Free meals quell hidden poverty

The extremist Republicans have slashed Food Stamps and other Food programs for children, while refusing to close tax loopholes or end subsidies to Dirty Energy.

The article below highlights how wrong-headed those cuts have been as poverty grows...

Gonsalves: Free meals quell hidden poverty

By Sean Gonsalves

June 25, 2013

 

Life on Cape Cod can be like a game of hide-and-seek where the dark side of summer isn't so easy to find — unless you know where to look.

 

School is out for summer vacation and yet students are expected to keep their minds sharp. For most, that means parent-led enrichment activities and trips to the library to keep up with summer reading assignments.

Where to go

Free meals for all children ages 1-18 on the Lower and Outer Cape will be served at the following locations:

• Chatham Community Center playground, 702 Main St., Chatham, from noon to 1 p.m., Monday to Friday, July 1 to Aug. 16
• Monomoy Community Services, 166 Depot Road, Chatham; free snacks from 9:30 a.m. to 10 a.m.; lunch served from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., July 1 to Aug. 23
• Eastham: Nauset Regional High School, 100 Cable Road, Eastham, from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., July 1 to Aug. 9
• Wellfleet Elementary School playground, 100 Lawrence Road, Wellfleet, from 11:30 to 12:30 p.m., July 1 to Aug. 16
• Truro Central School, 317 Route 6, Truro; free snacks from 9:30 to 10:15 a.m.; lunch from 11:30 to 12:30 p.m., July 1 to Aug. 23

For more information, call Ruth Campbell at 413-537-9200 or the Church of the Holy Spirit at 508-255-0433.

 

But for a growing number of young people on Cape Cod, there's one part of this equation that's hidden: "food insecurity."

 

That's how the experts describe the state of not knowing where, or when, your next meal will come.

 

And so, as Congress debates how many billions of dollars to cut from food stamp programs and economists tell us we are in a post-recession economic recovery, a first-of-its-kind program this summer on the Outer Cape tells a different story.

 

It's called "Free Food for Kids" — a collaborative hunger-fighting effort led by the grant-writing faithful at the Church of the Holy Spirit in Orleans.

 

"This program attempts to reach the children who are hungry during the summer months when they do not get free or reduced-priced lunches at school," program director Ruth Campbell explained.

 

"Studies have shown that as some kids get less nutrition in the summer, they fall behind academically. It impacts their learning in the fall," said Campbell, a retired educator and now an active member at the Church of the Holy Spirit.

 

Administered through the Massachusetts Department of Early and Secondary Education, in collaboration with Project Bread and the Episcopal City Mission in Boston, the program is funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

 

And while the Mid- and Upper Cape offer similar programs, this is the first time the Summer Food Service Program has been extended to the Outer Cape, the part of the Cape that hides social problems so well.

 

"Poverty is extremely hidden out here. Sometimes people get angry when I tell them there are poverty zones in each town on the Lower Cape," Campbell said. He explained that the main criteria for accessing federal funds are census tracts indicating locales where more than 50 percent of the families in that area are living below the poverty rate.

 

Once the 50 percent threshold is established with census data, communities can access federal funds to pay for healthy lunches at no cost to anyone under the age of 18. No questions asked, no paperwork required.

 

In fact, the five sites where free lunch will be served on the Outer Cape — the Chatham Community Center playground; Monomoy Community Services on Depot Road in Chatham; Nauset Regional High School in Eastham, the Wellfleet Elementary School playground and Truro Central School — were chosen because of their proximity to "poverty zones.".

 

(If you're interested in seeing where on Cape Cod these "poverty zones" are, go to www.fairdata2000.com and click on "summer food" and find the "Summer Food Mapper").

 

Each site will be staffed with volunteers and a paid coordinator who will be in charge of transporting the lunches prepared at the Church of the Holy Spirit to the respective "open sites." Lunches will be served for an hour and on most days will include nonfat chocolate milk, juices, fruits, vegetables, a sandwich, yogurt, hummus and pita bread.

 

Campbell also applied for a grant that pays for new children's books — from the preschool level all the way up to high school. The grant is enough to cover six books a day.

 

Campbell told me the Summer Food Service program is underutilized.

 

"Nationally," she said, "only about 11 percent of the children who could use it are accessing it. And that's because of the barriers of geography, the (lack of) commitment to set up sponsorships, and the difficulty of renting space."

 

Of course, this is nothing short of a moral scandal, considering that, nationally, we are seeing the highest levels of childhood poverty in decades (one in four children).

 

Locally, according to the recently released report by the Barnstable County Department of Human Services, the percentage of children under 18 living in poverty increased from 3.4 percent in 2006 to nearly 18 percent in 2010. Last year, it dropped to 16 percent, or 5,691 children.

 

And by poor we're talking about the too-low federal poverty threshold which defines "poverty" as anyone living in a household of two with an income of below $14,710, or $22,350 for a family of four.

 

Campbell acknowledged programs like this are only a drop in the bucket in the grand scheme of things. But, it was her time running a similar program in the Greater Springfield area for 20 years that convinced her this was her calling, despite the negativity she sometimes runs up against.

 

"I've had people tell me: 'I know why the kids don't have food. Their parents are on drugs.' But we need to take care of them anyway because the kids belong to all of us. It's not my kid versus that's not my responsibility. Those children are just as important as your own children. God loves them just the same."

 

Lemonade in the summer is nice. But it's even more refreshing when Christians actually take Jesus' admonition seriously: Clothe and feed the hungry — "the least of these" — and don't just follow the herd whose mantra is: "Me and my family have ours. Too bad if you and yours don't."

 

Sean Gonsalves can be reached at sgonsalves@capecodonline.com.

 

http://www.capecodonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130625/NEWS/306250307/-1/NEWSLETTER100

 

 

Just in case you have convinced yourself the Republicans' punitive and irrational tactics make sense, this from W.P. --

 

 

Boehner’s House implodes over flawed farm bill

By E.J. Dionne Jr., Published: June 23

 

The roof fell in on John Boehner’s House of Representatives last week. The Republican leadership’s humiliating defeat on a deeply flawed and inhumane farm bill was as clear a lesson as we’ll get about the real causes of dysfunction in the nation’s capital.

 

Our ability to govern ourselvesbeing brought low by a witches’ brew of right-wing ideology, a shockingly cruel attitude toward the poor on the part of the Republican majority, and the speaker’s incoherence when it comes to his need for Democratic votes to pass bills.

 

Boehner is unwilling to put together broad bipartisan coalitions to pass middle-ground legislation except when he is pressed to the wall. Yet he and his lieutenants tried to blame last Thursday’s farm legislation fiasco — the product of a massive repudiation by GOP conservatives of their high command — on the Democrats’ failure to hand over enough votes.

 

He seemed to think he could freely pander to the desire of right-wing members of his caucus to throw millions of low-income Americans off the food stamp program . When that didn’t produce enough votes, he then expected Democrats to support a measure that most of them rightly regarded as immoral. In the end, the bill went down 234to 195, with 62 Republicans voting no and 24 Democrats voting yes — more help, by the way, than Nancy Pelosi usually got from Republicans when she was speaker.

 

Boehner can’t have it both ways, and he should be called out if he lets his party’s disarray throw the nation into an entirely unnecessary debt-ceiling crisis this fall. The country shouldn’t be held hostage because of Republican chaos.

 

Start with the food stamp cuts, and let’s remember that this program is a monument to bipartisanship.

 

The current form of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is, in large part, the product of an unlikely alliance between former Sens. Bob Dole and George McGovern in the 1970s.

 

They were far apart ideologically, but both were horrified that too many Americans were going without nourishment. Food stamps have been an enormous success in curbing hunger in our rich nation, while also serving as a powerful stimulus to economic recovery during hard times.

 

The bill the House voted down would have cut food stamps by $20.5 billion, eliminating food assistance to nearly 2 million low-income people, most of them senior citizens or working families with children.

 

This alone should have been bad enough to sink the bill. But then Republicans pushed through an amendment by Rep. Steve Southerland (R-Fla.) to toughen work requirements in the program. Work requirements sound reasonable until you look at what Southerland’s amendment was actually designed to do.

 

As Robert Greenstein, the president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, explained, Southerland’s proposal violated “the most basic standards of human decency” because it made no effort, as other work requirements have in the past, to create employment openings for those who “want to work and would accept any job or work slot they could get, but cannot find jobs in a weak economy.”

 

In fact, noted Greenstein, a longtime advocate of nutrition assistance, the amendment barred states “from spending more on SNAP employment and training than they do now.” And it created incentives for states to throw people off food stamps by letting their governments keep half the SNAP savings to use for anything they wished (including, for example, tax cuts for the wealthy).

 

In a more rational political world, progressives and small-government conservatives might join forces to slash subsidies for agribusiness and wealthy farmers while containing market distortions bred by price supports. But when Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) proposed an amendment to restore some of the food stamp funding by reducing spending on crop insurance, it was defeated.

 

And Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) exposed hypocrisy on the matter of government handouts by excoriating Republican House members who had benefited from farm subsidies but voted to cut food stamps.

 

The collapse of the farm bill will generally be played as a political story about Boehner’s failure to rally his own right wing. That’s true as far as it goes and should remind everyone of the current House leadership’s inability to govern. But this is above all a story about morality: There is something profoundly wrong when a legislative majority is so eager to risk leaving so many Americans hungry. That’s what the bill would have done, and why defeating it was a moral imperative.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ej-dionne-boehners-house-implodes-over-flawed-farm-bill/2013/06/23/b6807272-dc41-11e2-bd83-e99e43c336ed_story.html