136. 2 Billion Meals Served to Hungry Kids with Debbie Shore

Debbie Shore is co-founder of Share Our Strength, which has fed close to 2 billion meals to hungry children since their campaign, No Kid Hungry, began. (That’s billion with a B, folks!) Today's episode is full of stories and insights from that remarkable journey that will give you many nuggets of inspiration and ingenious thinking to take into your own path to make the world a little better place.  00:00 Preview 00:46 Intro & Welcome 04:16Share Our Strength Sharing Strength is the most thought about of the organisation’s 5 core values. The feeling of wanting to be connected to something bigger than yourself and finding value in what people bring to the table is embodied in the name of the organization. Enough people will respond to the call if the right vehicle or platform is presented. In the case of Share Our Strength, the vehicle is ending hunger. 04:42 The Great Questioning During the pandemic, more people questioned what impact the work they were would have on the world and on their own well being. More people focused on discovering what they were uniquely built to contribute. The path taken by Share Our Strength has changed and grown over the years but the vision to find ways for people to share their strengths to end hunger has sustained. The core belief of the organisation was that everybody has a strength to share. The original idea of working with chefs & the restaurant industry paid off as restaurants became the lifeblood of the organization. A New York Times article about a famine in Ethiopia in 1984 sparked the idea for the organization.  The organization started with personal funds & loans and contributions from friends and family members. One of the first big donors, Chef Alice Waters from Chez Panisse in Berkeley California, is being honored this week. Chef Waters responded to a cold letter with a generous check and by sending letters to fellow chefs who also responded. That started the chain of events with restaurants across the country. The fundraising platforms allow contributors to engage in their passions by giving people the opportunity to contribute by doing what they do for a living. People want to be engaged in things they care about and be a part of something bigger than themselves. Volunteering to do something you care about can lead to discovering your calling and may lead to greater opportunities. Peoples’ energy is found in their passion. 12:41 Food Is Life Food is central and fundamental to all our cores. While we thank our stakeholders for their efforts,  they usually thank us for allowing them to be a part of the solution and feel connected. According to Christoph Gorder of Charity Water, ‘This is a problem we know how to solve’.  There are many problems in this world that we don’t know how to solve, so we have to step up to solve the ones when the solution is known.  World hunger is not necessarily a complex problem but there are barriers of access. 1 in 8 kids in America struggle with hunger even though several meal programs exist. The focus of Share Our Strength was to identify the barriers that exist in schools. Barriers include: The stigma associated with having to access school meals Timing around getting into school to access meals Lack of information Efforts to reduce barriers include: Changing the way meals are distributed at schools Working toward eliminating any special lunch lines Eliminating any special or coloured tickets for provided meals Start serving breakfast in the classroom 3 million kids have now been added to school breakfast. Breakfast in the classroom tends to stay once introduced because of improvements in areas such as: Attendance Readiness to learn Schoolwork  Test results Behaviour Less need for fidget spinners 18:50  Hunger is Invisible Starvation in places like Ethiopia is easier to identify than an issue like hunger in America. The awareness barrier is huge in a country that is considered one of the richest countries in the world...