrepreneurial kind of endeavor if you really think about it.
And also, during COVID, on a social level, women were
impacted more than others in terms of things they had to give
up to take care of the family staying at home, the kids can't
go to school, all these various different things.
So thank you so much, Ms. Ross, for raising that.
Ms. Ross. Thank you.
Ms. Reynolds. And if I could just say, they all said it
beautifully, and I concur. And also a special thank you to
Chairman McGovern and Ranking Member Cole for having four women
testifying today before this hearing.
Ms. Ross. So, Mr. Chairman, I just want to put that on the
table for one of the issues for your conference, which I pray
will happen soon.
And with that, I yield back.
The Chairman. Well, thank you very much.
And before I yield to Mr. Cole for any final comments, I
just want to make sure that you all have the opportunity to
share a few brief words if there is anything that we have
missed.
Let me just say, Ms. Curry, I want to make it a point to
come out to California. Hopefully we will bring others out to
see your incredible program.
And, Dr. James, I want to bring people up to see what is
going on at Boston Medical Center.
And we will go to Northwestern and Notre Dame. Those are
two schools, when I applied for college, I couldn't even get
into the cafeteria, never mind be accepted to attend those
schools. But, interesting enough, George McGovern got his Ph.D.
at Northwestern, so there is a connection there.
But let me just begin, Dr. Schanzenbach, why don't I begin
with you. Any final words? And then we will just go around, and
then I will yield to Mr. Cole for any closing remarks.
Ms. Schanzenbach. I just want to thank you for this, for
both of you, for convening this hearing.
Ending hunger is something that we as Americans can do, and
it absolutely should be a bipartisan effort. And so I look
forward to continuing to be part of that and working with you
all.
The Chairman. Thank you.
Ms. Reynolds.
Ms. Reynolds. Well, thanks to all of you for having me
today at this hearing.
Chairman McGovern, you are welcome any time to Notre Dame.
And I know our university, one of the things I love so much
about it is in our mission statement it talks about a
disciplined sensibility to approaching issues of poverty and
injustice and inequity. So this is an issue we as a university
just care so much about, and so to continue to be a part of
that in any way, we would love to do.
I also just want to note, I think a major to-do coming out
of this is for LEO to do a research project on Ms. Curry's
amazing project, so we can build evidence, so when the point
comes to it, all of you as policymakers will scale up what she
is doing across the Nation.
That is it for me.
The Chairman. Thank you.
Ms. Curry.
Ms. Curry. I guess I just want to say thank you for this
amazing, productive meeting. It is my first time being in a
room like this, and I have learned so much, but realize there
is so much work to do.
So I really hope that that next step of getting everybody
in a room and connecting those dots and having a big, giant
meeting of the minds to figure out how to really tackle and
resolve this issue happens. I really hope it happens, and I
feel confident that it will.
So just thank you for having me here today to speak on what
I have seen in the community.
The Chairman. Thank you.
Dr. James.
Dr. James. I, too, just want to thank everyone, and thank
you, Chairman McGovern, for inviting me here today and for the
privilege to be here with the panelists, as well as the other
Representatives.
I am so hopeful because I have listened, I have learned,
and there is so much opportunity I see that is in front of us,
and I don't think we are starting from square one.
I too, am trying to imagine this conference, this White
House conference, and what that could do in the way of
transformation.
So thank you to everyone. I really, really am grateful for
this opportunity.
The Chairman. And now I will yield to the birthday boy, Mr.
Cole, for any closing remarks he may have.
Mr. Cole. Well, thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
I actually will be part of the escort party for the
President tonight, so I will try to put a plug in for your
White House conference. I am sure it will help a lot.
But I do want to thank you very much for the hearing.
I want to thank all of our witnesses. They were all
spectacular, well chosen.
I appreciate your insights. Much more profound. I just
appreciate the workthat each of you is about and how you have
dedicated your time and your careers and your interests and your energy
to things that are truly important in making life better for every
American.
And who knows, Mr. Chairman, we get that conference, you
may not have been able to get into Northwestern or Notre Dame,
but I bet you could snag an honorary degree.
So thanks again. And thank you particularly, Mr. Chairman.
It is a good hearing. It is an important topic. And thank you
for your passion.
More importantly, thanks for not being a flash in the pan
on this issue but somebody who has literally spent a career on
working and advancing these causes. It is something that we are
all proud of in this committee in a bipartisan sense. Your
leadership here is much appreciated and I think will make a
meaningful difference in the years ahead.
Yield back.
The Chairman. All right. Well, first, I thank the gentleman
for his kind words, and all the members of the committee, and
the witnesses, too. This has been over 3 hours. And so I
appreciate you being part of this.
And as I mentioned in my opening, hunger, ending hunger has
been a focus of much of my time in Congress, and I really want
us to step it up and go to the next level here where we
actually think out of the box, we reimagine how we combat
hunger, and we do something meaningful about it that actually
ends hunger in this country.
This hearing I think is an important first step. And there
will be a lot more hearings and briefings and site visits. But
this is a first step.
But I would like to leave with just a couple of points.
First of all, we have a hunger problem in this country.
There is not a congressional district in America that is
hunger-free. And as I said at the beginning, I am ashamed of
that fact. We all should be ashamed of that in a country with
all of our riches.
And if you have ever met a hungry child--and I,
unfortunately, have met way too many in my lifetime--it breaks
your heart. Because it doesn't have to be. And people are
hungry who are young, people are hungry who are old, everything
in between.
MAZON, which is a Jewish response to hunger, reminds us
that there are many members in the military who are defending
our country who are hungry as well.
But the thing is that hunger is real, but it is also a
solvable problem. That is what makes it so frustrating. It is
not like that there is no way to solve it. There is. We just
have to choose to solve this problem together and make it a
political priority.
Second, the people who are hungry, who are dealing with
hunger, deserve respect. They deserve dignity. And that starts
by listening to them and not talking at them.
We have all been meeting leading up to this, and we will
have hearings with people who are dealing with the challenge of
hunger right now, who have lived experiences.
The bottom line is these people are not caricatures. They
are individuals. They are our neighbors. They are our friends.
Some of them are our family members. And between work, school,
volunteering, and taking care of loved ones, they have a
schedule that would make any one of us on this panel--I mean,
on this dais--blush.
Being poor is hard work. Struggling with hunger is hard
work. And these people, they do it while trying to figure out
where their next meal is going to come from and how they are
going to put food on the table for their families.
And I know that developing this road map to end hunger
sounds hard. And as we talked here today there is all of these
different things that we need to consider and aspects that need
to be put on the table.
But you know what? What is harder than solving this is
being hungry. And so not knowing how you will feed your kids,
having to choose between food and medicine, that is hard.
And we can end hunger in this country. So please join me in
this effort. You are the first panelists in our effort here. We
hope that we can rely on you for additional information along
the way. If you have ideas, please get in touch with us.
Hopefully, we will visit some of the programs that were talked
about here on site. Follow our work in the Rules Committee.
And to those who are listening, give us information, go to
our web page. Because it is going to take an ``all hands on
deck'' approach to end hunger.
Again, we are doing this with the intention of trying to
persuade the Biden administration to do a conference. The last
conference on this issue was 52 years ago. And actually the
President at the time was Nixon. And my last name being
McGovern, I am actually saying something nice about Nixon. I
can't believe it. But in any event, as imperfect as that
conference was, it produced a lot of results.
The final thing I am going to say is that, and I think
everybody here made this point, when we talk about ending
hunger we are also talking about promoting nutrition. Ending
hunger is not just about filling somebody's stomach up with
whatever. It is also about making sure that we are promoting
nutrition. And so that is another key factor here.
So I, again, am grateful to everybody. Thank you so much.
And with that, the hearing is adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 3:22 p.m., the committee was adjourned.]
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