REVOLUTION HUNGER BLOG

By Sophie Solomon

I started working with Revolution Hunger this past February after hearing about it from a friend of mine. I hadn’t heard too much about the organization and really had no idea what to expect. But my experience with Revolution Hunger thus far has been a huge source of growth for me, as an individual. Being a Youth Outreach Worker with Revolution Hunger has also been a huge learning experience.

Sophie and Lia volunteering at Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco

First and foremost, from my time with Revolution Hunger, I have learned about the various ways individuals, and more specifically teens, can fight hunger. While the issue of hunger seems like a large task to tackle, and it is, there are a variety of different things we as individuals can do to help combat hunger. In San Francisco alone, there are numerous organizations that provide volunteer opportunities in the realm of hunger fighting. One of these organizations is the Glide Memorial Church. As a final project with Revolution Hunger, Megan, the SF regional coordinator, Lia, a fellow youth outreach intern, and I volunteered at Glide Memorial Church. Glide Memorial serves breakfast  and gives out lunches to hundreds of people in need of food daily. As part of our volunteer session Megan, Lia and I served breakfast to the people at Glide. It was amazing to see how much of an impact Glide makes within just one breakfast shift. For just two hours of your time you can help to make a small difference in the people eating at Glides’ lives. Other volunteer opportunities in San Francisco include working at the SF Food Bank (website) and helping to give out food at St. Anthony’s Church.

Hunger is a real issue, and it isn’t going away. But by getting involved with organizations like the SF Food Bank and Glide Memorial, and completing some of the activities on www.revolutionhunger.org we can do something to educate ourselves about this issue deal with the problem. Working with Revolution Hunger has shown me just a small portion of the ways hunger affects people around the world daily and I hope that by working with this organization that I have in turn done the same for some other people too.

Revolution Hunger has provided me with a ton of knowledge and resources to start my hunger fighter journey. I hope that in years to come as I go off to college and beyond I can take the knowledge that I gained from my experience and raise awareness about hunger and help to fight hunger.

By Gionni Crawford

Hunger, wealth and health. When you think about it, they all go hand-and-hand. World-wide these are things that people are struggling without everyday.

I remember when a small bag of potato chips used to be 25 cents. Somehow the suggested retail price rose up to 50 cent for small ounce of potato chips.

Junk food is not the only thing that increased, but along with that was the gas prices — which has been a big deal recently.

Some people blame the economy, some blame our leadership, our government and some blame it on consumers. Overall, we all play a role in the hunger disparities and it’s starting right in your community.

You may ask, “How could I be responsible for the thousand of people going hungry every day?” Well, you are not directly responsible for those people.

Let’s look at the big picture.

In 2009, in response to the question, “Have there been times in the past twelve months when you did not have enough money to buy food that you or your family needed?”

18.5 % of people in the U.S. said “Yes.” Nearly 1 in 4 households with children said, “Yes.”

What does this mean to you? This means hunger lurks in almost every community in America.

But, hunger is bigger than America. It’s an global issue and we all can do something

25,000 people die everyday from hunger-related causes.

Take Forgotten Harvest for example, a local food bank in my hometown of Detroit. This organization “rescued” 23.2 million pounds of food last year.

They “rescue” food that grocery stores. schools, restaurants and various businesses would otherwise throw away and donate them to over 435 food donating organizations.

Forgotten Harvest is combating two hunger problems in America: Hunger and waste. That is amazing!

Think of what we can do by rescuing our food. Next time you’re at an event with a surplus of food, why not tell the organizer about Forgotten Harvest or an organization that does something similar.

Using your voice and knowledge of hunger, waste, and malnutrition counts. I always say, if you cannot afford to donate money to food banks, donate your time! Your knowledge and your physical presence in your community will make an impact.

Just think if we all worked together to combat hunger disparities in every community….that would create a global impact!

You don’t like cost of eating healthy? Then I push you to contact legislators and community leaders and do something about it.

But, there are ways to get around that hefty price. Always check your newspaper for coupons, look for fliers advertising sales, and support locally-owned stores, who are more prone to give you a price cut because you live in the neighborhood. You can always choose to volunteer at a food bank!

It hurts me to realize that some parents in America have to choose between paying a house note or buying food for their children, but this is reality! Even when the parents can afford to buy food, there is a lack of knowledge on what the buy and how to be economical. Unfortunately, some families opt to buy the cheaper, calorie and carbohydrate-infested foods. As a result of constantly eating these cheap-but-unhealthy foods and snacks, this increases the high blood pressure, stroke, obesity and diabetes rates in our country. That means more trips to your doctor for prescriptions and more money these families have to come out of to keep themselves “healthy.”

What is the true definition of eating healthy or being healthy? It’s like we as Americans have two choices: buy the cheap-but-unhealthy foods and make more trips to the doctor for medicine or buy the expensive-but-healthy foods and not be able to pay some bills.

The malnutrition in this country is atrocious. But let’s not give up hope. There are lots of other organization out there combating hunger, waste and malnutrition in America everyday.


Here is a list of hunger relief organizations that also strive to keep Americans healthy at the same time. http://dir.yahoo.com/Society_and_Culture/Issues_and_Causes/Poverty/Hunger/Organizations/Relief_Organizations/

No one can do everything, but everyone can do something.

Hello all Hunger Fighters! What a year it has been! We are coming to the end of our pilot year and I think a decent recap of my favorites is only appropriate :). Let’s see, we started off our August of 2011 with an awesome RH meeting in Washington DC. We got to meet each other and brainstorm ideas about how to Revolution Hunger can bring our message to YOU!

New media Producers decided up on videos, pictures, and LOTS of blog posts. One of my favorite blog posts was “To Be OR Not“  . I wrote this post with the Trayvon Martin case in mind; everyone focused in on such a terrible tragedy but tragedies happen all the time in our face. It’s not until something extreme happens in our own backyards that we tend not to take certain things for granted. I wanted to appeal to all in the sense that let’s not take forever for something bad to happen, before we take action against it.

Now, all the new media producers at Rev Hunger have done an supercalifragilistic job with making videos. We done everything from interviews on the street to hawking kids down in our school hallway with a camera. It was alotta work. Trust me on this one. I have to bring up the very first Rev Hunger video, by Jessie in San Francisco. She made it out to be like a news show which was really cool! It was witty and was loaded with info about Rev Hunger and what was poppin (/-__-)/.

Then, there was the “Dc Students Think Hunger Is…” video. I had hella fun with this video. I interviewed so many tens, teachers, administrators it was RI-DIC-U-LOUS. I had a class discussion about hunger and what it meant to the kids in my school. I got different feedback from everyone and on some topics the decision was unanimous.

Alexcia from the Twin Cities made “Ideas and Words” within like a month of her joining us! It was a total silent video and was pretty cool because the teens wrote on a board what they wanted and it was just so inspirational.

Well, Rev Hunger def did more than just that but I don’t think there’s enough GB space on Tumblr to tell every detail of our journey. But I can say, Rev Hunger has broaden my views about famine and hunger. I have been thoroughly educated about the effects of over farming and nutritional value. Hunger is not just located in Africa but EVERYWHERE.

As the saying goes, Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.

Tekiah Jones is the Washington DC New Media Producer for the Revolution Hunger Campaign. Tekiah is a a senior at McKinley Technology High School is planning to study film production and broadcast at Howard University.

We asked Revolution Hunger’s Jessie Chen to reflect about the greatest hits of her months as a New Media Producer with Revolution Hunger. Here’s what she had to say:

Fighting Hunger with Memes

My favorite blog posts that I have done have been images. I have noticed that they receive much more recognition from viewers, while at the same time they are very quick to make. Also, in particular, I really enjoy my Gandhi posts.

Videos Against Hunger

My second favorite blog posts are the videos I have created for RevHunger. I feel like the videos I make are short and simple, and also entertaining to watch. Here are some of my favorite videos:

A snippet of a day with the Revolution Hunger team meeting in San Francisco

A video I made of a few classmates and their thoughts on hunger:

Writing to End Hunger

Last fall I created a post titled High School Hunger Polls which included some surprising facts and data I collected from kids at my school.

Jessie Chen is the San Francisco New Media Producer for the Revolution Hunger Campaign. Jessie prides herself in working with great organizations such as buildOn, Youth Steering Committee, and the ACLU.