Jeremy Everett puts policy into action to fight poverty

Jeremy Everett from the Baylor Collaborative discusses causes and solutions for poverty and hunger in America.

Listen here, read the transcript below, or click here for the full video version.

George Mason:
Welcome to Good God, conversations that matter about faith and public life. I'm George Mason, your host, and I'm pleased to continue the series of Good God episodes on good politics. And to help us with that today, we're welcoming back to Good God, Jeremy Everett, who is the executive director of the Baylor Collaborative on Hunger and Poverty. Also, The Texas Hunger Initiative, I'm not sure exactly how they work together, Jeremy, but goodness, we thank you for being with us again and talking with us about the political aspect, advocacy work, especially in relationship to matters of hunger. This is your sweet spot, and it's always good to talk with you.

Jeremy Everett:
Well, it's great to be here with you, George. I appreciate the work that you do in this space, not only with your congregation, but for the world at large and helping point us towards our common humanity and helping us to find common ground so that ultimately we can make it a better world for everybody who lives in it. So, thanks for the invitation.

George Mason:
So we're going to get into the question of how we find solutions and how we encourage people to be involved. But we still have a world Jeremy, that we live in, that is not yet flourishing for everyone, right? Where access to housing and to food and to jobs. And those sorts of things are still inadequate for many, many people. And so your specific space of course, is hunger. And the goal is not just to improve, but to eliminate hunger. Why do we have a hunger problem in a country like ours Jeremy?

Jeremy Everett:
Yeah, that's a great question. And many of my colleagues have spent their lives trying to figure that out. One of the things that we've identified is that the primary cause of hunger in the U.S. is under employment, meaning that people are working. The majority of people who are eligible for federal nutrition programs, for example, are actually employed, but they're underemployed, meaning that they make minimum wage. And so they are trying to put together as many hours as they possibly can to make ends meet. Now, if you're on a minimum wage income in Texas and you were able to get 40 hours of work a week, 52 weeks out of the year, you're still only looking at grossing about $15,000 a year. In a place like Dallas, even in a place like Waco, that's not enough for rent, much less all your other expenses.

Jeremy Everett:
And so under employment is the primary cause to food insecurity in the U.S. And one of the caveat about underemployment is it leads to income volatility. And that's something that we've really taken a deep dive into since the pandemic hit. And essentially what income volatility is, is that you remember almost all of us have worked an hourly wage paying job at some point in our lives. And you can remember that you didn't determine what hours you worked. Your shift supervisor or whoever's in charge determines how many hours you're going to get and when you're going to work. And if you can't go to work consistently at the hours that they assigned to you, you're going to lose your job. And so since some weeks you might get 20 hours of work a week. The next week you might get 10, the next week you might get 15.

Jeremy Everett:
It means that your income is unpredictable. And so that leads to income volatility. Meaning that week to week, you don't know how much money you're going to make. And so on a monthly basis, you can't plan for all of your expenses. It also makes it hard to cobble together two or three jobs because oftentimes those shifts end up competing with each other. And so inevitably you can't keep all two or three jobs on a consistent basis. And so under employment and income volatility are two of the driving forces in hunger in the U.S.

George Mason:
Let's just pause there for a moment because I think it's important given what you've just said to note that there's a lot of conversation around raising the minimum wage, which is of course, an agenda item for Democrats generally. And it is not on the agenda at all for Republicans at this time, because of the fact that there is always a kind of balance that the marketplace is seeking. And that is between what does it cost to employ people to do your work versus, what do you have to do? In other words, if you're an employer, you want to get the least amount of labor costs in order to make the most profit. But at the same time, here is a place where policy comes into being, right?

George Mason:
Because if you leave it to the marketplace, you get something like where we are today. If minimum wage were only to have grown, linked to the inflation rate since 1968, today's $7 and 25 cent minimum wage would be a little more than $10 instead of $7 and 25 cents. If it were tied to the increase in productivity of American workers, it would be somewhat north of 15 dollars. And if it were tied to average wage gain of all Americans over the same period of time, currently, it would be more than $21 an hour. So imagine that your point about underemployment and volatility of wages, what would a worker working 40 hours a week at minimum wage be able to do if the income were tripled simply tripled? Automatically, you just changed the entire scope of the hunger problem in America.

Jeremy Everett:
That's right. That's right. I think when we think about good politics and we think about issues of hunger and how that's directly tied to economic security and economic opportunity, I think there are a couple of thoughts. First, it's recognizing that as people, as human beings, walking and breathing on this planet, that almost everything we do has political implications.

George Mason:
Yes.

Jeremy Everett:
Well, what we eat, how we eat, where we shop, when we shop, what we like on social media, what social media outlets we use, almost everything we do is inherently political, not just voting. And so, I think that's an important framework. I think for us at The Baylor Collaborative, we're trying to think through, okay, hunger is a socially unacceptable condition, that you can essentially identify the health and wellbeing of a society based upon the prevalence and the severity of hunger. So if you have widespread hunger and it is incredibly severe, then chances are good that the rest of your society is struggling in a significant way. And that's regardless of a pandemic. I think what we've seen in the U.S. is that we've never in modern American history. So I would say modern American history really thinking post civil rights era.

Jeremy Everett:
So really kind of eighties, nineties, early 2000s, the lowest that we've seen food insecurity rates decline to was 11.1%. And that was shortly before the pandemic. But during the pandemic, it jumped over 23%. I think what we, as people of faith can say is one, our Catholic brothers and sisters have a right to food. And I think that's something that we need to adopt on the Protestant side of the house. We need to recognize that food shouldn't be a negotiable item based upon where you live, what race you are, whether or not you've had a family member that's been incarcerated, whether wrongfully or rightfully.

Jeremy Everett:
It shouldn't be linked to, even consistent employment because not everybody has access to consistent employment. I think about people that live in areas that might be big summer spots and they work in the vacation industry or whatever, they don't always have gainful employment consistently. All that to say, what I think we can determine as a society is what is the best way to ensure that people have access to food to three healthy meals a day, no matter who they are or where they live. And so, as you mentioned, the minimum wage is directly tied to that.

George Mason:
Yes.

Jeremy Everett:
And we have to decide, what's the vehicle to ensure that people have the resources they need to live an active, healthy lifestyle. And do we do that through minimum wage? Or do we do that through increasing programs like Snap and putting more resources on a Snap card? I think what unfortunately has been negotiable for too long is it's like, "Yeah, we're really not going to put more money on a Snap card, and we're not going to raise the minimum wage." and we're not really going to do anything to ensure access to health care. And we're not really going to do anything to strengthen public schools in these low-income neighborhoods.

Jeremy Everett:
And so instead of having almost a new contract for America saying, that we're going to have to ensure that everybody's taken care of that their basic needs are met. We've continued to suppress opportunity for families that are in poverty and we're paying for it. We're paying for right now. I mean, our food insecurity right now is upwards of 23% this year because of COVID and we know that a lot of the families that are food insecure also didn't have healthcare [inaudible 00:11:09] and they were more likely to be adversely affected by COVID-19.

George Mason:
Right. So we have a constellation of factors that contribute to poverty and poverty is the single overriding factor in hunger and in other social ills as well, including drug use, including criminality and including, all the social ills that come from hopelessness. So the question is, how do we address that systemically? And I think when we consider all the options, there's the option of let the marketplace handle it. Okay? Because the market is the most efficient means of distributing goods and services. This is basically an American business principle or economic principle, but we also know that nobody who has a hand on the market the way, say for instance, a managed economy in China would be instead, our market is relatively free with limited regulation by government.

George Mason:
So there's going to be gaps as a result of that. Those gaps then have to be filled in somehow. And historically those gaps are filled in mainly by charity work, non-profits, among, which is your work, for example, but food banks and other kinds of benevolence kind of organizations. And then the third is it's government. So you've got these three factors. Now government seems to be something that for people of faith generally, and especially, you and I have been in the Baptist tradition really suspect in terms of what role the government should play, even if we are the government. So if you're making the case to people about good politics, I think everybody gets that the market has a role to play, and that charity has a role to play. I would argue that maybe charity should play a different role than it actually does currently. We could have that discussion also. But what role would you say to people of faith is a legitimate, godly role for government to play in eradicating hunger and in being a partner in this three legged stool?

Jeremy Everett:
Great question. A couple of thoughts. First, at the collaborative, one of the things that we talk about is that hunger and poverty are too big for any one organization or one sector, or even one political party to end by themselves. But it inherently requires the public sector and the private sector and the private sector representing corporate America, representing faith communities in America, representing the nonprofit sector, everybody that's not government essentially, that requires all of these organizations working in concert with government, if we want to move towards sustainable social change. And that inherently has to be bipartisan. I think one of the things that we can observe from Obamacare is that as well-intentioned, as Obamacare was, I mean, it increased access to healthcare for 30 million Americans. That's incredible.

Jeremy Everett:
And that is an incredible success, but in a state like Texas, we didn't expand Medicaid. That's like Mississippi, they didn't expand Medicaid, in Oklahoma, they didn't expand there. And so the people who are in the most difficult financial circumstances in our state still didn't benefit from that. And because Republicans didn't buy into Obamacare from the beginning, they spent the last better part of the decade trying to undo it. And so, is that sustainable social change? I think that's one of the things that we have to determine as people of faith is as a determinant, how do we build bipartisan support for a pro justice agenda? Because as people, as Christians, people from all faith traditions, but Christians specifically I'll speak from our context is that justice is a non-negotiable.

Jeremy Everett:
It is an absolute non-negotiable. We decided as largely a white church during the era of slavery that we would bifurcate justice and the work that needs to happen to ensure that everybody has food to eat and healthcare and housing and all of the things that are our core in our faith, we decided to pull that apart from saving souls because we didn't want slaves to feel empowered, to be able to have agency inside of a plantation. And so, we intentionally rip that apart. I think what we're recognizing now in the 21st century is that was not acceptable. And that we have built a tradition that is dying in part because of what we did 300 years ago. And so if we don't cobble back saving souls and justice together, then the white church in America will cease to exist.

Jeremy Everett:
So justice is as an absolute core responsibility that we have to work towards, I believe, and I could be wrong, but I believe that we need to do this as bipartisan in the capacity as possible. And certainly that's what we're trying to do as a part of the Baylor Collaborative is working in a bipartisan capacity and get both sides to identify some common ground, whether that's increasing the minimum wage or strengthening Snap, or figuring out creative ways that we can increase access to summer meals for kids across America, that they understand that from where we sit, the people experiencing hunger is not socially acceptable. And that we are bent on doing everything in our power to try to end that problem. So I'm getting a little preachy and-

George Mason:
No. We love it when you get preachy. So I think it's important though, also for us to perhaps acknowledge some of the accusations out there that undermine the Snap and the government programs that help. There is a sense that people have and I think it has a kind of echo ring from slavery days. The Bible verse that's quoted is, "If a person will not work then that person should not eat." Right? And there is an assumption that if you're giving food from the government, that you are undermining a work ethic and that people will be happy just to stay on the dole. Okay?

George Mason:
So I think probably what we need to acknowledge is that you can cherry pick people in every category of American society and say, "Look, there, that's characteristic of that." We can do that for rich people, as well as for poor people. But if you were listening to that kind of conversation of people who would say, "We need to get people off of Snap, get them off of welfare, because it's just perpetuating this mentality of being takers." What would your response to that be Jeremy?

Jeremy Everett:
Well, kind of build upon what I was saying before. Justice is a non-negotiable for us who are coming from the Christian tradition. Again, how we make justice, a reality is negotiable. What we know in our country and in the evolution of our country is that government plays the primary role in addressing inequity. It always has. And so the church can echo support for it. It can condemn it, but the government plays the primary role. When you look at most of the charitable organizations in your community, if it is an organization that is doing the most good in your community, by sheer volume, chances are good that at least 80% of their funding is federal funding. And so what churches donate and what individuals donate is typically the cream, but the actual meat, the majority of their budgets are funded through federal funds.

Jeremy Everett:
And so, if you're going to end hunger, you have to have a strong government response, as well as a strong faith community response, a strong corporate response, a strong nonprofit response. Now, when Christians talk about it, you don't work, you don't eat. I mean, we love to, as your point, cherry pick passages that absolve us of our guilt. We all know inherently at the core of our being that we are responsible for our brothers and sisters who are in poverty. And so we can try to come up with as many arguments as we possibly can, but really we're speaking to ourselves when we're trying, when we're quoting you, "You don't work, you don't eat." That's really us trying to absolve our own own guilt that we feel maybe because we're living too lavish of a lifestyle.

Jeremy Everett:
Maybe we know that we are using the resources that maybe God intended for the community, that we have kind of consolidated within our own little space. So I would say that, I think that's principle to know about it, but I wrote a book on Matthew 25, and then here, Jesus, it's the only eschatological scene in the entire gospel of Matthew, the only one. Jesus returns and he is returned as the king. And he assembles all people before and he begins to separate them, the sheep and the goats, the righteous from the accused and to the establishment of the people gathered the criteria for judgment wasn't confessional faith in Christ. It was whether or not you acted with love and cared for the needy. And those acts weren't just extra credit, but they constituted the decisive criteria for judgment.

Jeremy Everett:
Basically, if you fed the hungry, you are going to live, and he was welcoming you into the place that was prepared from you from the foundation of the world but if you didn't, then you were cast out. Jesus, also associates himself with people who are hungry and thirsty and naked and an immigrant and so forth in that passage, he calls that group of people, members of his family. And you and I, and the rest of us are judged based upon what we do or didn't do to serve members of his family. So I think that's important. For that to be the only eschatological scene in the entire gospel of Matthew, our go-to gospel. I think that tells us something about the priorities of the kingdom as Jesus saw it. And if we believe Jesus as God's son, then that certainly should have direct implications for how we live.

George Mason:
So before we wrap up this conversation and before we get to the final judgment day, let me pretend that I am a person of faith in a pew. And I have just heard you speak. And I am convicted that I need to become actively involved as an advocate to eliminating hunger in my community, maybe in the world, but let's just start out where we are. I don't know what to do, Jeremy, what do I do to become actively involved in being part of the solution here? What are the range of possibilities that you would recommend to me to become involved in?

Jeremy Everett:
Yeah, I'll give you three. So first proximity, Brian Stevenson says you can't solve a social problem from a distance. You have to have proximity to the problem. And so I would encourage our members of our congregation, your congregation, mine, members of the Christian household and our other faith traditions that we know are so important to our communities to spend time with people who are experiencing hunger and poverty. You get to know them and to listen to them and to believe what is being communicated to you. Well, we have a tendency when somebody is in a socioeconomic class that is below ours to disbelieve what it is that they're communicating. We assume that they're trying to get one over on us or that maybe we're being taken advantage of but to get to know them on their turf and to spend time with them is crucial. And for us to be able to identify an actual solution to the problem.

Jeremy Everett:
Otherwise, the solutions that we come up with are not going to work. So that's one way. Second thing is in basically every community in the country, you have incredible people who are putting flesh on Jesus's demand to feed the hungry and go align yourself with them. You don't have to invent the wheel, go find out where God is moving and join alongside in that. And then the third thing is to get to know your member of Congress and your elected officials in the local community. And one thing that I would encourage that I've been preaching on this podcast. I can go there pretty easily, but to do the same level of respect that you're going to have for somebody in poverty have that same level of respect and willingness to listen to your elected official. They're just a human being just like you.

Jeremy Everett:
Now, you might see them on the news periodically. You might disagree with everything that comes out of their mouth, but they're a human being, created in God's image, just like you. So go and spend time with them and get to know them, get to know what their priorities are, get to know what they care about, and then to tell them about you, tell them about what you care about. Tell them about some very practical steps that they can take in order to reduce hunger and poverty in your community. And if you're willing to commit yourself to that relationship and build it for the long haul, you'll be surprised at what you can accomplish. You might be able to take people who were previously antagonist to some of these issues and turn them into an ally in time because you cultivate trust. And if you do that, we can certainly make the world a better place.

George Mason:
Well, thank you for all the work you do to make the world a better place. And we're grateful to know you and support you. Jeremy, it's always good to talk with you and thank you again for being on Good God.

Jeremy Everett:
It's always my pleasure. You ask great questions and I love what you're doing to bend the world towards justice.

George Mason:
Thank you so much. God bless. Take care Jeremy.

Jeremy Everett:
Thanks.

Speaker 3:
Good God is created by Dr. George Mason. Produced and directed by Jim White. Social media coordination by Cameron Vickery. Good God conversations with George Mason is the podcast devoted to bringing you ideas about God and faith and the common good. All material copyright 2021 by Faith Commons.