Help Us Build The First Hunger-Free Generation

New Initiative:

From Share Our Strength:

The Road to Riches is Called K Street, according to the headline of a recent Washington Post front-page story. The article described that the number of registered lobbyists in Washington has more than doubled to 34,750 since the year 2000, that starting salaries have risen to $300,000 a year, and that there's a "wide acceptance among corporations that they need to hire professional lobbyists to secure their share of federal benefits."

The Post story is really about those having power having a voice that is heard. Of the many great divides that challenge our nation: economic, racial, digital – one of the most far reaching is the divide between those whose voices are heard and those whose voices are not. If America's most successful corporations need professional lobbyists to "secure their share of federal benefits" imagine what America's hungriest children need. If America has a greater shame than children and families who are penniless, it is citizens who are voiceless.

I'm writing you today to ask you to make a donation to help us reach those with the least voice of all -- America's hungry children -- and to inform you that eradicating chronic childhood hunger is finally within our reach.

According to the Department of Agriculture, over the course of the year, some 260,000 households have a hungry child. This is a large, but manageable number. It represents a finish line we can reach and cross. We at Share Our Strength, and thousands of our volunteers across the country, believe that when it comes to several hundred thousand children suffering from hunger on a chronic basis, we can find them, we can feed them, we can support them, and we cannot quit until we do.

To mark our 20 th anniversary and to set the agenda for our next 20 years, we've traveled to countless communities to find out why hungry children are not receiving the nutritious food they need to learn, grow, and thrive, why kids are not enrolled in school breakfast and summer feeding programs, and why inadequate nutrition and obesity are reaching epidemic proportions. As a result, we are partnering with the most effective advocates in Ohio, Massachusetts, Florida, California and other communities to advance Share Our Strength's finely targeted, community-by-community strategy to end childhood hunger by eliminating barriers to the public-private partnerships that have proven to be successful.

Ending chronic childhood hunger in the United States is a goal that is finally within our grasp. Not today, tomorrow, or even next year. But within the next 5-10 years, if we are strategic and if our strategy is well funded, we will achieve this lasting legacy. But we need your help.

I am writing you because you are one of the few who has always been willing to use your voice on behalf of those who have yet to be heard. Please do so again by making a contribution to Share Our Strength so we can extend our childhood hunger strategy to every community that needs it.

Thanks to you, America's hungry children will have been heard. Thanks to you, we can achieve the first hunger free generation in American history.

Sincerely,

Bill Shore
Executive Director
Share Our Strength