If you’re hungry and someone gives you a meal, your immediate problem may be solved. But what about tomorrow, next week, or next year?
Emergency food is critical, but it’s not enough. Ending hunger requires community-specific solutions that address the underlying causes of why people are hungry in the first place. WhyHunger does both. We tackle immediate needs by connecting people to nutritious food (over 1.2 million last year!) and we support communities worldwide in identifying the root causes and solving hunger for themselves.
Central to our mission is this important truth: local people are the experts on the challenges in their communities, and they’re best positioned to address those specific issues to create lasting access to nutritious food.
Our job isn’t to tell communities how to solve their problems. We listen to what they need, trust their wisdom and experience, invest in their solutions, expand their capacity, amplify their stories, and respond quickly when disaster strikes. WhyHunger accompanies and strengthens grassroots solutions worldwide that produce nutritious food, protect the planet, and break cycles of hunger and poverty.
As you can imagine, those solutions look different in Missouri, Mexico, or Manhattan, and WhyHunger’s support can take many forms, like:
- Investing in agroecology schools and trainings that equip thousands of small farmers to grow food sustainably.
- Supporting urban, rural, and school garden programs, nutrition education, and cooking workshops.
- Providing resources to build farm infrastructure and to buy land, tools, livestock, and seeds.
- Investing in community-run farmers markets and food co-ops, along with culinary job training programs and business incubators.
- Supporting food and farm workers in the fight for fair wages and safe working conditions.
- Amplifying grassroots voices to tell a new story about how to end hunger.
These strategies are vital for local change, but how do they translate into global transformation? WhyHunger connects and convenes grassroots organizations so they can learn together, share strategies, build power, and scale effective solutions across the nation and around the globe. We also partner with massive global organizations of food producers and leaders to press for policies that expand food access, support small farmers, and protect natural resources from corporate agribusiness.
WhyHunger and our partners are working together to solve hunger from the grassroots up! We’re so glad you want to be part of the solution.
Stay tuned for more next week,
The WhyHunger Team
P.S. If you missed last week’s installment of the WhyHunger’s Why? series, you can check it out here.
