My ride for the Summer 

I am tired, y'all. I spent the day hitting stumbling block after stumbling block, but I will get the bus together and I WILL feed these kids next week, dang it!  Besides all of the frustration (and bonding with my fellow SFPS peep through the many struggles), today was great.

 I went to visit 4 out 8 of my neighborhoods to hand out post cards with info about the program and talk to folks because I love it. I learned some important things already. There are a lot of hungry folks out there. I met so many kids and the adults were excited for the program, but it stung every time I talked to someone that asked if services for adults would be coming too.

 I'll talk about this later because I want to celebrate two of the things I learned that brought me joy today:

1.  I really need to keep learning Spanish because I made a couple of families and myself giggle at my struggles to translate.

 If I have to keep using it, maybe one day I'll be able to speak it without sounding so ridiculous with my mixed tenses and choppy sentences.

 Thank goodness people are so kind. Here's hoping we learn to communicate this summer so I can get to know people better. And I was impressed at what I could remember. Any time I used the correct verb tense and saw on their faces that I had said something that made some sense it was a (huge inner) victory.

2. I spotted so many cool guerrilla-style and container-style gardens everywhere! I really struggled to contain myself and keep from talking about gardening strategies.

I will say the gardens were in some of the more crowded and run down of my neighborhoods. They were creative and each was so different from the next. I really wanted to take pics, but I'll wait to people know who I am first. I would like to show the cool container garden and the recycled items vertical garden (the old cowgirl boot herb pots were my favorite).

Now, the part that hurt. It hurt every time I realized just how many kids needed this service to the point I am a little concerned about running out of food next week. Please don't let that happen. I would cry if I had to tell them I ran out of food and they'd have to wait.

It also hurt every when I realized how many adults needed help, too. I am boxed in by my funding source to only serve kids, but there are many elderly folks that need help and the parents need to eat so they have the energy to work and take care of their kids. I'm glad the Mobile Food Pantry is coming out with me once a month. Being able to tell them that made me feel a little better, not much though. I am working in a really underutilized program that helps a big chunk of hungry kids in these neighborhoods and can no way meet all of the need.

In the back corner in one of my neighborhoods I found a car with a disabled veteran tag and two car seats for tiny kids in the back. That's how I figure out if kids live in the houses at the moment. I look for toys, bikes and car seats. The picture of that car with that tag and those two little seats bruised my heart. I hope I met them.

Being in the rescuer role can be a challenge. I've worked in this role more times than I care to know and I can deal with it. I can hold my reactions when the ten year old I told about the food bus starts a conversation about weed and alcohol as soon as I step away. I file it away and digest it later where they can't see my wtf face and I can check my privilege. Then I start looking for the strengths in the community and building relationships with folks. There is always more strength.

Seeing people growing their own food makes me happy. I know if people have those skills what I am doing is a bonus. Probably a needed and helpful bonus, but just a bonus because they have some control over their own food supply. It may be independence out of necessity, but it is powerful.  

Now it's time to rest. I have to get up and do it all over again tomorrow.

I recently started a job with Second Harvest as a site supervisor with the Summer Food Services Program. This week I am calling sites and confirming food orders and all that jazz. On Monday, I start riding a bus around Unicoi County and Johnson City feeding kids. I decided to spend some time today learning about this USDA program and looking up info about Unicoi to figure out where hungry kids are in my community.  

"The Summer Food Service Program (SFSP) was established to ensure that low-income children continue to receive nutritious meals when school is not in session. Free meals, that meet Federal nutrition guidelines, are provided to all children 18 years old and under at approved SFSP sites in areas with significant concentrations of low-income children. "

This program targets neighborhoods around schools with 50% or higher of the school population is enrolled in the Free of Reduced Lunch Program. Our program is an open program which means we don't have to enroll kids. All they have to do is show up, get on the bus and we will feed them. Once a month the Mobile Food Pantry will be following our bus handing out food boxes to the families.

According to the USDA folks about 21 million kids access free or reduced price lunches during the school year. During the Summer only 2.3 million receive meals through USDA's Summer feeding programs.

That's means a lot of kids may be going hungry after school lets out for the Summer.

I'm not sure why this program is so underutilized, but I am looking forward to learning more about it and more about my community through this work.

If you are interested in finding  food services in your community I have put some links and numbers below.

Now time for some music from one of my favorite local artists, Amythyst Kiah.

USDA Programs:
http://www.fns.usda.gov/summer-food-service-program-sfsp

Second Harvest Food Bank of Northeast TN
http://www.netfoodbank.org/

Find other programs by searching on http://www.whyhunger.org/findfood or calling the national hotlines.

Need help finding food?
Know someone who does?
Call the National Hunger Hotline at

1.866.3hungry

(1.866.348.6479)
or

1.877.8hambre

(1.877.842.6273)

Food Justice has many intersections and can spur movements from the tiniest details about our seeds and how they are produced to the biggest of issues, such as,  how we feed our community, our country and the world. Food policy and food access effects everyone because everyone eats and everyone needs food to live. This is why Food Justice is accessible to all and this is why joining the call to have power over our food system is radical and revolutionary. And joining the call is becoming absolutely necessary.

Hello, my name is Heidi and I am a Food Justice advocate.  I live in Central Appalachia where the mountains are stunningly beautiful, poverty and hunger is rampant and the history of resistance runs deeps. I love these mountains and the people that live in them more than I could ever explain. My pretty little spot of red clay dirt is home and it is from here that I plant my flag in this struggle. If the system is broken we must grow a new one.

If you ever have met me you know how obsessed I am with food. I learn about everything from growing it to cooking it and making sure everybody has enough. I also care about things like protecting heirlooms and preserving Appalachian methods of food storage and recipes. I'll be darnded if I don't get some Paw Paw trees and Elderberry bushes growing around my house soon! But my biggest issue is creating food security through any means necessary.

I want this blog to be a record of the awesome work going on in Appalachia with the Local Food Movement. I want to share the vast resources and knowledge I obsessively gather about food issues. I need a space to talk about all of these cool people working on these inspiring projects that keep showing up in my life. And sometimes I want to call out our local politicians when they decide that letting people go hungry is better than standing up to corporate greed. Because the system is broken we are growing a new one and that story needs to be recorded.

If people read this blog for no other reason than to find out things like where to taste local moonshine for free I'll be happy. This is home and y'all are family and everybody ought to be able to brag, gossip and complain to their family.