Episode 98: Jeremy Everett on hunger and poverty, part 2
Join us on a deep-dive into the complexities and systems that lead families to being food insecure.
"It's not that one family experiences poverty, another family experiences hunger, and another lack of health insurance. It's always the same family experiencing the result of all our broken systems at once." -JE
We can't isolate these issues. They are intermingled with each other. Today, we learn more about that, and how ensuring access to food can help with everything else.
Listen here, read the transcript below, or click here for the full video version.
George Mason: One of the challenges in addressing any social problems of our time is telling the story in a way that is really personal and not abstract. Jeremy Everett of the Texas Hunger Initiative has a way to tell that story and also to invite us to be practically involved in addressing the matter of food insecurity in our community. Stay tuned for Good God. Welcome to Good God, conversations that matter about faith and public life, I'm your host, George Mason and I'm pleased to welcome back to the program today Jeremy Everett. He is Baylor University's executive director for the Collaborative for Hunger and Poverty.
Jeremy Everett: That's right, that's right.
George Mason: And Jeremy, welcome back to Good God-
Jeremy Everett: Thank you.
George Mason: We've had great visit so far and here we go again, looking forward to our conversation, I know everyone else is as well. In the first episode that we had together, we were talking about your own sense of call to this work and what animates you and how it's been framed, but I think people also want to hear more about the Texas Hunger Initiative, about the more practical aspects of how we go about addressing a massive social problem that has consequences in all sorts of different directions. And that really makes people almost despair over the size of the problem and how to go about it. So a lot of this is about working collaboratively. It's about trying to get to the heart of these things. When you frame that in your own mind and think about how to talk to people about it, how do you do that?
Jeremy Everett: Well, I mentioned before, proximity research and faith tradition are critical in understanding and being able to engage these issues. I did a race equity training where I was a participant about six months ago, and the trainer said the temptation after going through this two day training is that you're going to want to rush to solutions and first you need to rush to understanding. And she said, you're not ready for solutions yet. So I think first, it's really trying to understand what's going on. One of the things that we found is that people who experience hunger in the United States primarily experience it in an episodic fashion, meaning it's towards the end of the pay period. Most people who are food insecure and are of working age are working.
Jeremy Everett: And so there's kind of this common misnomer that people are not working, and that's why they're food insecure, but the reality is that most people are working, they're just under employed. And so if you think about our wage rates, the minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, and if you are able to put together 40 hours worth of work at $7.25 an hour, that's still only $13,000 a year. That's barely enough to cover rent-
George Mason: Amazing.
Jeremy Everett: Much less anything else. So I think first, it's rushing to understanding, so that we're not trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist. And so you have to ... The only way you can understand is to really have real proximity, and that doesn't mean that you stood next to somebody in the grocery store line and you saw them use a SNAP card and all of a sudden you're able to make a "snap" judgment about all their family's history and all people in poverty based upon that one person's purchase, that particular day in the grocery line. Proximity means really immersing yourself with the people. So John Lewis and the students for nonviolent coordinating committee during the civil rights era crafted this term incarnational organizing, and it has to live and dwell among the people that you're working with. And so I think understanding is critical first before we can rush to solutions.
George Mason: To the end of understanding, then, you used a phrase that I think people need to understand. And that is "food insecure."
Jeremy Everett: Sure, yeah.
George Mason: So when we talk about hunger being a national crisis, I think for many people, the kind of people in fact who listen to or watch a podcast like this, they have the time and they have the resources and the leisure to be able to do so. Probably most immediately they think of starving children in places around the world where there have been massive famines and where there's no access to food at all, and there are extended stomachs and there are flies around people in the Sudan and the like. And it's an imagination that they can't transfer to the United States, to their communities. It's a continuum obviously, but food insecurity starts to get at that, doesn't it?
Jeremy Everett: It does. It does. So food insecurity is the technical definition that we use for hunger, basically. It means that you don't have enough access to healthy food to live an active, healthy lifestyle. And so one of our colleagues was a school social worker when he first came on staff, prior to coming on staff with us. And he told us of an experience that he had as a school social worker where he was mentoring a young man who was a junior in high school, and the kid through his mentorship began to perform well in school, had fewer discipline problems, all kinds of things were going well. And until the end of the school year, when he started to flunk his classes and get in trouble again, and our colleague said, "Well, tell me what's going on, you were doing so well." And he said, I realized that if I can at least flunk one class that I'm guaranteed to go to summer school. And if I go to summer school, I'll at least get one meal a day during the summer.
George Mason: Oh my goodness.
Jeremy Everett: And so that's food insecurity in America. That's what many of our children and elderly are experiencing on a regular basis. I just happen to be naive enough to think that we can do better than that.
George Mason: So when we think about food insecurity, you mentioned that one of the primary reasons for that is underemployment. We live in a time of historically low unemployment. So we're celebrating this fact that there is broad employment, but now we are moving into a new category and that is underemployment. You mentioned that if someone worked 40 hours a week at minimum wage that's not a living wage, but it's even much higher than that when you think about it. I think SNAP is 133% of the poverty level, which is what? In about $35,000, $36,000 a year, that would work out to be for a family of four?
Jeremy Everett: It would be a little bit less than that. Yeah, that's right.
George Mason: So now when we're talking about that, you have to have two persons in the family working minimum wage and still not reaching the poverty level if that were the case. So now you have to have multiple jobs. The social consequences of that are just enormous to begin with. So underemployment is a major factor in this country.
Jeremy Everett: It is. In the two decades that we lived and worked in low income communities, most of our neighbors had jobs that they would perform during the week and then they had weekend jobs that they would pick up to be able to try to bring in any kind of extra income. Now imagine if you're a child in that household, and your parent has to be away at work, and oftentimes it's at all hours of the day, it's not like they get to pick their shifts and say, I want to work from nine to five because that way I can pick up my kid. They get assigned the shift, and they have to go show up and make it work. And so it really is problematic for people in poverty. And underemployment is something that I think most of us believe that we want people to be able to access a job that will pay for all of their living expenses. I don't think that's a partisan desire. I don't think that that's a desire that's specific to any one religious perspective.
Jeremy Everett: We want people to be able to have a job that provides for their family so that their family can have the food that they need, the medication that they need, the housing that they need to be able to get by. But the reality is that we have some structural inequities that prohibit that from happening for many Americans, for millions of Americans. It's one thing if that's a problem for one family or two families in a nation as large as ours, but when it's a problem for upwards of millions-
George Mason: 40 million.
Jeremy Everett: That's right. That's right, about 18 to 20% of your population.
George Mason: That's just-
Jeremy Everett: That's significant.
George Mason: Inconceivable. Well, you and I have been talking about how important it is to change the narrative for people. And when we start talking about narrative, we're talking about stories and real people to a certain extent. So far we're talking abstractly, conceptually about employment and the like. I think it's important for you to make that story clear. Tell us about Lupe. Tell us the story of Lupe and her family.
Jeremy Everett: Lupe was our neighbor in the West side of San Antonio. We lived there. We probably moved to the West side a little more than 15 years ago. And the West side, a very low income neighborhood, it's gotten a lot of publicity recently because Julian Castro, who was running for president, was from that neighborhood. I worked closely with his mother who was an organizer there in the community. But the neighborhood had a 150,000 residents and the median income was $19,000 per household, and typically you had three generations sharing a home.
George Mason: Wow.
Jeremy Everett: And that was the case for Lupe and her family. Lupe and her husband Luis, were devout Catholics, they had eight children ranging from high school age all the way down to elementary age. She was also the primary caregiver to her to wheelchair bound parents. And so Luis was the only guy on our block that had full time employment with one employer and they had one small car and he would take the car and go off to another part of town to work every day. And then she would send her kids off to school and get her parents situated at a senior center. But then she would go volunteer in all of the schools because she knew the ticket out of poverty for her kids and the other kids in the community was to graduate from high school and hopefully go to San Antonio Community College. That was her goal for them.
Jeremy Everett: Now our best high school had a 50% dropout rate. But their family had a myriad of issues. So their kids would oftentimes come down to our house and play with our kids. And oftentimes during the summer they may have the water shut off or they may have their power cut off or they may not have any food in the house. And so if they played in the hose at our house, that might be, that was their water access. If my wife brought out a bowl of fruit, that might be the only thing that they would potentially eat during the day. And it's not because their parents didn't care, they care deeply, they just couldn't afford to pay all their bills. Well Lupe got an ear infection like we've all gotten only she didn't have health insurance. And so she waited until it was too painful to bear, ultimately caught a city bus and went down to one of the emergency rooms in downtown San Antonio, waited all day, wasn't seen, and had to catch the bus to get back home before her kids got out of school.
Jeremy Everett: And later that evening with her family present her ear drum ruptured and the infection went to her brain. She fell into a coma, and she never woke up. So her eight kids lost their mother prematurely because she couldn't have access to an antibiotic. That's in a first world country like we're in, it's just mind boggling. Well, the next day after she passed away her husband and her older kids went door to door raising money for a memorial service so that they could bury Lupe. And her husband came to my house and he sat on my porch and he just buried his head in his hands and said, "What am I going to do? What am I going to do?"
Jeremy Everett: And that family was both food insecure, they were underemployed, they didn't have health insurance and oftentimes when we think about 40 million Americans experiencing poverty, or 40 million Americans experiencing food insecurity, or 30 million Americans who don't have access to healthcare, we think about them as different segments of society as if one segment of society is bearing the weight of one particular broken system. But it's the same family on the local level, bearing the weight of all of our broken systems. And certainly that was the case in Lupe's story.
George Mason: And so when we're talking about changing the narrative, let's just think about the fact that this is an intact family.
Jeremy Everett: Right.
George Mason: A multi generational family.
Jeremy Everett: Right.
George Mason: A family with a lot of children, which is to say they valued carrying pregnancies to term.
Jeremy Everett: Very much so.
George Mason: Pro life family.
Jeremy Everett: Very much so.
George Mason: They valued work, they valued education, they valued community and so all the kinds of things that are sometimes pointed to, to say if only you would do this, if only you would do that. If only you had these values, this faith, this, all sorts of things. They had all of those things and still their family fell into a catastrophic situation because of a lack of ability to access things that in a first world country should be available to everyone.
Jeremy Everett: That's right.
George Mason: So part of the challenge then I think is to see these things holistically. Right? So we're going to talk about hunger. You said they were food insecure and we got a good example of that with the children needing fruit and the water and things of that nature. When we come back from the break, Jeremy, I'd really like to talk a little more about why addressing hunger specifically is one of the ways that has a catalytic effect on everything else.
Jeremy Everett: Okay.
George Mason: Okay?
Jeremy Everett: Sure.
George Mason: And why you focus in that area. So let's take a break and we'll be back.
George Mason: Thank you for continuing to tune in to Good God. These conversations are part of a larger program that is called Faith Commons, the umbrella organization you might say of Good God. Good God is the first project of Faith Commons, which is a nonprofit organization that is intended to do public theology you might say. It's multi-faith, not just Christian, Jewish, Muslim, other faiths but all of them becoming involved in the question of how do we promote the common good together. There are so many areas of need and concern in our community. And Faith Commons is trying to help bridge the gaps between religions and peoples in our community so that we can have a more just and peaceful society. Thanks for continuing to support us.
George Mason: We're back with Jeremy Everett, who is the author of, I Was Hungry: Cultivating Common Ground To End an American Crisis. End an American Crisis. You say in this book that this is something doable.
Jeremy Everett: Yes.
George Mason: Being able to eradicate food insecurity in this country is achievable.
Jeremy Everett: Yes.
George Mason: And if it is achievable, then the social consequences will become more positive rather than negative of this. I think a lot of people just begin by saying that's idealistic, they would think, well of course he says that he's working on the Texas Hunger Initiative. And he certainly wants to motivate us and of course he's not going to lie about that. But the poor you have with you always. And there's always going to be a reason for us to have people who are hungry and but why is it a realistic aim for us and what are the ripple effects of that for every other kind of problem? Why start with hunger?
Jeremy Everett: Yeah. Well it is a solvable problem. We produce enough food for everybody to have access to-
George Mason: Number one there you go.
Jeremy Everett: To healthy food. And so much of the problem is logistical, and this is worldwide. This isn't just in the United States in fact worldwide, we cut global poverty in half from about a billion and a half people to about 800 million people in three decades.
George Mason: Yes. It's a remarkable story-
Jeremy Everett: It's remarkable.
George Mason: That nobody knows about.
Jeremy Everett: That's right. It's remarkable and so yeah it is very doable. I'm inspired by, Sir William Wilberforce is a 1700, 18th century British parliamentarian who is credited for ending the British slave trade. And oftentimes when we think about that in retrospect, it's like, Oh of course they ended the slave trade, but we don't think about how profound the very concept of ending the British slave trade was at that time. Because as one buyer often noted his greatest accomplishment wasn't just ending the British slave trade, but it was ending the very idea that slavery was an acceptable form of commerce. And so because until that day, throughout all human history, that was just a normal way that you did business. That was just the way that you created wealth.
Jeremy Everett: And he challenged that notion and I think the same is true for us. It's a re-imagining. It's a re-imagining to think that in 200 years maybe somebody will be sitting in a living room having a conversation with their friends saying that, "Did you know that two centuries ago, there was actually hunger and poverty." And not being able to fathom it just like, we can't imagine people using slavery as a way towards economic growth. We know it was there, we know it was very present in American history, but that is just hard to get our mind around that people would be so unjust. And likewise, I think people can say the same thing about us, about hunger and poverty to make sure that this thing is something that we ultimately solve.
Jeremy Everett: But I'm also encouraged ... So that's kind of the theological and the philosophical framework. But very practically, we produce enough food. So if we produce enough food then that's a step in the right direction. We throw away a hundred billion pounds of food annually. That in itself would be enough to ensure that all 40 million food insecure people in the U.S could have access to three meals a day just with what we throw away. Now you take into account the 4,000 organizations that are addressing hunger in Texas alone. I think nearly 60,000 organizations are addressing it nationwide. You take into effect that we actually have wonderful federal nutrition programs.
Jeremy Everett: So the SNAP program gets a bad wrap. But the reality is that for every dollar that comes into a community through that program, it has $79 worth of economic stimulus for our community. So people who are on the SNAP program immediately take that money and they go and they invest it in the local grocery store. They get food, and the local grocery chains across the country have said that that program accounts for one in every 10 jobs they have.
George Mason: Wow.
Jeremy Everett: So not only-
George Mason: So which you stop and say SNAP is the successor language to food stamps.
Jeremy Everett: That's right. Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Yeah.
George Mason: Right.
Jeremy Everett: So not only are you addressing hunger through that program, you're also creating economic opportunity for people. So we really do have great resources at our disposal, plus you've got a great network of food banks nationwide called Feeding America. You've got Meals on Wheels program, you've got all kinds of wonderful interventions in schools. Our public school system is one of our best interventions around food insecurity and poverty. So I definitely think it's possible and-
George Mason: Okay. And so you have talked then about some of the distribution issues-
Jeremy Everett: Yes.
George Mason: Food banks represent some of that, tremendous aspect of that. Schools create a table where people can gather, so an access point where they can get to the food. We still have some tremendous absences of accessibility and food in certain parts of our communities though. Sometimes we talk about food deserts, and that's probably not exactly right in the sense that almost everybody finds a way to get to a convenience store to buy certain kinds of food, paying more with more sugar in it, with less healthy and those sorts of things. What we're really talking about is access to nutritionally healthy foods and that sort of thing. How do we get there when Jeremy, I think everybody talks about we need more grocery stores and supermarkets and fresh produce at a reasonable price and those sorts of things in communities, but we think the market just naturally takes care of this and it's not working?
Jeremy Everett: Well, I'm a strong proponent of public and private partnerships.
George Mason: Good.
Jeremy Everett: Meaning that there are things that we need the government to do that only it can do, and there are things that we need nonprofit communities and philanthropic communities to do, and there are things that we need congregations to do that only they can do. By building partnerships and getting all these folks collaborating together, that's where we see us as a nation getting the multiplier effect. And so the things that I have seen that I am most encouraged by in terms of intervening on behalf of people who live in these low income food deserts where they don't have access to healthy food, oftentimes they're surviving on the dollar menu at a local fast food restaurant or to your point, a convenient store that may not have access to healthy food. And it's often overpriced and older, a convenient store.
Jeremy Everett: So one is initiatives where you're partnering with existing convenient stores and transforming shelf space and providing more healthy options. And so oftentimes cities are partnering with convenience stores to see that happen. But I'm a believer in Waco, one of our nonprofits Mission Waco, they've put in, what they called Jubilee Market. They bought an old convenience store and transformed it into a small grocery store. It may never achieve profitability in a traditional sense, but isn't that what investing in the common good is about, right?
George Mason: Right, exactly.
Jeremy Everett: So if we collectively as a community need to subsidize their losses at 20% a year, but we're providing access to healthy food and we believe that that is a value then what better way to spend our money?
George Mason: So this is the kind of imagination and innovation that is so needed in the social sector, I think, because here's the story I'll tell you here in Dallas. There is a Costco that went in to North Dallas and the city council made the decision to give it a $3 million tax abatement to incentivize this particular place in North Dallas for the Costco. My own Councilman, Mark Clayton at the time, was involved with other council persons around this concern that we continue to subsidize parts of our city for businesses and other parts get no attention to their credit. South Dallas, West Dallas has been on the radar of our public officials and they know that we can only succeed as a city for so long. And certainly we are not if we consider the whole city, and that is we need help in these areas that are most underserved. So they tied it to a $3 million equal incentive to put a major grocery store in South Dallas.
Jeremy Everett: Wow.
George Mason: And they said, we'll give this, but we're also going to contact all these major grocery store chains and incentivize them with $3 million to put a grocery store in South Dallas. Fabulous idea, nobody agreed to do it. Now, the city council voted, it's sitting there waiting for some major grocery store to say yes, but they look at their market analysis and say, $3 million is not enough to incentivize us to turn on this community.
Jeremy Everett: That's right.
George Mason: But what we're talking about here is, again, government policy can sometimes be ham-fisted, it doesn't always have the nimbleness of using these fingers. And what you're talking about is, what if instead of $3 million one time to have a grocery store go in, what if you break that up 30 times and have $1 million or $100,000 to contribute to changing convenience stores that exist all through South Dallas.
Jeremy Everett: That's right. And I think that it's good that the city is exploring these opportunities. If they could get a grocery store to come in for a $3 million tax incentive, then that's wonderful. I am grateful that the city of Dallas is prioritizing both communities because oftentimes if you live in one community, we see you as a little more human than people who live in the other community. And so we just keep our sidewalks look a lot nicer in wealthier areas than they do in poorer areas. So anything that we can do to try to provide a just infrastructure I think is important, but also recognizing that grocery stores only have a 1% profit margin. And so $3 million, they would probably lose money over the course of time even if they did have that $3 million subsidy. So, maybe that's not going to work, but what can work?
Jeremy Everett: So to your point subsidizing convenient stores or convenience stores healthy food initiatives. So Philadelphia has done a wonderful job of increasing access to healthy food through convenient stores. I do think that those are the kinds of things that we just keep trying. We just keep trying until we can hit the mark.
George Mason: Urban gardens is another approach. Bonton Farms here in Dallas is a tremendous example of being able to transform a community through an urban garden. And there are not just urban gardens, but then there are community gardens where people can come and participate in this process too. What role do you see these playing in this big picture?
Jeremy Everett: One obviously they create access to healthy food to families that wouldn't have it. They also help us get reconnected with agriculture. And so most of us are several generations away from being connected with knowing how our own food gets here. And we had a little community garden at a school that I taught at for one year and the kids grew lettuce and then when the lettuce was ready to be harvested we asked the kids if they wanted a salad, what they're launching and they said yes. And then when we gave them the salad from the garden, they said, "Wait that was outside. We thought you were bringing us a salad from McDonald's." And we were like, "Where do you think the lettuce comes?" And to be able to use that as an opportunity-
George Mason: Well just the connectedness.
Jeremy Everett: Yes, that's right. And to see how God moves through all things both us as people but also the land and how it can replenish itself. So those things are transformative in so many ways. One, they are nimble and they are able, I mean, you can set up a community garden almost anywhere and but also helping us reframe and reconnect to the land that gives us life.
George Mason: Terrific. Yeah. Well we have just a short moment left, but I wonder if you were able to say to someone who is listening or watching this conversation I'd like to do something. I'm a member of a congregation, I hear what you're saying, I'm so grateful we have all these organizations out there. What do you want an ordinary person who's beginning to catch an awareness of this? What can they do? What would you instruct them to do? Call them to do?
Jeremy Everett: One they can, I think proximity is important and what's important about that, it's not always moving to a neighborhood, but it's being in relationship with somebody who's experiencing hunger and poverty and hearing what they have to say and assuming that it's true. Don't argue with them-
George Mason: Wow, okay there it is.
Jeremy Everett: But to be in relationship with them and assume what they're saying is true just to listen to them. That allows you to soften and to begin to see them as somebody that has created the image of God so that's the first thing. There are wonderful ways to get engaged to volunteer at Meals on Wheels is probably one of the best programs to be able to do that because you're able to have a human connection with somebody while also providing them food. But we have a great coalition here called the Dallas Coalition for Hunger Solutions that are doing amazing things and whether it's a community gardening to access to SNAP or the food SNAP program to intervening with Child Nutrition Programs in schools. So there are all kinds of great ways, but I think most importantly, get to know somebody who grew up in different circumstances that you did and just listen to their story.
George Mason: Terrific. Jeremy, thank you for all you do, for answering the call to do this kind of work. I know it's partly coming out of your faith and partly it's coming because of the people that you've encountered over time, but the imagination to be able to see the day when maybe 200 years from now as a result of the work that you do, people will say, "Wow, people were hungry?" What a beautiful thought let's live into it together.
Jeremy Everett: Thank you.
George Mason: Thank you so much Jeremy.
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