University Daily Kansan / Friday, May 4, 1990
11B
Daniel Starling/KANSAN
lim and Diane sought shelter in a parking lot of a building at 18th and Wyandotte streets after being turned away from a rehabilitation shelter
Hunger
Continued from p. 11
With the cuts came administrative crackdowns, "churning" recipients from the rolls for minor offenses. Food stamp recipients might have to fill application forms that can run down and require complex calculations.
Poppendieck, who analyzed Depression-era food policy in her 1986 book, "Breadlines Knee-Deep in Wheat," sees the reliance on emergency programs as "a dramatic reversal in the direction in which social provision had been evolving in the United States."
That direction, toward an increased federal role, resulted in greater standardization of benefits, safeguarded recipients' rights and enabled them to buy their own food, just like their neighbors.
By contrast, volunteer programs vary from city to city and state to state. Regardless of how well they be treated, clients "have no enforceable rights whatsoever." Poppendieck said.
"And far from making the lives of poor people similar to those of the rest of society, emergency food programs tend to segregate the poor into separate programs available only to those who assert their poverty.
Unlike federal programs, non-profit efforts are fragile and fragmented, heavily dependent on volunteers, donations and good will, Poppindeck said. Many lack adequate facilities and are subject to neighborhood opposition. "How long can we keep these people off the ground or other non-profits to keep up the enormous effort required to respond to the emergency?" she said.
In some quarters, there is talk of closing soup kitchens and food pantries to force government to do more.
"Some days," said Nancy Amielde of the Western Massachusetts Food Bank, "would want to show down all the kitchens and pantries in America.
“If that sounds too cruel, every time someone walks through a door needing food, I would want the first action to be to call a congressman or a woman here with two children she can't feed. Where should I send her?”
"Put the onus back on them."
Walker worries about the possible legacy of continued reliance on emergency services. "We are creating a large, disenfranchised population that may never find its way back to mainstream American life. People are not going to live on handouts all the time, good; then to go work for Citicorp."
For non-prefit agencies, the struggle to keep up with demand for food leaves little time for advocacy.
"You won't have to change much in society if those people never have the time to raise their voice," said Maria Lipski, a political science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
For some service providers, competition for funding leads to compromises that may not always serve clients' interests.
"To get more bang for your buck, you need bigger programs," said Bill Bolling, executive director of the Atlanta Community Food Bank.
"But the bigger the program, the more dehumanizing it is. If you're feeding 50 people a day, you can have an accountable relationship. If you're feeding 500 a day, nothing can happen."
Marc Mibodean, a former Boston Food Bank board member, calls the '80s "the decade of the sidewalk, the soup kitchen lines. Now, it's the '90s, and people can't believe these people are still there. The trend is to turn
Relief act to fight hunger improve lot of truly needy
The Associated Press
Here are some highlights of the Mickey Leland Memorial Domestic Hunger Relief Act, HR 4110, the largest anti-hunger initiative since 1977. As introduced in the House of Representatives, the bill would:
- Increase benefits for the Food Stamp Program and the Temporary Emergency Food Assistance Program by $600 million in fiscal 1991 and by $2.3 billion during the next three years.
■ Provide a 2 percent across-the-board increase in food stamp benefit levels, in addition to inflation
Provide higher food stamp benefit levels for families whose housing costs exceed 50 percent of their income and pay up at highest risk of homelessness.
Raise the fair market value of
vehicles that food stamp recipients can own from $4,500 to $5,500 in fiscal 1991, and adjust for inflation thereafter.
Allow relatives who buy and cook food separately to be considered separate food stamp households, with the exception of minor children living with their parents. The law now requires people to apply together with parents, siblings and adult children, thereby discouraging doubling up with relatives.
■ Exclude the first $50 monthly child support payment from consideration as income in determining food stamp benefits. The Food Stamp Program now counts these benefits from seeking child support, benefits and discourages custodial parents from seeking child support.
away."
Meanwhile, a new generation is coming of age.
"I'm now teaching students who have grown up with soup kitchens and food pantries, and who consider such emergency provisions to be the normal way of dealing with destitution." Ponendkeck said.
As she walks the streets of New York, Christina Walker, who recently resigned as executive director of the New ork Food and Hunger Holline, finds herself thinking about the people she photographs in their picture of this country when be up? It will be a different country. Yet kids will grow up and
think this is the way we've always been." she said.
"I think we did the right thing in the beginning, in thinking we must get these people in off the streets. But now it's snowed out of control.
"A storefront Pentecostal church in a poor neighborhood with 50 congregants, themselves dirt-poor, scrounging food of questionable nutritional value from a bunch of nuts — that's become our safety net.
"There really is a big trony here, one that lots of people are wrestling with. In setting out initially to fix what they become part of what's broken."
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