ABQJOURNAL OPINION/GUEST_COLUMNS: New Mexico Is Making Strides To Reduce Hunger

Friday, November 05, 2010

New Mexico Is Making Strides To Reduce Hunger

By Nancy Pope
Director, New Mexico Collaboration to End Hunger
          Hunger is a significant and poorly understood problem in our country. It rarely earns the headlines of natural disasters and disease outbreaks, yet it affects many more people. In New Mexico, one in every four children and one in every 10 seniors is food insecure.
        While hunger is often associated with homelessness, more than 80 percent of New Mexicans who qualify as food insecure — a term the United States Department of Agriculture uses to describe a person who does not know where they will get their next meal — have an income.
        In 2006, New Mexico was named as the worst state in the nation for food insecurity, prompting a group of concerned citizens to form the New Mexico Collaboration to End Hunger. The collaboration has taken on hunger in New Mexico for the past three years with initiatives like the annual Intergenerational Summer Food Program, which provides meals for children in the summer months when they are not in school receiving breakfast and lunch. Through this program, 3,050 Albuquerque children received free breakfast and lunch, along with nutritional education. In the past summer alone, the program provided 21,915 weekend food bags filled with food at 31 sites. The children also planted, tended and harvested gardens.
        Collaboration partners have also worked to reduce the amount of food that goes to waste in Albuquerque by recovering food from restaurants, grocery store delis and produce departments throughout our city. Last year 1.2 million pounds of food were recovered and redistributed to families who are food insecure.
        Thanks to these and other programs, the collaboration has achieved its primary goal of moving New Mexico from worst in the nation in food insecurity to the fifth worst in the nation. Now, the collaboration is leveraging its success with a comprehensive Five Year Plan to End Hunger starting in 2011.
        New Mexico's high level of food insecurity is fueled by a number of factors, including poverty. After dipping below 10 percent in 2003, the percentage of Albuquerque families living in poverty has risen to almost 12 percent in recent years, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. An increase in poverty was also evident among our vulnerable seniors.
        The Five Year Plan aims to reduce the percentage of food insecure children in New Mexico from the current rate of 24 percent to 15 percent by the end of 2015, and decrease the percentage of food insecure seniors in New Mexico from 9 percent to 6 percent in the same time frame.
        Community involvement is pivotal to our efforts to end hunger in New Mexico. Unfortunately, many people who want to help simply don't know where to start. That's why the collaboration is holding a series of community meetings on hunger across the state this fall.
        Meetings have been scheduled for six rural and urban New Mexico communities through November to obtain community input for the plan, share the progress made to date in ending hunger in our state, and to engage local citizens in developing effective strategies to end hunger in their community and across New Mexico. The next meeting will be in Albuquerque at 2 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 11, at the University of New Mexico Cancer Center.
        Albuquerque's community meeting will include group discussions on what's working, what isn't and what would really make a difference in ending hunger. Participants will be asked to "Take the Pledge" to make a difference in ending hunger in New Mexico by committing to one key action step in their community.
        Meetings have already been held in Silver City and Hobbs. In addition to the upcoming Albuquerque meeting, meetings have been scheduled in Farmington (Nov. 9), Santa Fe (Nov. 18), and Taos (Nov. 17).
        We've made great progress against hunger in New Mexico over the past three years, and with the help of the people of Bernalillo County, we are poised to make further advances.
        For more information about the community meeting or the collaboration, go to www.endnmhunger.org, or call 505-883-6240 to reach the collaboration located at the Albuquerque Community Foundation office.

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