Ending Hunger in America, 2014 Hunger Report Full Report | Page 138

BOX 4.3

ENDING HUNGER, ONE STEP AT A TIME.
Matthew Hackworth and Maurice A. Bloem

Courtesy of Church World Service

A CROP Walk in Durham,
North Carolina, in 2012.

“When you participate in a CROP Hunger Walk, you provide food to our community and
people around the world,” says Karen Ellers, director of Clemson Community Care in Clemson,
South Carolina.
The food assistance agency is one of more than 2,500 local feeding programs that benefit
from CROP Hunger Walks across the United States each year. These events—where participants get friends and family to sponsor their participation in order to raise funds—have grown
in popularity. Sponsored by Church World Service (CWS), CROP Hunger Walks have been
raising money to fight hunger for more than 40 years. Walks
often serve as an intersection—the “putt”—where people of
different faiths, no faith, businesses and community groups
coalesce to fight hunger.
Communities that hold CROP Hunger Walks determine which
local hunger agency (or agencies) will receive 25 percent of the
event’s proceeds, with the remainder funding the life-sustaining
work of CWS around the world. Long-time CWS staff member
Kevin McCoy says in his region of the Carolinas people know
about world hunger but want to do something about local needs
as well. “I’ll hold up the work of the local agencies that are
supported by the Walk and give their statistics about how many
clients they serve or how much need they are seeing,” McCoy says. There are 80 local agencies
supported by CROP Hunger Walk in the Carolinas alone.
Volunteers in more than 1,600 communities participate in a Walk to fight hunger each year,
strengthening ties between communities and the local agencies they support. In a recent CWS
survey of local hunger agencies supported by Walks, every agency that responded—from
Berkeley, California to Exeter, New Hampshire and spots in between—reported increased
demand, with some estimates as high as 20 percent. All indicated a client base that relied
heavily on SNAP and school lunch programs.
In the case of Clemson Community Care, the CROP Hunger Walk helps to fund food assistance programs for the 3,563 families it serves each year. Clemson Community Care estimates
three out of every four of its clients depend heavily on SNAP and other safety net programs that
have become political targets. That makes the assistance Clemson Community Care provides
all the more critical. “The CROP Hunger Walk is the single largest fundraising event we rely on,”
Ellers says.
Matthew Hackworth is the director of marketing and communications and Maurice A. Bloem is executive vice president for Church World Service.

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