3 minute read
Introduction
This is our fourth and final report for the Health and Hunger Project — one of Think Kids’ first projects when we launched in 2020. We started this project with the hopes of connecting healthcare providers to local food resource providers. But instead, what we found was a concerning lack of infrastructure connecting food pantries, stakeholders, and the communities they serve. When healthcare providers don’t know where services are or what services are lacking, how can they connect families to resources? Or advocate for better services?
For the last four years, we’ve spoken with community stakeholders across the Pallottine Foundation’s service area, learning from their insight and lived experiences. They’ve articulated their challenges, successes, and recommendations for improving how our state addresses hunger, and we’ve worked to amplify these thoughts to the rest of West Virginia — particularly lawmakers. We’ve met great people and learned so much. I hope many will remain friends years after this project ends.
It seems fitting, as we wrap up this project, to work with young reporters from Marshall University who have an interest in journalism and public policy. Perhaps they’re too old for us to call them “kids,” but their work represents the spirit of our organization — allowing younger generations to share their perspectives and learn more about communities across our state. I hope they learned more about the counties they covered, and I appreciated the opportunity to work with them.
During the pandemic, America’s safety net programs kept many of us afloat — programs like the child tax credit, continuous Medicaid coverage, a federal moratorium on eviction, and, importantly, food assistance. West Virginia participated in many USDA waivers and flexibilities. With limited interaction with each other during those many months, it was hard to get a clear understanding of what food insecurity looked like.
But now, the smoke has cleared. One of the last COVID-19 emergency funding programs for childcare programs ended in September. I think that is it, the last of supplemental funding. So it seemed like an important time to revisit some of the stakeholders we had spoken to in the last few years to see what the pandemic had been like for them, and especially, what hunger looks like right now in their neighborhoods, post-COVID.
Our team assigned each student reporter a county, gave them a spreadsheet of the names and contact information for people to interview, and offered a few links to data sources to learn more about food insecurity in the county they were covering. Each reporter had about a month to do the work and submit a draft to us. We then worked with them to edit their stories, collected photos of interviewees, and uploaded each story to the Think Kids website.
When it was ready, we pushed each story out on our social media sites. At times, I was amazed at how some articles fostered lengthy dialogues online about community challenges and suggestions for improvement.
I hope you read each article and see the similarities and slight variations as to how each county is addressing food insecurity postpandemic, as well as how each stakeholder perceives the effects of the pandemic on the food resource system. I’m thankful that our funders agreed to provide them with a modest stipend for their work. They earned it! And I hope they remember this project and this critical issue as they pursue their professional aspirations.
