Ending Hunger in America, 2014 Hunger Report Full Report | Page 143

CHAPTER 4
Arkansas: No Kid Hungry
Here in a state-level initiative, a national nonprofit lends its
expertise to support local partners, building their capacity to
ensure that progress is sustainable. The national partner is
a conduit to best practices that have worked for other local
initiatives, saving time and resources.
Candidate Barack Obama, while campaigning in 2008,
Dayton
pledged to end child hunger by 2015. Candidate Obama’s
pledge naturally fell on receptive ears in the anti-hunger
community. What one hopes will happen when a president or
presidential candidate tells the nation that an issue matters to
him or her is that the nation will respond in kind. States and
localities will embrace the commitment to end child hunger,
deploy their own resources, and communicate to national leaders that they need to keep
talking about the goal. The conversation rises in pitch, more people are drawn in, and the
goal becomes a national priority.
Since entering the White House, President Obama has spoken ever so softly about ending
child hunger. In fact, the 2008 pledge would be a footnote to his presidency by now were
it not for national organizations,
such as Bread for the World, the
Alliance to End Hunger, FRAC,
West
and Feeding America, that conVirginia
tinue to remind the White House
that the president’s pledge is still
on their agenda.
Perhaps no national anti-hunger
organization has done more to
promote the goal of ending child
hunger and to keep the pledge alive
than Share Our Strength. Through
its No Kid Hungry Campaign—a
national effort to achieve candidate
Obama’s pledge to end childhood
hunger in America by 2015—Share
Our Strength is working with
governors and mayors, faith and
business leaders, and nonprofit
organizations to connect families at risk of hunger with the programs that can help them.31
No Kid Hungry Campaigns have been started in all 50 states. Maryland, Colorado
and Arkansas are Share Our Strength’s “proof of concept” states, where it is investing the
greatest effort. Governor Martin O’Malley of Maryland was the first governor in the country
to embrace a goal to end child hunger by 2015. O’Malley helped persuade Governor Mike
Beebe of Arkansas to do the same. Conditions in the two states are quite different. Maryland

Arkansas

Ohio

Toledo

Ohio

Oregon

www.bread.org/institute?

Courtesy of Arkansas Hunger Relief Alliance

Breakfast in the
Classroom at Franklin
Elementary School,
Little Rock.

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