Ending Hunger in America, 2014 Hunger Report Full Report | Page 156

Courtesy ProMedica

The Afterschool Meal
Program focuses on
serving meals in neighborhoods where more
than half of the children
qualify for subsidized
school meals.

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situation led to an “all hands on deck” attitude. In the aftermath of the Great Recession in
2011, Toledo’s child poverty rate was 44 percent.55
The impact that an institution the size of ProMedica could have on hunger in Toledo
became clear at once when it joined its efforts with the other partners to increase the number
of summer meals served. In 2010, Toledo served only 1,500 summer meals. A year later,
the number rose to 45,000. The next year, it climbed to 100,000. A major reason for the
program’s fast growth was a public
information campaign. Most antihunger organizations don’t have a
lot of spare money for marketing.
Nor do they usually have people in
the organization with those skills.
Marketing is a core component of
what ProMedica does, so it was
able to draw on resources from
within the organization to build
a successful campaign around
summer meals.
Rebranding hunger as a healthcare issue doesn’t change the fact
that it is a problem rooted in poverty. Rebranding could, however,
move local residents who would
be predisposed to make quick
judgments about poverty and
poor people to consider solutions
to hunger in terms of health care
rather than “welfare.” If we talk
about hunger only as an extension
of poverty, it’s much easier to think of it as solely a personal problem that people need to
solve themselves. It’s not society’s problem. The results can be seen in ordinary conversations: while many people consider it perfectly acceptable to excoriate “welfare recipients,” it’s
almost never okay to make similar derogatory remarks about patients with chronic health
problems.
One reason there is so little stigma attached to WIC compared to SNAP is because WIC
includes health care checkups, leading the mothers who participate to see it as something
completely different from welfare. Nutrition is so clearly associated with young children’s
health and growth that it is natural for pediatricians to promote WIC. Doctors can write
a prescription for WIC. What if they could write a prescription for SNAP? New York City
has recently started allowing doctors to write a prescription for low-income patients with
certain health conditions to purchase fresh fruit and vegetables at local farmers markets.
The program is being financed privately. Similar privately financed efforts have been piloted
in California, Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Mexico, Rhode Island, Texas, and
Washington, D.C.56 

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