Food Insecurity is a Public Health Concern | Rayna Andrews | TEDxUWMilwaukee

can you remember what life was like for you when you were 9 years old you were likely going through puberty and you were more concerned with looking good and avoiding looking bad for me the year was 1992 I was entering the fourth grade and I went to Heflin Elementary School in Houston Texas for me I was more concerned about rushing home to chat my friends up on the phone which you know was a landline or jumping in front of the tube to watch my favorite music videos on MTV or if you were really anything like me you liked to collect a lot of things I mean like bookmarks posters pins of new kids on the block those were the good old days right you're only 9 what did you really have to worry about you didn't have to worry about paying bills right you had to just worry about that really cute guy in class and if he really liked you back or failing your math test there weren't too many worries things were a little different for me when I was 9 my mother worked as a draftsman at the phone company and I can remember every morning she would wake me up to the smell of bacon eggs toast and Folgers coffee it was the best part of waking up I can remember every night she cooked us a hot meal and on Wednesday nights she let me set the menu life was good back then and then things began to change my mom and I spends less time at home where she'd go on our little vacations and I've spent time at my aunt and uncle's but it was ok it was kind of like slumber parties and then we had to move we move from a two-bedroom apartment to one-bedroom apartment just nearly a mile up from where we lived I'd to sell my carebears canopy bed my Mickey Mouse stove and my Snoopy sno-cone machine ok Snoopy had to go because I was getting syrup all over the kitchen and mom wasn't having it mom was dying my mother had developed a rare disease that the doctors didn't know what it was she went from having a great job to being unemployed single sick nearly homeless and with a nine-year-old to raise my mother was brave she was resilient but that still didn't negate the feeling that I felt when she'd asked me to go to the store to pick up milk eggs bread peanut butter rice and beans and going to the store when I'd walk into mr. Vicks place it smelled like fresh bread in roach spray as I gather groceries into my cart and I'd wait in line to check out if there are any other patrons in line I'd ensure that they go in front of me because I didn't want them to see me paying with food stamps I mean this was in the early 90s so you had the bright colorful paper books right you didn't have the EBT cards that can be mistaken for debit cards today I was embarrassed and I didn't want anyone to know but mr. Vic knew or when my mother would ask me to go to the church aintry with her because she was too weak to bring the food back on her own she would open her grocery stack and as she was stacking and piling the food into our bag I would stand back and survey the room to see who I recognized because I didn't want anyone from church to know that we came here to get our food I was humiliated or even at school in the lunch line as I had my food I would cross my fingers that a classmate wouldn't be standing in front of me or behind me because I didn't want them seeing me pass along that little red ticket to the lunch lady or from elementary and middle school and then in high school it went to that four digit pin that I'd whisper to the lunch lady you see I was afraid that my classmates would judge me and make fun of me to no end because I wasn't like them we couldn't even afford food and so there were good days where they were hamburger mondays and cheesy pizza Fridays that really carried the day because it meant that it was something other than beans I mean my mom was a was a delightful cook but I really couldn't tell because we had beans almost every night we had black beans white beans pinto beans lima beans red beans beans beans beans by the time I graduated from high school I didn't care if I ever ate a bean another day in my life I was only nine years old from the age of nine to the age of eighteen I've blocked out that entire period of my life I made up that I wasn't good enough I didn't belong and something wasn't right here and as a result I've developed my entire identity based on that I felt like it wasn't right for me to feel that way as a nine-year-old that I wasn't good enough and that I didn't fit in but now as an adult I realized that there was nothing to be ashamed of because there are 24 million Americans that suffer from not having enough food to eat that's one in seven Americans and in this city and in Milwaukee it's one in four we're children like me are present and so I stand before you sharing my story and hopes that my narrative will change the narrative I now work as an executive for Wisconsin's largest food bank and I see the many faces of hunger every day through the hundreds of thousands of people that were able to feed with dignity and compassion I see that urban hunger is a lot like suburban in rural the geography may be the same but the people are a lot alike like the case of Nikki the young girl who steals a little extra from the lunchroom to ensure that her little brother and sister have something to eat at night or Margo the single mother who has to choose between rent and electricity or food on the table for her babies or Gary who has degrees on top of degrees that just so happened to lose his job and now he's trying to figure out how am I going to put food on the table or Maria who lives in a senior community who's on a fixed income and who's trying to balance her prescriptive drugs and the rising cost of groceries and finally Jose Jose seemed seemingly could never really keep a job but he was able to pick up on an odd and end gigs here and still can scrape up a living wage it's this narrative that Nikki Margo Gary Maria and Jose as if it's their fault that they're hungry that they're the weaklings of society and that it's something that they did to put themselves in a situation that keeps us stuck I mean but do you even know what I mean when I say hunger right you may have fasted for your personal reasons or religious reasons right and maybe your mind wasn't right while you're going through the process so you got really hungry and angry at the same time I like to call it hangry right but that's just the tip of the iceberg right that doesn't even give you get you close to what I talk about when I'm referring to hunger hunger is scary hunger is a basic human need and without it you do some pretty unpredictable things when you don't eat you can't think when you don't eat you can't function and when you don't eat you can't live so the current status quo is that it's them versus us as if they need to pick themselves up by their bootstraps but even that experience that you feel of hunger when you haven't eaten in a long time just imagine that coupled by the feeling of anxiety of not knowing when you'll ever be able to eat again and you'll begin to do unravel things and so you don't tell someone to pick themselves up by their bootstraps who doesn't even have boots in the first place we have to change the narrative we've been treating people as if their transactions pounds in and pounds out pounds before people statistics before people people are not numbers people are beings that have feelings that are real and it is real complex we've been operating in silos as if this is my territory so stay back I work in food so let me just focus on the number of people I can feed regardless of the nutritional value regardless of if it affects any of their other health elements or I work in education so I'm only going to focus on the number of children I'm able to push out this door regardless on if they're prepared or if they're ready for another phase in their life or I work in economic development so I'm going to focus on the number of people that I get jobs for regardless on the working conditions or if their living wage we continue by staying in these silos to perpetuate this narrative and it's not okay it's time that we change the narrative and I invite you to lean in on how to do that one we first have to recognize that the issue of hunger is complex people don't just wake up one day and become hungry it's a system that has them hungry in the case of Margo the single mother who's choosing between her rent and electricity she lost her job she went through a period of not being able to access food stamps she didn't know where the food pantry was so here she is just with her children trying to figure it all out that's how a lot of people's situations are we have to look at it from the root cause of it and what I mean by that is that we have to be willing as caretakers of the community to look upstream and to consider what's having these people be hungry and look at their being four core pillars to household stability its food health housing and employment if you don't have food you can't think and function if you don't have housing you can't expect someone to show up on the job and give a hundred percent if you don't have health care you can't really expect someone to perform at their peak and if you're not employed you can't expect to bring in an income and for the rest of your house to be stabilized so an example of this is this is a picture of household instability if someone doesn't have housing and if these were all like spokes on a wheel if one of those spokes are gone that car isn't moving its disabled and so that's how we've been treating people in America as if why can't you just pick yourself up by your bootstraps well they can't as organizations and as stewards of the community we have to start working in concert with one another as I mentioned a lot of nonprofits do a great job of operating in silos and it's not just nonprofits as several organizations as well and in working in concert what I mean by that is co-authoring agendas for the quality of life for our entire community and saying that I work really well in food and this is what I can contribute or I work really well in healthcare and this is what I contribute and housing and unemployment and education and being able in this massive puzzle to put down our puzzle piece and step back and consider how does my piece affect the entire picture that's what I mean by working in concert it's not about the lack it's about looking at the bigger picture and seeing the abundance of opportunity we then have to be unapologetic about advocating on the public's behalf it is with us that the public and Trust as nonprofit leaders as government officials to keep the public in mind I'm not passing any judgment but I'll tell you what we should do and in keeping the public in mind we have to put a stake in the ground we have to go from feeding the hungry to solving hunger we have to be willing to put ourselves out of business to ensure that the health of the public is our first priority and who knows once we finish solving hunger we can go from feeding America to nurturing America how about that and when we do that new possibilities arise possibilities such as food banks working with school districts to provide pop-up school pantries on a monthly basis schools get provided with food for the families and their students that attend that school to ensure they have a consistent flow of healthy and safe food or health care providers working with food pantries to provide diabetic friendly food pantries to ensure that those facing hunger don't also lose their health because they're not eating to live or the farmers markets who start allowing the use of EBT food stamps so that all people can enjoy the access to healthy and safe food so it's when we begin to work in concert with one another that anything becomes possible and so I share my story with you in hopes of changing the narrative and I never have considered myself a public health professional you know I've done a lot of things in the community but I've never had formal training but what I've come to discover is that by me working and advocating on behalf of the public's health and well-being that in fact I was operating in public health and so you all may be listening to this and you may be thinking that's interesting right and so I don't want you to leave here and just fire off a text hashtag hunger sucks and then fine if in five seconds later lean over to your neighbor and say where we eating after this I want you to lean in just a little bit closer and I want you to go back to your communities and one I want you to realign your personal mission to why you do what you do and make it worth your life I want you to dig deep and have your why be so big it doesn't matter how you do it or how long it takes next I want you to re-engineer how you do things in your places of operation by reengineering I mean to begin to massage and to reshape how you're operating and to ensure that you're addressing the root cause and that you're doing it as effectively and as nimbly as possible and finally I want you to reframe the conversation in every space that you walk into so that hunger is no longer on the table in solving hunger is so I invite you to enjoy me in this mission to change the narrative because together we can and together we can change the world thank you you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 32,192

Rating: 4.9000001 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United States, Health, Achievement, America, Big problems, Body, Business, Career, Change, Childhood, Children, Cities, Community, Compassion, Decision making, Development, Economics, Education, Exposure, Food, Global issues, Hardship, Inequality, Initiative, Learning, Parenting, Security, Sociology, Struggle, Success, Teaching, Truth, Urban Areas, Value, Women, Women in business

Id: DHBpWM0rNZI

Length: 17min 12sec (1032 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 21 2016