WhyHunger works to build and strengthen a grassroots-led movement for food justice and food sovereignty worldwide. Here are some selected impacts from 2017, highlighting what we accomplished with our partners and allies to support social movements, strengthen social justice efforts and protect the right to nutritious food, while increasing community access to food around the world. Thank you for your support!
Building Grassroots Movements
A total of 85 grassroots partners and social movements benefited from WhyHunger directly granting $532,280 to help communities develop their own solutions to hunger and poverty and build their capacity to engage in long-term change. By investing in capacity building, training, food production and leadership development, WhyHunger is helping to both spur innovation locally and build power nationally.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, WhyHunger raised over $47,000 in immediate, quick-response fundraising to directly support the Puerto Rican farmers and community organizers working through
Organización Boricuá de Agricultura Ecologica to rebuild their communities from the ground up. The funding was leveraged to meet immediate needs with food and water, as well as to supply the seeds,
tools and resources to begin rebuilding homes, farms and the local food system.
WhyHunger deepened critical relationships with three global social movements working to build food sovereignty and social justice for all–La Via Campesina International, World March of
Women and the World Forum of Fisher Peoples–and mobilized over $393,300 in funding through WhyHunger’s International Solidarity Fund and Imagine There’s No Hunger grants to
support local agroecological food production and community organizing projects in Canada, Nicaragua, US, Paraguay and Brazil. This support helps ensure communities are able to produce nutritious food, maintain their land rights and strengthen their ability to mobilize.
Protecting the Right to Food
WhyHunger continued to provide backbone support to the emerging Closing the Hunger Gap Network by providing 19 scholarships and facilitating popular workshops on Structural Racism, Race & Privilege in the Emergency Food System, The Right to Food and Narrative Change for the 2017 Conference, which brought together over 600 progressive food access organizations in the US to strengthen and unify efforts to end hunger and address its root causes.
WhyHunger held community of practice gatherings in the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic, bringing together 26 community-based food access organizations and leaders to deepen relationships, build a shared analysis of justice and health, explore opportunities for collaboration and establish ways to stay connected throughout the year. By building collectively, WhyHunger is fortifying the work of local communities and laying the groundwork to build a national movement to end hunger.
WhyHunger is developing the most comprehensive database of food access organizations in the US, placing an emphasis on those that provide nutritious food. Currently with 23,384 organizations and growing, we are utilizing whyhunger.org/findfood, a texting service and our WhyHunger Hotline, 1-800-5HUNGRY, to assist over 262,821 individuals annually to access healthy food in their communities.
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