[House Hearing, 117 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]


                ENDING HUNGER IN AMERICA: CHALLENGES, OP-
                  PORTUNITIES, AND BUILDING THE POLITICAL 
                  WILL TO SUCCEED

=======================================================================

                                HEARING

                               BEFORE THE

                           COMMITTEE ON RULES
                        HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

                    ONE HUNDRED SEVENTEENTH CONGRESS

                             FIRST SESSION

                               __________

                       WEDNESDAY, APRIL 28, 2021

                               __________


[GRAPHIC NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]

                    Available via http://govinfo.gov
             Printed for the use of the Committee on Rules
             
                              __________

                    U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE                    
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                           COMMITTEE ON RULES

               JAMES P. McGOVERN, Massachusetts, Chairman
NORMA J. TORRES, California          TOM COLE, Oklahoma,
ED PERLMUTTER, Colorado                Ranking Republican
JAMIE RASKIN, Maryland               MICHAEL C. BURGESS, Texas
MARY GAY SCANLON, Pennsylvania       GUY RESCHENTHALER, Pennsylvania
JOSEPH D. MORELLE, New York          MICHELLE FISCHBACH, Minnesota
MARK DeSAULNIER, California
DEBORAH K. ROSS, North Carolina
Vacancy
                       DON SISSON, Staff Director
             KELLY DIXON CHAMBERS, Minority Staff Director
                                 ------                                

             Subcommittee on Legislative and Budget Process

                             VACANCY, Chair
JOSEPH D. MORELLE, New York,         MICHAEL C. BURGESS, Texas,
  Vice Chair                           Ranking Republican
MARY GAY SCANLON, Pennsylvania       TOM COLE, Oklahoma
DEBORAH K. ROSS, North Carolina
JAMES P. McGOVERN, Massachusetts

                                 ------                                

          Subcommittee on Rules and Organization of the House

                   NORMA J. TORRES, California, Chair
ED PERLMUTTER, Colorado,             GUY RESCHENTHALER, Pennsylvania,
  Vice Chair                           Ranking Republican
MARY GAY SCANLON, Pennsylvania       TOM COLE, Oklahoma
JOSEPH D. MORELLE, New York
JAMES P. McGOVERN, Massachusetts

                                 ------                                

                  Subcommittee on Expedited Procedures

                     JAMIE RASKIN, Maryland, Chair
DEBORAH K. ROSS, North Carolina,     MICHELLE FISCHBACH, Minnesota,
  Vice Chair                           Ranking Republican
NORMA J. TORRES, California          TOM COLE, Oklahoma
MARK DeSAULNIER, California
JAMES P. McGOVERN, Massachusetts
                            
                            
                            C O N T E N T S

                              ----------                              

                             April 28, 2021

                                                                   Page
Opening Statements:
    Hon. James P. McGovern, a Representative in Congress from the 
      State of Massachusetts and Chair of the Committee on Rules.     1
    Hon. Tom Cole, a Representative in Congress from the State of 
      Oklahoma and Ranking Member of the Committee on Rules......     3
Witness Testimony:
    Dr. Diane Schanzenbach, Margaret Walker Alexander Professor, 
      Northwestern School of Education and Social Policy.........     6
         Prepared Statement......................................     9
    Dr. Thea James, Vice President of Mission and Associate Chief 
      Medical Officer, Boston Medical Center.....................    20
        Prepared Statement.......................................    23
    Ms. Heather Reynolds, Managing Director of the Wilson Sheehan 
      Lab for Economic Opportunities, University of Notre Dame...    26
        Prepared Statement.......................................    29
    Ms. Ayesha Curry, Co-Founder, Eat. Learn. Play. Foundation; 
      Ambassador, No Kid Hungry..................................    33
        Prepared Statement.......................................    36
Additional Material Submitted for the Record:
    Statement from Congresswoman Gwen Moore dated April 28, 2021.    51
    Statement from Congressman Gregorio Kilili Camacho Sablan 
      dated April 28, 2021.......................................    54
    Statement from Luis G. Pedraja, President, Quinsigamond 
      Community College..........................................    73
    Letter from the Food Bank Coalition of Massachusetts dated 
      April 28, 2021.............................................    78
    Letter from Defeat Malnutrition Today dated April 28, 2021...    86
    Letter from the National Education Association dated April 
      27, 2021...................................................    89
    Letter from The Root Cause Coalition dated April 28, 2021....    94
    Letter from Dartmouth-Hitchcock Health dated April 26, 2021..   101
    Curriculum Vitae and Truth in Testimony Forms for Witnesses 
      Testifying Before the Committee............................   105

 
 ENDING HUNGER IN AMERICA: CHALLENGES, OPPORTUNITIES, AND BUILDING THE 
                       POLITICAL WILL TO SUCCEED

                              ----------                              


                       WEDNESDAY, APRIL 28, 2021

                  House of Representatives,
                                        Committee on Rules,
                                                    Washington, DC.
    The committee met, pursuant to call, at 12:04 p.m., via 
Webex, Hon. James P. McGovern [chairman of the committee] 
presiding.
    Present: Representatives McGovern, Torres, Perlmutter, 
Raskin, Scanlon, Morelle, DeSaulnier, Ross, Cole, and 
Fischbach.
    The Chairman. The Rules Committee will come to order.
    This is an important day for the cause of ending hunger in 
this country, and it is personal to me. My first involvement in 
the movement to end food insecurity began when I was a student 
interning for Senator George McGovern--no relation. He was the 
chair of the Special Select Committee on Hunger and Nutrition. 
I watched him champion these issues in a bipartisan way, along 
with leaders like Senator Bob Dole.
    He saw the face of hunger in the United States, and he did 
not look away; he did something about it. And that always stuck 
with me. And I promised myself that I would never look away 
either. Every person who has stopped me on the street, every 
mother who visited my office to tell me about their struggle to 
put food on the table has stuck with me. I have seen how hunger 
makes it harder to learn, harder to grow, harder to work, and 
harder to take care of our kids.
    For all the good the government does today, it is clearly 
not enough. In fact, the progress that Senator McGovern and 
others fought so hard for has been heading in the wrong 
direction, and, as chairman of this committee, I am going to do 
something about it.
    People need help. They needed help long before the COVID 
pandemic hit, and they need it more urgently now. More than 40 
million Americans are at risk of food insecurity because of 
COVID-19, and 35 million Americans were already dealing with 
food insecurity and hunger before the pandemic hit.
    Think about that. The United States of America is the 
richest country on the face of the Earth. That anybody--
anybody--goes without food is unconscionable.
    We have everything we need to eradicate hunger in the 
United States. We have the brainpower, we have the food, we 
have the infrastructure, and, yes, we have the money. It is a 
hell of a lot cheaper to solve this crisis than it is to let 
someone go hungry, get sick, and end up in a hospital needing 
additional care, or for seniors to take their pills on an empty 
stomach and end up in an emergency room.
    For too long, we have lacked only one thing: the political 
will. I have always said that hunger essentially is a political 
condition. If we have the political will, we can solve it.
    Today we begin to change that, and we start building what I 
hope will become a roadmap to end hunger in America--not to 
tinker around the edges, not to get us where we were before the 
COVID pandemic hit. I don't want to manage hunger. But, truly 
and finally, I want to end food insecurity and hunger in this 
country and to do it by 2030, as the United Nations has called 
for.
    The challenge before us is great, but I believe this goal 
is in our grasp if we are willing to fight for it.
    I get it; the programs that address hunger don't fall under 
one umbrella. They are scattered throughout many programs and 
across many different agencies. And even here in the United 
States Congress, we can get a little territorial, which 
prevents us from working together as well as we should. And, 
you know, that is why this committee, the Rules Committee, is 
perhaps best positioned to take this issue on, because we are 
not hindered by any single jurisdiction. And since we have 
never held a hearing quite like this before, we are coming at 
things with a fresh perspective.
    The committee is going to do its homework. We are going to 
hold hearings, roundtables, briefings, and site visits, as 
COVID precautions permit. And we are going to think 
holistically, not just focus on one program or another--all to 
build a record that encourages not only Congress to act but the 
administration too, because we need, in my opinion, another 
White House Conference on Hunger.
    You know, the heads of food banks, hospitals, government 
agencies, educators, the faith-based community, people with 
lived experience, anybody who has anything to do with finding a 
solution needs to be brought together in one room in the White 
House. And they should develop a plan to tackle this, something 
with benchmarks that better connects the dots between all the 
different Federal programs.
    This is an all-hands-on-deck moment, and it will take the 
full weight of the Federal Government. I also want to get the 
business community involved, because the government alone 
cannot solve this problem.
    We have a lot of work to do to change the reality in this 
country, but if anyone doubts that that is possible, I want to 
end my remarks by quoting someone I mentioned at the beginning, 
and that is Senator Bob Dole, a Republican from Kansas. The 
ranking member and I recently received a letter from him, and I 
want to read it into the record right now.
    He writes, ``Dear Jim and Tom, I am writing to commend your 
joint efforts to address hunger in America. It sure brings back 
fond memories of working with George McGovern many years ago. 
Some thought we were an odd couple, but I still believe 
bipartisanship can work effectively.
    ``The 1969 White House Conference on Food, Nutrition, and 
Health was a call to action that led to the development of 
critical programs that continue to support millions of 
Americans five decades later. I remain proud of the work 
Senator McGovern and I did then, and I endorse your effort to 
secure a second White House conference to identify the next 
frontier of programs to finally end hunger in America.
    ``Our Nation must keep making strides to end food 
insecurity in America. I appreciate your work to bring the 
topic of nutrition front and center in the United States 
Congress. Thanks for all you continue to do.
    ``God bless America. Bob Dole.''
    I want to thank him for such a thoughtful letter.
    And I still think that we can do big things in this 
country. And to all the doubters, let me say this: There was a 
time when the sky was literally the limit. Then Americans 
dreamed bigger. We put a man on the Moon--the same year of the 
first and only White House Conference on Hunger, by the way. We 
launched a Cancer Moonshot. NASA just recently flew a 
helicopter onto Mars, reaching a world away for the very first 
time. That is the kind of thinking we need to build a Nation 
that is hunger-free.
    And before I turn it over to our ranking member, let me 
conclude with a story. You know, in the mid-1960s, a 
documentary called ``Hunger in America'' ran on CBS. Like 
scores of other Americans, my old boss and mentor, Senator 
George McGovern, sat with his family and watched. Senator 
McGovern's first thought was, why are they looking at hunger in 
the United States? Many Americans believed hunger to be a 
problem of other countries, not ours.
    And as he watched, Senator McGovern saw a little boy tell 
the interviewer that he had no food at school and was regularly 
hungry. The interviewer asked the little boy how it made him 
feel to watch other kids eat while he went without, and the 
little boy said he was ashamed.
    That night, Senator McGovern told his family, you know, it 
is not that little boy who should be ashamed, it is George 
McGovern, a United States Senator, a member of the Committee on 
Agriculture.
    More than 50 years later, we have made progress, yet more 
than 40 million people are hungry in the United States today. 
So I will say it: It is still not that little boy or the 
millions of people who face hunger today who should be ashamed. 
I am ashamed. We all should be ashamed.
    The time has come for the promise of this Nation to be that 
no person goes hungry in America--no person, period--not on my 
watch, never again. So that is what I am working toward. That 
is what I hope this committee will work toward. That is why I 
am calling for this White House conference, because patchworks 
and Band-Aids are not enough. They don't solve the problem.
    So, before I turn to our ranking member, let me first wish 
him a happy birthday, because today is his birthday. And there 
is no better place to mark such a special day than right here 
in the Rules Committee.
    So, with that, I yield to my ranking member, Congressman 
Cole.
    Mr. Cole. Yes, Mr. Chairman, spending my day in the Rules 
Committee is a dream come true on my birthday.
    But I am genuinely pleased to be part of today's discussion 
on a critical topic that faces far too many in our country.
    And, Mr. Chairman, let me add personally, we all know your 
passion for this particular issue, but I want you to know we 
all respect your expertise as well. You have spent a lot of 
years working on these problems in the Agriculture Committee. 
You bring a commitment that is born of many, many years' 
effort. And it is an unusual topic for our committee to deal 
with, but I am glad you have chosen to take it up, and I look 
forward to working with you on this important topic.
    Despite the fact that our country is the most prosperous 
Nation on the planet, far too many of our fellow citizens 
continue to face the heartbreaking challenge of hunger. In my 
home State of Oklahoma, it is estimated that one in five 
children still do not get the nutrition they need to grow up 
happy and healthy. Moreover, Native Americans nationwide are 
literally four times as likely to report experiencing food 
insecurity compared to the rest of the U.S. population.
    The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has made this problem even 
worse, particularly for those who are out of work or who cannot 
leave their homes.
    But, while it is easy to identify the challenge, addressing 
the complex root causes of food insecurity and poverty remain 
elusive, even for Members of Congress. The answer is clearly 
not just increasing funding to existing programs, though that 
may well be required, but modernizing programs to meet the 
current challenges that those in poverty face. We must view 
this problem holistically and approach our solutions the same 
way.
    According to research done by our colleagues at the Ways 
and Means Committee, low-income individuals are eligible for 
more than 80 different programs, all of which are siloed to 
provide a specific benefit, at a cost to the Federal Government 
of well over a trillion dollars a year.
    I think the answer lies in a theory put forward in the 14th 
century by logician and theologian William of Ockham: quote, 
``The simplest solution is almost always the best,'' unquote.
    In addressing the issues of food insecurity and poverty, I 
think it is critical that we approach it with three goals in 
mind:
    One, supporting effective programs. With more than 80 
programs on the Federal level designed to address poverty, 
policymakers need to know which ones are effective and which 
ones should be redesigned to become more effective or even 
consolidated.
    Two, addressing the income cliff. During my terms on the 
House Budget Committee, we dove into this issue a lot. 
Unfortunately, the way many of our programs are structured, 
there is no way for people to transition off of public 
assistance programs. They reach a certain income level and all 
of a sudden their benefits are gone. And so people make the 
rational choice. When given the option to work more hours, they 
choose not to because they become worse off as a whole. That is 
something clearly we should be working on and remedying.
    And, three, working with the private sector. There is 
clearly a role for nonprofits and religious organizations in 
addressing the issue of poverty that must be encouraged by the 
Federal Government. Groups like the Regional Food Bank of 
Oklahoma, who provided more than 47 million meals in 2020 with 
almost 1,400 partner agencies, must be part of the equation.
    I want to thank our witnesses for appearing before the 
committee today. I look forward to hearing their testimony and 
perspectives. I look forward to continuing to examine this 
critical issue and potential solutions in the weeks and months 
to come.
    And, particularly, Mr. Chairman, I look forward to working 
with you on a problem that is genuinely bipartisan and where, 
as you pointed out in your opening remarks, we have worthy 
predecessors in Senator McGovern and Senator Dole, who showed 
us that, working together, we can make considerable progress. 
So I look forward to being your working partner in this 
endeavor.
    And, with that, I yield back.
    The Chairman. Well, thank you very much for your opening 
statement. I appreciate it very much.
    And I am delighted to welcome an incredible panel that we 
have here today. This is the first--this is our kickoff 
hearing. So we are really delighted that all of you have been 
able to join us.
    So let me read the witnesses and their backgrounds, and 
then we will hear from them directly.
    Dr. Diane Schanzenbach is the director of the Institute for 
Policy Research at Northwestern University. She is an economist 
who studies policies aimed at improving the lives of children 
in poverty, including education, health, and income support 
policies. Her work traces the impact of major public policies 
such as SNAP, school finance reform, and early childhood 
education on children's long-term outcomes.
    Dr. Thea James is the vice president of mission and 
associate chief medical officer at Boston Medical Center. She 
is the director of the BMC Violence Intervention Advocacy 
Program and associate professor of emergency medicine at Boston 
University School of Medicine. Dr. James has primary 
responsibility for coordinating and maximizing BMC's 
relationships and strategic alliances with local, State, and 
national organizations to foster innovative and effective 
models of care that are essential for patients and communities 
to thrive.
    Heather Reynolds is the managing director of the Wilson 
Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities, LEO, an antipoverty 
research lab at the University of Notre Dame. Ms. Reynolds is 
an expert speaker on poverty and nonprofit strategy. She has 
served as the CEO of Catholic Charities Fort Worth for 14 years 
before joining the Lab for Economic Opportunities team.
    Ayesha Curry is a chef, two-time New York Times best-
selling author, philanthropist, television host and producer, 
and entrepreneur. In 2019, Ms. Curry and her husband launched 
their family-founded charity, Eat. Learn. Play., with a mission 
to end childhood hunger, ensure universal access to quality 
education, and enable healthy and active lifestyles. She is 
also an ambassador for No Kid Hungry, an organization working 
to end childhood hunger.
    Again, I am really thrilled all of you accepted our 
invitation to be on this panel.
    And, Dr. Schanzenbach, we will recognize you first. 
Welcome.

    STATEMENT OF DIANE SCHANZENBACH, PH.D., MARGARET WALKER 
   ALEXANDER PROFESSOR, NORTHWESTERN SCHOOL OF EDUCATION AND 
                         SOCIAL POLICY

    Ms. Schanzenbach. Thank you. Chairman McGovern, Ranking 
Member Cole, members of the committee, thanks for the 
opportunity to appear before you at this hearing on ending 
hunger in America.
    So my name is Diane Schanzenbach. I am the director of the 
Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern, where I am also 
a professor and economist who studies the role of SNAP and the 
economy on hunger, food security, health, and economic 
security.
    Let me start by briefly describing the current state of 
hunger in the United States.
    Now, even during a strong economy, there are several 
million Americans who experience hunger. In 2019, 35 million 
people were food-insecure, which means that they didn't have 
the consistent and dependable access to enough food in order to 
live an active and healthy lifestyle. Now, 12 million of these 
food-insecure individuals were also categorized as hungry. 
Hunger or, in USDA's terminology, ``experiencing very low food 
security,'' is a more severe measure than food insecurity.
    During COVID, hunger has swelled. Between August and March, 
on average, 36 million Americans, or 11 percent of the 
population, lived in households where they reported that they 
sometimes or often didn't have enough to eat in the past week. 
They were hungry. Rates of hunger have been especially high 
among households with children and among children themselves 
during COVID.
    Now, typically, measures of food hardship increase when the 
unemployment rate increases. So high rates are not surprising, 
given what has happened to the economy.
    Some good news is that we have seen strong progress against 
hunger over the last 3 months. Rates of hunger peaked in 
December, with 46 million reporting that they sometimes or 
often didn't have enough to eat in the prior week. By the end 
of March, the numbers fell to 30 million, the lowest since the 
pandemic began.
    This recent progress reflects a range of factors, including 
the relief packages passed by Congress and also the 
strengthening job market. And I must emphasize that rates of 
hunger would have been even worse this past year were it not 
for government programs already in place, the emergency 
measures passed by Congress, and a surge of charitable giving 
and aid from food banks and other organizations.
    The centerpiece for Federal efforts to address hunger and 
food insecurity is SNAP. It already does a lot to reduce hunger 
but could be made even more effective with some modest policy 
changes. SNAP supplements the cash resources that a family has 
to purchase food so that, between SNAP and their other income, 
a family should be able to afford to buy a sufficient and 
healthy diet.
    SNAP is efficiently targeted to families who need benefits 
the most, and it is effective. It reduces the likelihood that 
families have trouble affording food and also serves as an 
automatic fiscal stabilizer in times of economic downturn.
    SNAP also offers vital long-term benefits to children. 
Research that I conducted found that those who had access to 
SNAP benefits as children were more likely to graduate from 
high school and grew up to be healthier and more economically 
successful.
    SNAP serves a very diverse caseload. A large share has 
children at home, and the majority of these families are 
employed, but they don't make enough to afford the food they 
need on their own. For them, SNAP helps stretch their grocery 
budget and reduces the likelihood that they suffer hunger or 
food insecurity. Now, a lot of these families cycle on and off 
of SNAP, using it temporarily when their jobs or hours are 
unstable or when they experience temporary unemployment.
    Another large share of SNAP families have elderly or 
disabled members. They generally will be eligible for and 
participate in SNAP for longer periods of time, because their 
incomes tend to be stable but just too low to afford the food 
they need without additional help.
    The remaining one in five households in SNAP tend to be 
very poor, many with incomes below half the poverty threshold 
or even with no cash income at all. Many of these participants 
face substantial challenges and barriers that make finding 
stable employment very difficult for them, and, in many of 
these cases, SNAP is the only assistance program available.
    SNAP can serve such a diverse caseload because it is well-
designed. The benefits are flexible, topping up purchasing 
power for those who lack enough money to buy the food they need 
on their own, and also provides a floor for food consumption 
for our Nation's most vulnerable. A key reason for SNAP's 
success is that it relies on our very efficient private sector 
to provide access to food through grocery stores and other 
retail outlets.
    By increasing resources available to purchase food, SNAP 
does a lot: It increases food spending. It stimulates the 
economy. It lifts millions of people out of poverty. It reduces 
hunger and food insecurity and improves both the quantity and 
the quality of foods purchased. When families receive SNAP, 
they are able to buy more nutritious foods that they otherwise 
could not afford.
    SNAP is effective, and it would be even more effective if 
the benefit were better aligned with families' needs. So, even 
before COVID, there was wide recognition that SNAP benefits 
were inadequate to buy and prepare healthy foods. The benefit 
amount is based on an out-of-date foundation called the Thrifty 
Food Plan. But we can fix that.
    We also need to make sure that those in need can access 
SNAP benefits. And participation rates here are especially low 
among the elderly, and we can fix that, too, with a more 
streamlined application process for them. And we can talk about 
other policy and community solutions over the course of our 
conversation.
    Over the last year, we have seen the highest rates of 
hunger in the United States since we began systematically 
measuring it. And as we continue to emerge from the national 
crisis caused by COVID, we should not be satisfied with just 
reducing hunger back to its previous level; we can eliminate 
hunger in the United States entirely.
    And we can do this by better using the tools we have 
already developed. We can enhance SNAP. We can improve 
participation in other nutrition programs. We can make 
permanent these recent expansions to the earned income tax 
credit, the child tax credit, and Summer EBT. Each of these 
will also surely reduce hunger.
    Bolstered by stronger income and nutrition support 
programs, also, the nonprofit sector will be made even more 
effective in filling the remaining gaps and addressing some of 
the root causes of hunger.
    Thank you, and I look forward to our conversation.
    [The statement of Ms. Schanzenbach follows:]
    [GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
    
    The Chairman. Thank you very, very much.
    Dr. James.

 STATEMENT OF THEA JAMES, M.D., VICE PRESIDENT OF MISSION AND 
     ASSOCIATE CHIEF MEDICAL OFFICER, BOSTON MEDICAL CENTER

    Dr. James. Thank you, Chairman McGovern and Ranking Member 
Cole and distinguished members of the House Committee on Rules, 
for holding this hearing and providing me with the opportunity 
to speak today about hunger in America and our bold intentions 
to collectively put an end to it.
    Again, my name is Dr. Thea James. I am vice president of 
mission and associate chief medical officer here at Boston 
Medical Center. This is also where I trained for my residency, 
and I have been honored to serve as an emergency physician here 
for the last three decades.
    Boston Medical Center is the largest safety-net hospital in 
New England, and it ranks among the 10 busiest trauma and 
emergency services centers in the country. Our patients, the 
patients we serve, are predominantly low-income, with 
approximately half of our patients covered by Medicaid or the 
Children's Health Insurance Program, or CHIP--the highest 
percentage of any acute care hospital in Massachusetts.
    Hunger, malnutrition, and food insecurity are all too 
common among our patients. In fact, of the more than 100,000 
patients we have screened for health-related social needs to 
date, 1 in 5 identified as food-insecure, double the national 
rate. The current pandemic and economic crisis has further 
exacerbated this need among our patients.
    In the emergency department at BMC, I see firsthand the 
ways in which hunger directly impacts health. Patients present 
for heart failure, diabetic emergencies, and these are things 
that could have been avoided with proper nutrition. I treat 
complications of conditions that are not adequately managed, 
like seizure disorders and COPD, because patients are having to 
choose between paying for food or paying for medicines.
    Treating illnesses in the emergency department that are the 
downstream effects of hunger is not only disheartening, it is 
the most expensive way to intervene. At BMC, we know we can do 
better by our patients if we move further upstream. And we are 
proud of our long history of addressing the root causes of what 
makes our patients sick, including the inability to afford 
enough food.
    And we know from clinical experience and decades of 
research that when our patients are hungry their health 
suffers. This is why BMC is committed to advancing solutions 
that reduce hunger among our patients and the communities in 
which they live.
    Our clinicians and staff are trained to look outside our 
four walls and move beyond healthcare to understand the social 
factors that impact our patients' health. At present, we have 
over 40 programs that address health-related social needs, and 
many of them have been replicated nationally.
    Over the past 40 years, our anti-hunger work has grown from 
a pediatric subspecialty clinic called the BMC Grow Clinic. 
This clinic treats babies that are diagnosed with failure to 
thrive, and it is an integrated, hospital-wide program that is 
designed to meet the full array of our patients' food and 
nutrition needs.
    Emblematic of these efforts, our Preventive Food Pantry, 
which has been in service since 2001, has grown to distribute 
over 1 million pounds of food annually to our patients and 
families facing food insecurity or specific nutritional 
challenges at home. Our patients are actually referred to the 
food pantry by a prescription from their clinicians in the same 
way that they would to receive medicine from the pharmacy. Our 
program began as the first hospital-based Preventive Food 
Pantry in the country, and now our staff regularly advises 
other hospitals and health systems on how they can launch their 
own.
    People are often surprised to learn that our urban hospital 
campus also has a 7,000-square-foot rooftop farm and a state-
of-the-art teaching kitchen, which are integral to the BMC food 
and nutrition program.
    The rooftop farm, which is in its fifth year, plays host to 
more than 20 crops, providing fresh local produce to 
hospitalized patients, hospital cafeterias, the Preventive Food 
Pantry, the teaching kitchen, and a weekly in-hospital farmers 
market.
    The teaching kitchen provides patients with opportunities 
to learn how to cook healthy meals specific to their clinically 
prescribed dietary needs as well as how to utilize the foods 
that come from the Preventive Food Pantry.
    In addition to these efforts, decades of research from 
Children's HealthWatch, which is a research and policy network 
headquartered at BMC, has shown that enrollment in the USDA's 
SNAP program reduces food insecurity and improves health. Given 
these findings and other compelling evidence on the health-
promoting impact of SNAP, we recently launched an initiative to 
enroll likely eligible patients in SNAP through a robust 
outreach strategy and streamlined enrollment process for 
patients when they are applying for Medicaid.
    As an academic medical center and health system and an 
anchor institution for our local community, we are acutely 
aware of the power we hold to impact the health of our patients 
and community, given our role not just as a healthcare provider 
but also as an employer, a purchaser of goods and services, and 
an investor. Given this role and commitment to moving farther 
upstream, BMC has made targeted investments in the community to 
address systemic causes of food insecurity and hunger among our 
patients.
    As a part of a multimillion dollar investment in affordable 
housing and community-based programs, BMC provided a $1 million 
no-interest loan to establish a healthy food market alongside a 
new affordable housing development in the Roxbury neighborhood 
of Boston. Through this investment, we intend to disrupt the 
status quo by increasing the availability of healthy, 
affordable food options in the places where people live and 
people with low incomes live.
    While we work hard, really hard, to respond to the 
realities of hunger among our patients, we know that we cannot 
end hunger, even in our little corner of the world, on our own. 
We welcome the Federal Government to play a bigger role in 
ending hunger, not only as a convener and coordinator but also 
as an incubator and accelerator, helping to ensure the scale of 
the solution matches the scale of the problem.
    I will close my remarks today by offering this anecdote: In 
a recent survey to patients in our hospital Preventive Food 
Pantry, we asked the question, what would it take for you to 
never need this food pantry again? As a physician, some of the 
responses to this question were heartbreaking. Many people we 
talked to said they could never imagine not needing to rely on 
the food pantry.
    To me, this highlights why, as a country, we must reimagine 
our commitment to ending hunger. In doing so, we must seek 
solutions that respond to its root causes, instead of 
perpetually filling in the gaps that people have, and 
prioritize thriving for people in order to truly alter the 
quality of their life course trajectory.
    Holding this hearing today sends a signal that hunger is a 
solvable problem if only we can step outside of business-as-
usual practices to chart a new course forward.
    Thank you for your time, and I look forward to the 
discussion.
    [The statement of Dr. James follows:]
    [GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
    
    The Chairman. Thank you very much. Appreciate it.
    Ms. Reynolds.

STATEMENT OF HEATHER REYNOLDS, MANAGING DIRECTOR OF THE WILSON 
  SHEEHAN LAB FOR ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITIES, UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE 
                              DAME

    Ms. Reynolds. Chairman McGovern, Ranking Member Cole, and 
members of the committee, thank you for your time today.
    My name is Heather Reynolds, and I have the privilege of 
serving as managing director of the Wilson Sheehan Lab for 
Economic Opportunities, or LEO. LEO is a research lab at the 
University of Notre Dame that helps service providers apply 
scientific evaluation methods to better understand and ensure 
effective poverty interventions.
    Prior to coming to Notre Dame, I spent almost two decades 
at Catholic Charities in Fort Worth, the last 13 as CEO. My 
time at LEO and at Catholic Charities have both shaped my 
insights on the audacious goal of ending hunger in our country.
    A wise man once said, ``We have the food, the ability, and 
the means to end hunger in America. What we lack is the 
political will and moral courage to act. We must change that.''
    Thank you, Chairman McGovern, for this source of 
inspiration. I have three points on how we can achieve your 
vision.
    First, ending hunger begins with the safety net, but it 
does not stop there. The safety net plays a key role in 
combating hunger. The SNAP program ensures people, most notably 
children, are not hungry today. While SNAP provides a modest 
benefit, an average of $1.39 per person per meal, it is part of 
a critical foundation for the well-being for vulnerable 
Americans.
    The social safety net lessens the impact of poverty on 
families in difficult situations, treating the symptoms of 
poverty and not their root causes. The causes of poverty vary 
considerably across people: lack of skill, a mental illness, 
the absence of a parent in the household, a physical 
disability. Unfortunately, the social safety net cannot alter 
these underlying conditions. Rather, it can only help provide 
what poverty is preventing: health insurance, three hot meals a 
day, a roof over a family's head.
    A coordinated effort to eradicate hunger must, then, 
include programs whose larger goals are to move families 
permanently out of poverty. These programs work hand-in-hand 
with the safety net and can only be successful when the safety 
net is effective.
    Service providers and local governments are implementing 
innovative programs aimed at generating upward mobility. These 
programs, with economic stability as their goal, work in the 
context of the broader safety net programs.
    At LEO, we are running several studies--one in Texas, 
Indiana, and South Dakota--all aimed at getting students with 
low incomes credentialed and degreed to support a goal of 
increased earnings. Our evidence shows really promising 
results, but it also shows that providers must balance the 
short-term needs of clients with the long-term need of 
financial stability. People cannot work on their education if 
they worry that their child will not have food on the table 
tonight.
    The safety net is needed in our country, but its role is to 
ensure people are not hungry today. Tomorrow's hunger needs to 
be solved differently, which brings me to my second point: To 
achieve an end to hunger, we need comprehensive, family-
centered solutions to poverty. We need a comprehensive approach 
that provides not just food, not just housing, not just job 
training, but also the human support and interactions that 
drive changes and choices in the face of despair. These 
solutions need to be family-centered, individualized, and 
comprehensive.
    Simple declarations such as getting people employed, they 
just fall short. We need to look no further than the SNAP 
program to see this. As of 2018, 79 percent of all families 
receiving SNAP had at least one person working. I found this to 
be true from my experience as a service provider. We served 
over 100,000 people a year. More than 70 percent of our clients 
had full-time jobs, yet they were still walking through our 
doors needing assistance.
    The Padua program, operated by Catholic Charities Fort 
Worth and studied by us at LEO, is designed to take all this 
complexity that poverty brings and address each element through 
supportive case management.
    This holistic approach begins with assessment and a case 
plan, engagement in the safety net as a first step, small 
caseloads for staff, case managers serving as both connectors 
and coaches, and the ability to serve clients for the long 
haul. Padua is designed to support participants to reduce 
dependency on benefits, earn a living wage, accumulate savings, 
and reduce bad debt.
    Our study at LEO showed that participants saw a 25-percent 
increase in full-time employment. But Padua was particularly 
successful for those who were not already employed at the time 
of enrollment, with a 67-percent increase in the probability of 
working full-time and a 46-percent increase in monthly 
earnings. Health conditions improved by 53 percent. 
Participants who lacked stable housing when they entered the 
program saw a 64-percent increase in housing stability.
    This program demonstrates that weaving the social safety 
net with holistic programming for those who need it can have 
the greatest impact. To achieve an end to hunger, a more 
comprehensive solution to poverty, like Padua, is needed.
    So why do I believe solutions like this are what our 
country needs? Because not only do I see the clients, know 
their stories, and believe in this approach, but I have 
evidence to back this up, which brings me to my final point: 
Ending hunger will not happen through hunches, assumptions, and 
good intentions. Ending hunger will happen with evidence-based 
programs and policies.
    LEO evaluated the Excel Center program in Indianapolis. 
This program works with adults to help them complete their high 
school degree. It does so with holistic support by 
accommodating students' work schedules, providing childcare, 
and helping them navigate the challenges that come along with 
completion.
    Our research showed that going to the Excel Center leads to 
significantly higher earnings and a move from the service 
sector to health- and education-sector jobs. Graduates have 
higher earnings than adults who instead complete the more 
typical GED program. Programs like this work with low-income 
individuals to improve their financial outcomes, support a move 
toward economic stability, and, thus, achieve food security.
    The social service community contains the innovations that, 
when studied, can show us what works. At LEO, we spend our time 
engaging with those poverty fighters on the front line and 
bring to the table the research rigor to shine a light on the 
impact of their services. We do this because we believe people 
in poverty deserve interventions that work.
    We conduct causal evidence building, typically through 
randomized controlled trials with providers across the country, 
to learn what works and then to ensure that evidence is used.
    We have witnessed our partners discover something they are 
doing doesn't work and then they pivot and change their model 
for the good of those they serve. We have also seen our 
partners learn that something does work and they scale it up so 
they can serve more people in their local communities or break 
into new markets with this proven intervention.
    We need you as policymakers to see this as well. The gap 
between policymakers, academics, and social service providers 
is why we need local innovative solutions implemented by 
dedicated service providers, paired with academics to help 
discover evidence of what works, and then scaled up by your 
investment in them as policymakers.
    In closing, ending hunger begins with the safety net, but 
it does not stop there. We need comprehensive solutions for 
families to live a life outside of poverty. Evidence-based 
programs and policies will ensure we are offering families 
services that work.
    Chairman McGovern, I love your quote, and I share your 
belief. I would just suggest one little addition. We have the 
food, the ability, and the means to end hunger in America. What 
we lack is the political will, the evidence-based programs and 
policies, and the moral courage to act on them. And I am with 
you, Chairman. We must change that.
    [The statement of Ms. Reynolds follows:]
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    The Chairman. Thank you very much.
    Ms. Curry, welcome.

   STATEMENT OF AYESHA CURRY, CO-FOUNDER, EAT. LEARN. PLAY. 
           FOUNDATION, AND AMBASSADOR, NO KID HUNGRY

    Ms. Curry. Hello. Chairman McGovern, Ranking Member Cole, 
and members of the committee, thank you so much for the 
opportunity to appear before you today to testify to the 
importance of ensuring that every child has the nutritious food 
they need to thrive every day.
    My name is Ayesha Curry, and I am the co-founder of Eat. 
Learn. Play. Foundation and an ambassador for the No Kid Hungry 
campaign.
    Millions of children, as we know, in the United States live 
with hunger right now, including many in the community of 
Oakland, California. I have seen firsthand the impact hunger 
and hardship have on kids and families. Through my foundation, 
Eat. Learn. Play., and our partnership with No Kid Hungry, I 
have seen how national and local programs can work together to 
reach as many of those kids as they can. But it is truly not 
enough. We need Congress to strengthen the programs that keep 
food on the table for kids.
    This hunger crisis in America is extremely urgent. More 
than 13 million kids are living with hunger in our country, and 
this hunger affects everything from their ability to learn, 
their physical and mental health, the opportunity to reach 
their full potential, and so on and so forth. It is completely 
cyclical. And every missed meal counts for a kid, because an 
empty stomach that hurts today also hurts their futures.
    This is especially true for kids from families of color, 
who face hunger, poverty, and hardship at even higher levels. I 
have personally seen hunger in the community of Oakland, but I 
know that no community--urban, suburban, rural--is free from 
this issue.
    Food is not an essential school supply; it is the essential 
school supply. And when kids don't get the food they need, it 
is harder for them to learn or focus in class, affecting 
everything from test scores to graduation rates. There are 
numerous studies that back this up and show proof and evidence 
of that.
    I am a working mom, and my husband and I have three little 
ones at home. And, as a mom, I know what it is like to want to 
build a strong, healthy, and successful life for my children. I 
know how important a good breakfast is for all of them to help 
them focus and learn and how, I am sure as many of us know, you 
know, with the Zoom school and the pandemic, how cranky they 
can get when they are hungry. Things just don't work the way 
that they should.
    Families are already working so hard to make ends meet, but 
no mom or dad should ever have to deal with the pain and stress 
of wondering how they are going to put enough food on the table 
for their kids tonight. So that is why I am also an advocate. 
The work of Eat. Learn. Play. is rooted in being a village for 
those who don't always have one. And the effects of COVID-19 
created an unprecedented challenge in our community.
    So I want to take the time to just share a story of a 
loving mother who, like many, faced incredible hardships this 
past year. Christina is a Black woman from the San Antonio 
neighborhood in Oakland, California. She is a single mom of two 
children who attended an elementary school there called 
Garfield Elementary School. It is a part of the Oakland Unified 
School District. And Christina's children are among the 18,000 
students that have counted on their schools for a significant 
percentage of their nutritional needs.
    March 13 last year, OUSD school buildings shut down because 
of the pandemic, and parents like Christina were left wondering 
where their child's next meal would come from. Shortly after 
that, Christina was laid off from her service-industry job 
because her business closed when local shelter-in-place orders 
went into effect.
    I know you guys are hearing this story and saying, this is 
nothing new. And that is devastating to me, because Christina's 
story is very similar to the 10,000 Oakland families who showed 
up twice a week to receive meals during the pandemic at OUSD 
meal distribution sites and throughout the Nation at 
distribution sites just like it. This is thanks to critical 
Federal nutrition programs and the heroic work of OUSD school 
workers. Oakland students have continued to have access to 
healthy and nutritious meals.
    This past year has shown us how critical nutritious meals 
are in order to keep children healthy and on track to reach 
their full potential. Like Congressman McGovern said, childhood 
hunger is completely solvable--completely solvable.
    And Federal nutrition programs are essential for kids to 
get the food they need, no matter where they live or what time 
of year it is. But to reach as many kids as we need to reach 
right now, we need these programs to be stronger. And that 
means action from Congress.
    For example, like we have heard today, programs like SNAP 
and WIC are grocery benefits that make sure parents can feed 
their kids at home. Increasing these benefits means families 
can purchase more of the groceries their kids need when they 
need them.
    School meals make sure kids have the nutrition they need to 
focus and stay nourished during the school day.
    And, finally, summer. Summer is actually the hardest time 
to reach kids with the food that they need, but, last year, we 
actually saw what happens when schools and organizations were 
allowed to modernize their programs, letting parents pick up 
multiple meals at a time or dropping meals off directly to a 
child's house.
    I do want to take the time today to applaud Congress and 
the White House for expanding the Pandemic EBT program through 
the summer, when kids and families struggle the most, and 
building on P-EBT by proposing to make Summer EBT permanent. We 
will need continued help from Congress to make sure programs 
help hungry kids during the summer, the hungriest time of year, 
so I am very excited for this and hope that we can solidify it.
    I have seen our foundation be a part of the hard work 
happening on the ground with hunger heroes in our community who 
are doing amazing work to feed kids every single day. Like I 
said earlier, it truly takes a village to meet the level of 
food insecurity caused by the pandemic.
    Our collaborations with organizations like No Kid Hungry, 
World Central Kitchen, the Alameda County Community Food Bank, 
OUSD, and so many other wonderful organizations has made an 
incredible impact for hungry kids and families, but charities 
alone cannot fill the gaps to make plates full and children 
whole.
    So, today, I am really coming from a place as a mom, an 
advocate for change. You know, I came to the United States when 
I started high school, and I thought that, you know, it was 
going to be like an episode of ``Friday Night Lights,'' and 
that turned out not to be true.
    You know, the person sitting next to me, you know, could 
come to school without a meal. Who knows, the person sitting 
down the table, when they had their last meal. And just to know 
now, as a mom, that my children can be going to school with 
children who have not eaten or don't show up to school with a 
lunch or don't have food during the summer is just baffling to 
me.
    And, as Chairman McGovern said earlier, you know, this is 
completely solvable, and the money is there. So I really feel 
like we need to get together and solve this thing, because it 
is completely solvable and we really need to change this.
    So what I am trying to say is, Congress, kids need your 
help. You have the power to change this. And with your 
leadership, these programs can be stronger, more flexible, and 
reach more kids. People used to say hunger is a nonpartisan 
issue, and I really want to stand here today, or sit here 
today, in front of you and say that we all need to be kid-
partisan, without question.
    So I urge Congress to support and strengthen Federal 
nutrition policies to close the summer meal gap, strengthen 
school meal programs, and ensure benefits like SNAP and WIC are 
reaching the kids and families who need them.
    And, finally, I would like to invite all of you to come out 
and see our work here in Oakland, to meet the people behind 
these stories, to learn their triumphs and struggles firsthand 
and see the difference that these Federal nutrition programs 
make in their lives.
    In closing, thank you guys so much for allowing me to meet 
with you today and speak my piece, and I am so grateful for our 
time together. So thank you.
    [The statement of Ms. Curry follows:]
    [GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
    
    The Chairman. Thank you very much, Ms. Curry.
    Thank you to the entire panel.
    And, Ms. Curry, if the COVID restrictions get lifted and we 
can travel, we would love to visit Oakland. And I appreciate 
you telling us the story of Christina, because, you know, 
sometimes when we talk about this issue we get inundated with 
statistics, graphs, and trend lines, and sometimes we lose our 
human ability to feel.
    I talked to a group of people who are struggling with 
hunger and food insecurity in preparation for this hearing the 
other day. And, again, everybody's story is unique and 
different and complicated. And I think if we are going to move 
forward, we need to hear from those with lived experiences, 
because they are the ones on the front lines, you know, who are 
struggling.
    And one of the reasons why I personally believe there ought 
to be a White House conference is because I think we need to--
as everybody here has said, that we need to address this issue 
more broadly and more holistically. You know, the way Congress 
operates, we talk about SNAP when the farm bill comes up, and 
that is under the Agriculture Committee. And then if we are 
talking about school feeding programs, we wait until the child 
nutrition reauthorization bill comes up, and that is under Ed 
and Labor. And then Ways and Means does the child tax credit. 
And so we talk about little bits and pieces, but not the whole 
picture.
    There is no one committee that deals with hunger here, and 
there is no one committee that deals with nutrition here in 
Congress. There is no one agency in the executive branch that 
deals with hunger or deals with nutrition. It falls under USDA, 
it falls under HHS, it--to the extent that housing is relevant 
to this discussion, it falls under the Department of Housing 
and Urban Development.
    I had a conversation yesterday with the new Secretary of 
Transportation, Secretary Buttigieg; many of us on the Rules 
Committee had a conversation with him. And there is a piece of 
this that falls under Department of Transportation. People need 
to get to and from places. In addition to infrastructure--
refrigerated trucks, and how do we rebuild our schools so that 
every school has a kitchen, things like that.
    So, I began by referencing George McGovern and Bob Dole. 
Well, you know, back then, I think they understood that. They 
created a Special Select Committee on Hunger and Nutrition 
because they knew this issue fell under so many different 
jurisdictions and nobody was waking up every day and saying, 
how do we solve this?
    So I think a White House conference is what we ought to aim 
for. And what we are trying to do is build a record, do all the 
groundwork, if you will, so that, if we can get the Biden 
administration to agree to this, that it is not just a press 
conference, that it is real and substantial.
    You know, we had a White House conference 52 years ago. I 
look back on that. It produced a lot of good things, but there 
were lots of things that were missing in that conference. 
People with lived experiences were not part of that conference. 
It wasn't as inclusive as it should have been, given the 
population in this country. So what we want to do is figure out 
ways to build on the best of what happened 52 years ago but 
make it even better.
    So, let me just say, again, thank you all for your 
testimony.
    Let me start where I think we all agree. So each of our 
witnesses--and tell me if I have anything wrong here--everyone 
here agrees that hunger is a solvable issue, that there is no 
one silver bullet to solving hunger, and that we need 
government, nonprofits, the private sector, and others--that we 
need them all working together--our medical institutions--we 
need to be all working together in order to solve it.
    Are we all in agreement on that?
    Everybody is ``yes''? All right. Nobody disagrees. Okay. We 
all agree on that. All right.
    So each of you has discussed how economic opportunity plays 
a significant role in the hunger problem. We all agree that 
there is dignity in work, but, for too long, work hasn't work 
for most workers. And what I mean is that people work sometimes 
two or three jobs and they still can't get the financial 
security that the middle class promises, that the American 
Dream remains out of reach for many of them.
    This presents families with a series of impossible choices, 
whether it is deciding between housing and food or healthcare 
and food or education and food or work and food. You know, the 
cost to the lives of people experiencing hunger is profound.
    So, to each of the witnesses, when you think about what it 
will take to solve hunger, to what extent should Congress be 
thinking about economic opportunity?
    And we can begin----
    Dr. James. Chairman----
    The Chairman. Yeah, Dr. James.
    Dr. James. May I take a crack at that?
    The Chairman. Sure. Go ahead. Yes.
    Dr. James. You know, one of the things that I have had the 
privilege to learn over the last three decades of being an 
emergency physician at the largest safety-net hospital in New 
England is to ask patients all the time what it would take for 
this not to happen again, this repeat visit, this repeat 
hospital admission, this, sort of, cycle of perpetual 
instability.
    And the one thing that I have learned is that--and Ms. 
Reynolds asked the question. What is--she was talking about 
safety nets. We have had the opportunity, after all these 
years, of asking ourselves not that long ago, what is the role 
of a safety net and for, in our case, a safety net hospital? Is 
it, in fact, charity exclusively into perpetuity, or is it 
equity?
    And I would say the difference between the two is--you 
know, we have had, as I mention in my remarks, over 40 programs 
in our hospital, but what has been the role of those programs? 
What they mainly do is fill the gaps that people have. We are 
preventing people from falling down. We are preventing people 
from, you know, falling off the cliff. The intentionality of 
those programs has not necessarily been to eliminate the gaps. 
Because I believe that only through eliminating those gaps is 
it possible for people to become self-sufficient, have 
financial security, economic mobility, and even opportunities 
to build wealth.
    So I think a lot of it is, what is the intentionality of 
our resources and our subsidies? And when I think about, for 
example--let's just take public housing for example. And I 
think subsidies are fine, but I think they are designed to fill 
a gap for people.
    I think we could do better if we designed them for people 
to become self-sufficient and have financial security versus 
penalize them for trying to do so. You know, you are limited as 
to how much income you can earn, living in public housing, 
without losing the housing.
    And I am not suggesting that people should have these low-
cost housing units into perpetuity, but--I don't believe that 
at all. But I think that they should be designed to enable them 
to be like the rest of us and able to, you know, move forward 
in life, move up in life, to change socioeconomic status, 
change socioeconomic lanes, to get out of the line of need, so 
that ultimately, by having financial security and economic 
mobility, you know, you are actually able to contribute to the 
GDP, for example, or contribute to the economy versus relying 
on it.
    Because when we don't take that opportunity to be able to 
provide that sort of pathway and life-altering trajectory for 
people, we wind up having to subsidize to take care of them 
anyway. And so, on some level, I mean, I think, monetarily, we 
all could--it is a win-win situation all the way around.
    And the last example I will use is, during the height of 
COVID, when we had the $600 unemployment, you know, payment for 
people, the exchange for that was to remove SNAP. And so I 
think that doesn't, like, really help anyone. I think if all of 
us imagine ourselves, if we had $600, it is not like now we 
have enough to thrive. It is basically just people surviving.
    So I think the main thing is intentionality, you know, to 
move from filling gaps to eliminating them, and aiming for, you 
know, financial security and economic mobility and 
opportunities for people to build wealth, and to not choose 
pathways or make decisions for others that we would not make 
for ourselves or our families. Because we all want the exact 
same thing, which is thriving and being able to contribute to 
the betterment of our country and our economy.
    The Chairman. Thank you very----
    Ms. Reynolds. And I will just add on to what Dr. James----
    The Chairman. Ms. Reynolds. Okay. I will get to everybody, 
but, Ms. Reynolds, go ahead.
    Ms. Reynolds. Great. I will just add on to what Dr. James 
said.
    You know, to address hunger, I feel like we as a country 
have got to address poverty. Because the realities are, is 
that, you know, people walking through the doors trying to 
receive safety-net programs, walking through the doors of 
social service agencies, they are coming there for today's 
needs, but I can't tell you how many times, when I was at 
Catholic Charities Fort Worth and would work intake, the 
humiliation that often was present with the ask and the 
outreach for whatever was needed. And people want a life 
outside of poverty. People deserve a life outside of poverty.
    And so I think if we could solve this in a comprehensive 
way, where we are not just looking at solving hunger but 
solving upward mobility and creating economic opportunities for 
Americans, I think it will go a whole lot further. May be a 
little more pricey at first, but I think will save our country 
so much in the long run by what it will achieve for our Nation.
    The Chairman. Thank you.
    Dr. Schanzenbach.
    Ms. Schanzenbach. Yeah, of course, broad-based economic 
growth is going to be our best friend in terms of eliminating 
hunger, but I want to, sort of, remind everyone that, you know, 
a large fraction of people on SNAP are working, and they are 
working a lot. And they are in, you know, what we think of as 
good jobs. They are health aides, they are cashiers, they are 
cooks. But we haven't seen wage growth in that aspect of the 
economy in a very long time.
    And so I think, of course, it is appropriate for SNAP to 
come alongside and make sure that they have enough to eat, but, 
without question, as the economy grows and we see the wages 
improve, see more people become employed, the cost of these 
programs will go down because people won't need them anymore. 
But it is just the fundamental--the economy, you have to start 
there.
    The Chairman. Thank you.
    Ms. Curry.
    Ms. Curry. Yeah. You know, for me, I think, if we could 
find any silver lining in the pandemic, it is, with our 
nonprofit, we were able to build out this program that, in my 
opinion, does show economic growth and the cyclical nature of 
what happens when we do solve hunger. And for us, I feel like, 
with solving hunger, we have also been able to solve other 
issues when it comes to restaurants and farming, which are so 
important.
    And so, for us, we built out this infrastructure where, you 
know, we were able to have restaurants get back into business 
because they were providing the food for the community. And the 
farmers were providing the produce for the restaurants. And so 
it was this big cyclical nature and effort that I think has 
really worked.
    And I think it is just going to require a big, giant 
meeting of the minds with Congress and the White House to 
really figure out how to build out a plan for everybody in 
their small communities. And I think that sometimes we are 
thinking so big-picture that we forget to think small like this 
and have people start in their own communities and build out a 
program that way.
    And I think that, if you were to use something as a model, 
I think what we have built in partnership with World Central 
Kitchen has actually been working out here. So it would be 
interesting for you all to take a look at it and see how it 
works, because I feel like it is something we could implement 
in many places across the Nation.
    The Chairman. And I think that is a good point. I have seen 
lots of initiatives throughout my travels that are really quite 
extraordinary.
    Dr. James, I have been to the Boston Medical Center many 
times. I have seen your food pantry, and I have seen your 
Growth Clinic, and I say, why doesn't every hospital do this? 
Right.
    And you see lots of different initiatives in different 
areas that one wonders whether they could be expanded. But, 
obviously, it takes some seed money to help others to be able 
to follow suit.
    Some of it can be replicated; some of it can't. But, one of 
the things we hope to look at is what is right now working, 
whether on a large scale or small scale? And if it is on a 
small scale, how can we replicate it?
    I appreciate, too, the fact that everybody is always 
reminding us that a lot of the people who are hungry in this 
country work. I sit on the Agriculture Committee, and a great 
source of frustration for me has been that, during debates on 
the farm bill, when we talk about SNAP, I am not sure that fact 
is appreciated, because people usually say, ``We should have 
people go get a job.'' Well, the bottom line is, the majority 
of those who are able-bodied who can work are working, and they 
still earn so little they qualify for SNAP.
    So these people are doing everything they can to try to get 
ahead, but they can't. And then you add to the equation the 
cost of housing, and then you add the cost of healthcare, and 
then you add transportation costs to and from--I mean, it 
becomes overwhelming, right?
    So it is not as simple as people who are on SNAP just need 
to go out and get a job. The majority of people on SNAP, by the 
way, are children. But, of those able-bodied adults, people 
work.
    And I think so much of our discussion has been very 
punitive. If you are an able-bodied adult without a dependent, 
you can only be on SNAP for 3 months, and if you are not in a 
work training program or don't have a job, then you are out for 
3 years, as if somehow if you are hungry you are going to be 
more employable or you are going to be able to find a job 
easier.
    So I appreciate the fact that everybody here has made the 
point that this hasn't fallen to these--you have helped 
correct, I think, what is a false narrative.
    And I should also point out for the record when people say, 
``Oh, you know, you guys just want to expand government 
programs,'' well, there may be a need for expansion, or there 
may be a need for consolidation or, thinking out of the box, 
reimagining how we do this. I mean, you know, those are 
perfectly legitimate areas of discussion.
    But if people are really concerned about the bottom line 
and the dollars and cents, I mean, there is a cost to hunger. 
There is a cost to the status quo. You know, Ms. Curry talked 
about children, and, I mean, children who are hungry cannot 
learn. I mean, that school meal is every bit as vital to that 
child's ability to learn as a textbook or a laptop. If you are 
hungry, you can't focus. A worker who is hungry, they are not 
productive in the workforce.
    And there was a 2014 study that found that food insecurity 
cost an estimated $178 billion--billion with a ``B''--that year 
in direct healthcare costs, lost work time, and additional 
education expenditures.
    And Dr. James mentioned, in Massachusetts, Children's 
Health Watch did a study that said hunger costs at least $2.4 
billion a year in health-related expenditures alone due to poor 
health, pulmonary disease, diabetes, mental health, obesity, 
and more.
    This is a healthcare issue too. And yet a big chunk of our 
healthcare industry does not treat this issue, Dr. James, as 
Boston Medical Center does, for example. How do we change that?
    How do we get--I mean, I have learned that, if I want to 
become a doctor, then I can go through medical school and not 
have to take any courses in nutrition. Food is medicine. I 
learn how to prescribe a pill, but I don't learn how to tell 
you to live a healthier lifestyle so that you don't have to be 
on all these pills, you don't get these chronic diseases.
    But, anyway, I have some more questions, but I want to 
yield to my ranking member, Mr. Cole, at this point, and then I 
will get back to you. But thank you again for your wonderful 
opening statements.
    Mr. Cole. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I agree with 
you; they were very good opening statements, very robust 
discussion.
    I would just posit, I don't think there is much doubt that 
a rapidly growing economy is kind of a precondition. It is not 
an end-all and be-all, but it helps when you have, as we did 
pre-COVID, the lowest unemployment rate in 50 years, the 
fastest economic--or the highest consumer confidence in a 
generation, and we saw, literally, fast wage growth at the 
lower end of the spectrum.
    So that is something we need. And it is the first but not 
the only way of dealing with it.
    But, even when that was happening, we still had hunger in 
the United States, we still had problems that the country 
faced. And we were still spending a considerable amount of 
resources on all this. And I am not arguing that we shouldn't 
do that, but I am not sure we are very good at program design 
when it comes to dispensing those resources and getting them to 
where people need.
    So a lot of people on this panel have really extraordinary 
experience in program design.
    Ms. Reynolds, let me start, if I may, with you, because you 
studied this in a whole variety of contexts, from the nonprofit 
side through the academic research, variety of States, 
different people in different circumstances.
    We have, again, an enormous number of programs, and I am 
not saying we only need one program. There are different 
aspects of poverty that you need to treat, and I think that 
takes care of a lot of the problem with food insecurity. If 
people aren't poor, they are able to go get what they need.
    So, if you had to look at our Federal programs, in 
particular, and pick out some principles that you would say, 
okay, if I am designing a program that is going to effectively, 
number one, get somebody out of poverty and put them in a 
position to be food-secure, what are the sorts of principles I 
would, you know, focus on? What are the things I would do, or 
what would be the lessons I have learned that I would try to 
learn from, try to avoid mistakes we have made in the past?
    Ms. Reynolds. Uh-huh. Well, great question. Thank you for 
presenting that to me.
    Just to kind of start off, there are two things that come 
to mind. I think first is--and we kind of hit on it earlier--we 
need to understand what our goal is in each of these Federal 
programs and then, from there, understand did we achieve the 
intended goal.
    So let me just give you a very simple example. All across 
the Nation, there are these call centers. In communities, they 
are called 211 or 311 lines. People in need in communities can 
call those to find out, you know, where they can get utility 
assistance or rent assistance if they are about to be evicted. 
So they are for people who have had a big crisis. And all 
across the United States, we offer these.
    Yet it was really interesting to us, because, as we at LEO 
started looking into some of these call centers, what we 
learned is, the goal of the call centers were to prevent 
homelessness, yet really how the call center was tracked as 
being productive and hitting their goals was the numbers of 
calls they answered.
    And so it was really exciting to us because one of these 
call centers, in the city of Chicago actually, is run by 
Catholic Charities in Chicago there. And so they asked us to 
come in and do a study so we could understand, you know, did 
the call center, who was answering calls, who was giving out 
assistance to people who were about to be homeless, did the 
call center, did the support work?
    And so what we were able to do through a quasi-experimental 
design at LEO is we were able to evaluate this program and we 
were able to show that those who received the funds saw an 88-
percent decline in being homeless after 3 months and a 76-
percent decline after 6 months.
    And so what this meant was the goal of the call center is 
to prevent homelessness, and it actually works. The research 
shows that it works. And so that would be an example of, if the 
goal is to prevent homelessness, investing in emergency 
financial assistance programs across our Nation are a really 
great thing to do.
    But then again, if the goal is something different, such as 
community college completion, an example of that is a project 
we ran called Stay the Course at LEO. And this was 
comprehensive case management to get people to complete 
community college so they could increase their earnings for the 
long haul.
    The goal of this program was completion. And so the 
intervention that was needed here was entirely different. We 
didn't need emergency financial assistance. That may have been 
a little part of the intervention. But what was needed was 
comprehensive navigation and support, is what the evidence 
showed, in order to drive the intended outcome that we wanted 
to have, which was completion.
    And so, you know, Ranking Member Cole, the way I would just 
explain it is, in each of these programs, we have to know what 
is our intended impact, and then we have to build evidence to 
know, does this specific intervention achieve the intended 
impact of that program?
    Mr. Cole. Well, you are clearly doing that from a nonprofit 
standpoint. In your experience, which is considerable, do you 
see us doing that in government very much? In other words, 
going back and--we all talk about this as Members of Congress 
in our respective committees. We try and legislate, and I don't 
think we very often go back to see if the legislation we passed 
actually works, or the program we created. We just don't get a 
lot of feedback, I think, sometimes. We just get caught up in 
what the next thing is.
    Do you see some efforts in the Federal Government or 
something you could point us to that we could, like, build in? 
And we all know we have a government accounting agency. We use 
them from time to time. I think they do very good work for us. 
But I don't know that we systematically evaluate all these 
different programs and say, ``Hey, this one is working very 
great, we should probably invest more money in it; this one, 
maybe not, and maybe that money could be diverted over here.'' 
Do you see very much of that?
    Ms. Reynolds. You know, I think that is why you have 
economists, like we have at Notre Dame or Northwestern or other 
places across our country, who want to do this work and answer 
those questions for you.
    An example that I could point to is the Housing First 
model. This all started through some experimentation that was 
going on in New York City where we, as a country--in New York, 
folks were saying, ``Oh, my goodness.'' Like, 10 percent of the 
homeless in New York were taking up about 90 percent-ish of the 
resources. And so what kind of came from that is some studying 
to understand more, some RCTs that were run. And then, 
ultimately, under President George W. Bush, the Housing First 
initiative was born and funded in a big way across our Nation. 
And then it was expanded under President Obama to include HUD-
VASH for veterans and other things.
    And so that is an example to me of the Federal Government 
leveraging provider knowledge--which, a lot of these ideas came 
from local innovations--paired with economists and other 
academics overlaying their expertise into things to show what 
works, as well as to continue to study it.
    So that would be an example I would point to to say a time 
where we as a country and all of us have done a really good job 
of pushing forward a policy that makes sense and works.
    Mr. Cole. Yeah.
    And, Dr. Schanzenbach, let me go to you and talk a little 
bit and get your perspective on, you know, sort of, income 
cliffs, if you will, which I think we create a lot of in the 
Federal Government. And then we get mad at people because they 
are perfectly rational and decide they are not going to engage 
in some sort of behavior that we think is desirable that then 
costs them benefits, that they are living standard goes down, 
even if their income went up, because we have been very 
inartful about designing an exit from a particular program to 
self-sufficiency, which is, I think, where we want to get as 
many people as we can.
    So can you give us some thoughts on what we can and should 
do?
    I think--you know, we are having this problem right now. I 
am sure some of my colleagues have this same problem. I can go 
through my district right now, and some of my employers will 
literally tell me, ``I can't get people to work here right now 
because the unemployment benefit is higher than I have 
historically paid them.'' And they are making the perfectly 
rational decision, ``I think I will stay where I am making more 
money, as opposed to go back to work. And when I have to go 
back to work, I will.''
    And we can argue a lot as to whether or not that is wages--
although, again, that is a big problem. I think you mentioned 
the $600--I know one of you did--$600 additional unemployment 
benefit we had. Believe me, that is one thing in New York City; 
it is quite another in Wewoka, Oklahoma. I mean, really, the 
one-size-fits-all, geographically, creates a real problem for 
you.
    So I know some of my colleagues might not even experience 
this problem because the dollars don't go as far in their 
respective areas and economies as it might in a relatively 
small town in rural Oklahoma.
    So, anyway, any thoughts or guidance you can give us on 
this so we could more constructive to really help people get to 
self-sufficiency, instead of saying, ``We have gotten you to 
this edge, we are kicking you off,'' or, ``We are mad that you 
won't jump off, even though you are going to end up with less 
benefits for you and your children''?
    Ms. Schanzenbach. Yes. So many great questions there. Let 
me start by sort of addressing your broad question about, so 
what is well-designed and what is less well-designed?
    And I want to say that, sort of, the two big workhorses for 
antipoverty, especially for families with children, are the 
earned income tax credit and the Supplemental Nutrition 
Assistance Program, SNAP.
    When I teach my undergrads, we always start by reading 
Milton Freeman and him thinking about, what is our optimal way 
of designing a program? And he had a couple of things that he 
said. One of them was, people should always be better off if 
they are working. So, you know, when we have to take away the 
resources--which we do; we have to phase them out--but do it 
slowly over time.
    And so then we pivot and look to see, how is SNAP designed, 
how is the earned income tax credit designed? And they are 
really very much in line with exactly what Milton Freeman 
suggested, you know, way back, you know, 50-plus years ago.
    And there are a couple aspects of that, first, that the 
earned income tax credit actually gives people more than a 
dollar back for every dollar that they earn, versus a certain 
part of it. And we have tons of research on this, you know, as 
Heather said, mostly done by economists, you know, in academic 
outlets. And we know that the earned income tax credit induces 
people to work, and then there are all sorts of other positive 
benefits that come from that.
    Similarly, with Supplemental Nutrition--with SNAP, you 
know, we don't really see the big benefits cliffs with that 
because we have designed it.
    Now, I will warn you that, in recent months, even as part 
of Senator Romney's child tax credit, they want to, you know, 
make some changes to some of these programs that I think 
unintentionally would make those cliffs worse.
    And I agree with you, we want to phase things out, you 
know, we want a soft landing, so that if you work an additional 
hour you earn more. And there are some places, you know, where 
that doesn't happen, but not in, sort of, the big workhorses 
here.
    And so for sure, you know, we can work on fixing some of 
the incentives around other smaller programs, but I will tell 
you that the earned income tax credit and SNAP are well-
designed. And I am really excited about the potential for the 
new child tax credit to, you know, help along that as well. And 
the way they have designed that, you know, it persists for a 
long period, and so families aren't going to get the rug yanked 
out from under them when they start working.
    Mr. Cole. Good. Thank you.
    Dr. James, we talked, and the chairman touched a little bit 
on this in his exchange with you, about the food pantry that 
you have at Boston Medical. And, you know, how common is that?
    And coupled with that, I assume there is, you know, an 
immediate-needs problem, obviously, but also long-term 
nutritional advice that families really need, as to, you know, 
thinking about how you put together, literally, you know, a 
menu for your family over a week so that they are not only 
getting fed and they are not hungry but they are actually 
getting the nutritional needs that they need as well.
    Dr. James. So, Mr. Cole, you are asking how common----
    Mr. Cole. Yeah.
    Dr. James [continuing]. Does this happen? Well, I mean, 
pretty often. Every single day. I mean, we feed about 7,000 
people----
    Mr. Cole. Oh, no, excuse me. I meant how common in terms 
of, do you see other institutions like your own doing this? In 
other words, are you a shining example out there all by 
yourself, or have other people begun to emulate you?
    Dr. James. Well, I mean, we were the first, you know, 
prescription-based food pantry, you know, connected to a 
hospital in the country. I do believe that, you know, more 
people are focusing, but I don't think that is extremely 
common, because we are advising others who have asked us about 
how we did this and how to do this. So it is not that common.
    But these are the kind of things that we have used to 
operationalize innovation, you know, to try to create a 
transformative pathway versus just stay where we are. Because 
what generally happens is, when this translates to unstable 
disease, we are really treating people and resetting them back 
to baseline but then just discharging them back to exactly what 
is driving it.
    And I would say, the previous speaker just spoke about 
earned income tax credit. For example, two pediatrics residents 
came up proposing an idea to operationalize earned income tax 
credit in their pediatrics clinics. So, for 5 years now, we 
have been doing people's taxes in the pediatrics clinics to, 
you know, sort of, you know, have people be able to avail 
themselves of that. And we have gotten back, I don't know, $8 
million, $9 million, you know, over these years for people.
    And then we are taking back to another level by, you know, 
working with these families to leverage the HUD Family Self-
Sufficiency program that says people can earn more money and 
they don't fall off the cliff. The extra money goes into escrow 
for either home ownership or even education because everyone in 
the family is eligible for it.
    So we are constantly, you know, trying to operationalize 
things forward to, you know, enable people to get towards self-
sufficiency and financial security and that type of thing.
    Mr.  Cole. Any thoughts on how we would incentivize other 
people to do what you are doing?
    Because, you know, a lot of times, when I see a hospital, I 
mean, they think immediately the physical wellness of the 
patient. You know, they are coming in, they are either ill or 
they are, you know, going to deliver a baby or something like 
that, and we are going to take care of that problem, and then 
off you go, you know, and we have done our part.
    You seem like you do an awful lot more, in terms of 
thinking about the long-term health and outcome of the patients 
and how do we set them on a better path going forward than just 
take care of the immediate problem.
    Dr. James. Yeah, I think it is a transformation in even 
medical education. It kind of starts there. Because it 
basically focuses on disease. Honestly, it just focuses on 
disease. It barely connects it to a human being. And when it 
does, it presents an ideal human being who has an ideal life, 
unencumbered, unchallenged by anything, you know, and 
particularly some kind of systemic barrier.
    And so, you know, how we have tried to incorporate that in 
the culture of our healthcare system is, for example, when new 
doctors start as interns in June and July, they go through 
hospital-wide orientation to learn about the electronic medical 
record and patient quality and safety measures, but they also 
have to go through this, you know, a determinants-of-health 
orientation, both in simulation as well as didactics.
    So we want them to be looking through that lens before they 
ever sit in front of a patient----
    Mr. Cole. Wow. Very good.
    Dr. James [continuing]. So that they can understand from 
the very root what is driving whatever they are doing. Because 
without knowing that, they will unintentionally, you know, just 
be treating disease and not understanding what is driving it.
    Mr. Cole. Thank you very much.
    Well, I am like everybody else on this panel, Mr. Chairman; 
I could go on and on just asking questions. So I will yield 
back, because I know we have a lot of other people who want to 
participate. But thanks again for putting together the panel, a 
great panel.
    And thank all of you for your testimony and sharing your 
observations and wisdom with us.
    The Chairman. Thank you.
    Let me ask unanimous consent to insert into the record 
letters from two of our colleagues, Congresswoman Gwen Moore of 
Wisconsin and then Congressman Gregorio Kilili Camacho Sablan 
of the Northern Mariana Islands.
    I consider both of them incredible partners in the fight to 
end hunger, and I appreciate their advocacy for policies that 
will help alleviate and ultimately end hunger once and for all.
    So, without objection, I will include their statements in 
the record.
    [The information follows:]
    [GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
    
    The Chairman. Mrs. Torres.
    Mrs. Torres. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for hosting this very 
informative and very important hearing today.
    And I want to also extend my gratitude to the professionals 
that are with us today providing critical input on how we can 
address this, you know, what I see as a growing issue of hunger 
in our community.
    First off, I want to say how uncomfortable it makes me when 
I hear the term ``food insecurity.'' You know, I think by 
continuing to call it out, ``hunger''--to continue to call out 
hunger as being just food-insecure, you know, in my mind, we 
minimize the impact that that has on not just children but on 
our society as a whole. And, as Americans, you know, it is 
certainly a black eye, you know, to our Nation to have children 
go hungry every single day--and not just children but also 
adults.
    I want to pose a question to Ms. Reynolds.
    I just want to say how much I agree with so much of what 
you said, starting with weaving, you know, the safety net 
around the issue of providing food to people that are hungry. 
You talked about providing childcare. That is such a critical 
component to ensuring that parents are able to work and to get 
the type of jobs that are actually going to help them pay for 
the basic needs of their families.
    I happen to represent a community, a very working-poor 
community, the Inland Empire. You know, our families struggle 
just to get to work every single day. They spend 2 or 3 hours 
one way in a commute, a terrible commute, which really leaves 
our local municipalities to struggle with this ongoing problem 
of people leaving, you know, home, mass exodus at 5:00 a.m., 
and they don't return until 7:00 or 8:00 p.m.
    So what happens to the kids between, you know, 5:00 and 
8:00 a.m. when they are supposed to be in school--I mean, let's 
just put the pandemic, you know, aside, and let's just talk 
about, you know, the past normal lives that we have had--and 
what happens to the kids between, you know, 3:00 p.m. and 7:00 
p.m.? You know, our communities are challenged every single day 
with having to provide before- and after-school programs for 
kids.
    So, when a parent, you know, a head of household is earning 
minimum wage, that leaves very little money left to spend on 
childcare. So childcare becomes this luxury that--you know, 
poor people see it as a luxury, but, you know, we see it as a 
threat, a threat to continuing this pipeline, you know, to 
prison that I think that we continue to feed. And it is so much 
more expensive to try to prevent recidivism, you know, at the 
tail end, when we can prevent children, you know, from having 
to go in that direction.
    So four out of the six school districts that I represent 
are in the 80th percentile of free and reduced meals. I think 
these are sort of old numbers because some of my school 
districts have recognized that there are a lot of kids whose 
parents are not applying for this free or reduced lunch, so it 
is easier for them, it makes more sense, to just feed 
everyone--which I am thrilled that they have taken that 
attitude, to just feed everyone.
    But I wonder if, you know, our panelists could speak a 
little bit about, you know, that issue.
    The lack of graduation--our graduation rates, you know, are 
horrific. I am ashamed to even, you know, call them out. But it 
is a growing problem. And it is not the fault of our teachers, 
you know, or our schools. It is the fault of society not paying 
attention to this growing problem of the working poor. It is 
not their problem; it is our problem.
    So I wonder, starting with Ms. Reynolds, can you comment a 
little bit, you know, around that? I know that you have said a 
lot around this issue, but, look, we have an infrastructure 
bill that the President has put before us. And, in that bill, 
the women of Congress--I want you to know that we are demanding 
that childcare be a part of that infrastructure bill. Because 
if we don't put families and children ahead of everything, a 
new road, a new bridge, you know, broadband isn't going to help 
us get out of these poverty levels that we are seeing in our 
communities.
    So, with that, Ms. Reynolds, you know, if you can begin 
this conversation, I would love to hear your comments around 
that.
    Ms. Reynolds. Absolutely. And I love so much about what you 
said about prevention. We know prevention saves so much money. 
And it is more than about money; it is about human dignity, 
when we can prevent people from experiencing these traumatic 
things that they experience that comes with poverty. So I love 
the concept of prevention. I just want us as a country to be 
brave enough to do it.
    I love how you brought up childcare. And it just, for me, 
really goes back to the point I made about the need for 
comprehensive services. I mean, we are not a bunch of little 
pieces; we are whole beings.
    And probably the story that resonates the most with me 
about what you are talking about is a woman that we had the 
privilege to serve at Catholic Charities Fort Worth. Her name 
was Perla. And Perla came into our organization because of a 
very basic need. We said ``yes'' to that basic need, because, 
again, if you don't take care of today, there is no tomorrow. 
But then we also offered a longer-term journey out of poverty, 
about understanding what Perla's hopes and dreams and her 
bigger, brighter future was for her family.
    And her bigger, brighter future was a dream of a black 
suit. And I will never forget this, because Perla wanted a 
black suit because she envisioned, at the end of the night, 
sitting around her kitchen table with her husband and her son 
and them being proud of her because of what she achieved that 
day.
    And so we set out at Catholic Charities to make Perla's 
bigger, brighter future of a black suit happen. But it fell 
short time and time again, because we would get Perla a job and 
she would leave, we would get her a job and she would leave.
    And so it would be really easy, if you were in a 
relationship with Perla, to make a lot of assumptions, that 
Perla is not real serious about that black suit. But the 
reality was, Perla was very serious about that black suit, but, 
you know, she didn't have a living-wage job at the time, and 
she would drive to drop her son off at childcare, and she would 
drop him off at a place that she did not feel comfortable with.
    And like all of us mamas on this call, I can't imagine the 
lump that formed in Perla's throat as she drove away, leaving 
her son somewhere that she may not have felt like he was going 
to be okay. And that was causing Perla to leave her job again 
and again and again.
    But, again, because Catholic Charities was in a 
relationship with her, because they were doing life with her, 
because Catholic Charities understood that poverty is not 
just--you just leap out of it because you get some sort of 
assistance but that it is a day-by-day walk to achieve that 
bigger, brighter future, you know, they knew the details of 
what was going on, and they were able to problem-solve with 
Perla.
    And so, in that specific case, they had Perla find a 
childcare center that she couldn't afford but felt safe with, 
and then they matched, dollar for dollar, the money for Perla 
to be able to send her child there until Perla got to the place 
where she could afford that on her own.
    And I think, like, that this just brings up so many points 
to me of: We have got to be comprehensive. We have got to be 
individualized. We have to be in a relationship with people.
    You are right, Ms. Torres, we can't, you know, have 
families spending 2, 3 hours transporting back and forth. You 
know, the family is the core of society, and it takes away so 
much of that when we don't have those things in place.
    So it is my belief that all of these things need to be 
solved, but they need to come together in a comprehensive 
solution so we can really support families toward a long-term 
end goal of economic stability where they really are thriving 
as families.
    Mrs. Torres. So what you are saying is that, you know, in 
essence, we really need a youth and family master plan for 
America, one that recognizes, you know, public transportation, 
you know, has to be a priority, one that recognizes, you know, 
childcare and education and a livable wage and access to, you 
know, healthcare.
    You know, how do we do that? How do we find the courage, 
the political courage, to say, you know, this 35-year-old who 
is going to work every single day, maybe working two or three 
jobs, is deserving of food stamps because the wage that that 
person is earning, what that employer is willing to pay for 
that job, isn't enough for them to provide for themselves or 
even their families?
    Ms. Curry, can you speak a little bit to that?
    Ms. Curry. Yeah, absolutely. I feel like--just going back 
to your previous question as well, I feel like there are so 
many layers here to just peel back.
    But, for me, you know, as a mom and coming from the 
hospitality industry, it really comes back to the food for me. 
Food is foundational. Food is nutrition. Food is healthcare, in 
my opinion.
    And so, for me, I feel like there are some missed dots that 
need to be connected. And I feel like we are looking at it so 
big-picture, that we need to look at the small picture, and I 
think that there are some missing dots that we can connect here 
to help drive the change.
    You know, you spoke to some people's commutes in your 
community being 2 to 3 hours, and that is between the hours of, 
what, 3:00 and 8:00 you said. And then you talked about the 
graduation rates. And so, in my head, for me, that goes back to 
knowing the fact that, you know, children that are sitting 
around the dinner table with their families, you know, are 
having bigger, brighter futures because they are doing better 
in school and having better education. And if these parents are 
commuting and missing out on that opportunity to gather with 
their children, something as simple as that to give them this 
bigger, brighter future, that is so unfortunate. And it is 
something that, again, is so easily solvable right there, but 
how do we connect the dots with transportation and with 
childcare and nutrition at the forefront to make the change?
    And so, I mean, I have a lot of questions too. I know I am 
not answering your question, but I do feel like--I just feel 
like there are a lot of dots that need to be connected on that 
front. And I am hoping that it is something that somebody on 
this call can speak to, maybe Dr. James, from a nutritional 
standpoint, just, you know----
    Mrs. Torres. Yeah.
    Ms. Curry [continuing]. Connecting those dots.
    Mrs. Torres. Dr. James.
    Dr. James. Yes. Well, you know, I think that, just to 
answer that specific question, you know, statistically, we all 
know that people who have lower income have lower health 
status, and so do their children, because they are mere 
beneficiaries of their parents' resources. And people who have 
lower education also, you know, have lower health status and 
also don't live as long as everyone else does.
    And to sort of, like, get at that, I feel like the lowest-
hanging fruit always, at every turn, is to begin--particularly 
as we talk about the smaller picture versus the larger picture, 
the easiest thing is to ask the people who are living this 
experience themselves, ask them--we don't have to sit around 
and, you know, make assumptions and come up with things. We can 
ask them. And they can tell us what it would take, you know, 
for them not to have these issues and these problems. They 
could tell us what it would take for them to be able to 
literally just thrive.
    And I think one of the things we would learn from that is, 
we jump all over the subsidies, probably, and not use them as a 
solution but, you know, more as a bridge. So I always, you 
know, feel like we should start with the people; the people can 
tell us.
    And I also, you know, go back to this question of--I am not 
so sure whether it generates any thought or whether it even 
makes a difference, you know, when I ask a question like this, 
but I think it is really, really important for us to ask 
ourselves with everything that we intend to do--and I would 
say, again, starting with asking people first, but whatever 
solutions that we think are solutions they come up with, are we 
making a different decision or creating a different intent than 
we would choose for ourselves?
    I think that is foundational. Because we know what we need 
to thrive. So ask ourselves that to begin with, because that, 
in and of itself, will, you know, tell us right away what the 
intent is going to achieve, for sure.
    So I don't think--you know, these things are basic, but I 
don't think we generally think that way. So, you know, I think 
it requires that sort of level of a thought process, a 
transformation to thinking in that manner.
    So just two basic things: asking ourselves that and asking 
people with lived experience what it would take for them to be 
able to thrive.
    Mrs. Torres. Thank you for that.
    And before I turn it back over to Chairman McGovern, I just 
want to add and encourage my colleagues to, you know, shop at a 
grocery store in the poorest part of your district. I often do 
that. And, you know, I love to, you know, walk in and challenge 
the management of those stores. You know, why is the bread next 
to the beer? You know, why are certain things, you know, that 
we know are not good for children, you know, next to, you know, 
the candy aisle? You know, things like that. And why don't we 
have, you know, access to more fruits and vegetables? You know, 
there is a lot of, you know, canned items or, you know, 
microwaveable food. I am not trying to say anything negative 
around that, but--the balanced nutrition that kids need in 
order to grow up healthy and be able to learn and do all of the 
things that we are asking them to do.
    Fresh food just isn't available for many of the people that 
I represent. Supermarkets, you know, are far and few in between 
in these neighborhoods. So we need to challenge the corporate 
world also, corporate America, to invest in bringing fresh food 
into our communities. You know, that is something that, you 
know, we should not neglect in this conversation.
    Community gardens are a great way to teach kids about 
proper nutrition and to help them learn how to grow their own 
food, but the reality is, that is not a reality. You know, 
working people need to be able to go to the store and have 
access to fresh fruits and vegetables, and that simply is too 
big of a challenge in some of our communities.
    So, with that, Mr. Chairman, thank you again for bringing 
light to this issue, and I will yield back to you.
    The Chairman. Thank you.
    Mrs. Fischbach.
    Mrs. Fischbach. Thank you very much. Thank you, Chairman 
McGovern for putting this together. I really appreciate it.
    And thank you to all of the witnesses. Lots of good 
conversation, and I appreciate it.
    And I appreciate Chairman McGovern said there is no silver 
bullet. And we are hearing a lot of great programs, about a lot 
of great programs. And Ranking Member Cole asked about maybe 
some principles that we could use, you know, to really focus 
things and how we could tailor it at the Federal level.
    But one of the things that struck me is, I am hearing a lot 
about local innovation. You look at Dr. James and the things 
that are going on there. And my fear is that the Federal 
Government isn't good at local innovation and that we really 
need the guidance in order to make sure that we are allowing 
that innovation to happen at the local level. Because that is 
where--you know, Dr. James talked about talking to the people. 
That is where you are talking to the people. And so we need to 
make sure that we do provide that.
    And so I am just kind of, I guess, throwing it out as maybe 
a discussion, if anyone would want to respond. Maybe focusing 
on those principles, what would make sense for us to be looking 
at on the Federal level? And I understand the whole issue of 
the holistic approach, but, maybe, how do we do that and create 
the innovation?
    Because there are wonderful programs. Ms. Reynolds talked 
about a great program, and I know that when I was in the 
Minnesota Senate we talked about those kinds of local programs. 
And it never failed that, when we tried to make it go 
statewide, it just didn't have the same oomph.
    So I am kind of trying to find the answer to, how do we 
make sure that we are continuing that innovation? And if 
anybody would like to respond, I know that is kind of a big, 
kind of, question, maybe more of a comment. But if anyone would 
like to respond to that, I would love to hear it.
    Ms. Curry. I would like to step in, and hopefully this 
makes sense.
    But, for me, it starts with agriculture. So with food 
insecurity, I feel like the produce, the--all of the things, 
they are already there. There is so much waste that happens 
each year in the farming community. So the food is there that 
could be distributed.
    So, in my mind, it is, how can the Federal Government 
incentivize these local farmers and agricultural communities to 
get that produce and food to the right spots, to those food 
deserts and to the places where people don't have that? Because 
we can kind of bridge the gap there a little bit.
    So it is, how do we incentivize, you know, the farming 
community to get everything to the right places? Again, I am 
all about connecting dots, so how do we connect those dots to 
get the fruits and vegetables to the right place, and what 
incentives can we give that community? I think that would be my 
question.
    Mrs. Fischbach. Thank you.
    Ms. Reynolds. I would encourage rewarding successful 
outcomes.
    So one of the things--today, at LEO, we just launched a 
cohort of seven new organizations who are local innovators in 
topics of income poverty, asset poverty, topics of community 
college completion, all sorts of things in all corners of our 
country. And they are going through a 3-day process, which they 
will learn all about impact evaluations and start designing 
their research projects.
    And these are organizations who, you know, are very local, 
very determined to achieve a certain outcome, and want a 
research shop to come and tell them about their impact. Because 
they are, many times, social workers who got into this work 
because they wanted to see change happen, and now they want to 
understand if that change is what they think it is.
    And so what I would say is that--what I would encourage is 
that more and more Federal programs started pointing toward 
evidence, that where evidence exists, using it, or where 
evidence doesn't exist, making sure that evidence is built.
    And I think the way that is built is through the Federal 
Government saying, ``This is what we want to achieve,'' and 
then local innovators say, ``I will achieve this outcome,'' and 
they run their intervention, but then it is tested by, again, 
economists and other academics who can bring that research 
rigor to the table.
    So that is how I think about it.
    Ms. Schanzenbach. And if I could just add a few more 
things.
    One is recognizing that having a strong foundation of, you 
know, income support programs and Federal nutrition assistance 
programs really helps the local innovators have the space to do 
the work that they do best, which is understanding, you know, 
how to address the root causes of poverty. But they are much 
more stretched if there is a line around the corner, where 
everybody just needs sort of a basic amount of food.
    And so, when we are building on top of, you know, strong 
basic programs, then we can do the innovation, we can do the 
studies, you know, we could have the White House conference 
where we share ideas and, you know, sort of, learn best 
practices and share knowledge.
    Mrs. Fischbach. Thank you. I appreciate that.
    And then just one other question, and I will throw it out 
to everybody. But where do you see the role of the private 
sector in some of this, I guess? Because we are talking a lot 
about the Federal Government coming in and doing different 
things, but there has to be a role for the private sector.
    Dr. James. Well, I would like to just add one thing to 
answer that question.
    As a hospital, we realize that hospitals can't achieve 
these things alone. And so we actually have not achieved them 
alone. We have recognized that it requires multisector 
partnerships to be able to do this, and, you know, partnerships 
among not only hospitals--which is kind of unprecedented, but 
the hospitals in our city have invested together as anchor 
organizations that actually belong to a D.C.-based organization 
called Healthcare Anchor Network that focuses on building more 
inclusive, sustainable local economies--but also working with 
banks. You know, we have worked with JPMorgan Chase, for 
example, to create an ecosystem in an area that has 
traditionally been disinvested, to create opportunities for 
ownership of businesses and equity ownership in these 
businesses and this type thing.
    And also philanthropy. You know, we also, you know, talk 
to, you know, people who are philanthropically oriented to help 
build this thing.
    And government. I would say, city and State government as 
well, you know, we have worked with them as well. And, in fact, 
that program, that is what I just referenced about JPMorgan 
Chase. That is a multisector project that we are doing, and the 
city is very much a part of it. It is the Department of 
Economic Development, you know, from the city of Boston, for 
example, and other hospitals and people who are involved in 
career training and financial literacy for people.
    So I would say multisector partnering, to answer your 
bigger question, multisector partnering is the best way to 
leverage resources and assets to achieve common goals.
    Ms. Curry. I would like to second what Dr. James said. It 
is really not about reinventing the wheel, because there are so 
many small local places doing great things. So it is really 
about helping to amplify those strategies and structures that 
are already in place.
    Ms. Schanzenbach. I had a few other things that the private 
sector plays in this space.
    So, for example, in my work with the Greater Chicago Food 
Depository, I know that we send our trucks out to deliver food 
to the local food pantries. And then, on their way back, they 
stop by participating restaurants and stores that have fresh 
foods that they discard at the end of the day.
    Well, they don't discard them anymore. They give them to 
us, and then we repurpose them, getting them out. So that is 
one great example.
    Of course, lots of grocery stores make substantial 
donations to food banks, food pantries, especially when the 
expiration dates are getting close but aren't here yet. So, of 
course, the food is still safe.
    But the grocery stores know what they need to do to keep 
the food moving. And they have been very generous. They have 
been a tremendously important partner in terms of making sure 
that people get fed.
    Mrs. Fischbach. Thank you very much.
    And, Mr. Chair, I yield back.
    The Chairman. Thank you very much.
    Mr. Perlmutter.
    Mr. Perlmutter. Just quickly. I appreciate the questions 
that have been asked and the panelists' testimony today. And I 
am taking away from this two things--or several things. But a 
holistic view of the individual, the person and their family 
and what has got them in this position.
    And, I mean, the Chairman has started off with a gigantic 
subject, which is hunger. And, in effect, we have expanded that 
in a number of ways beyond that discussion. But I am looking at 
it as a holistic kind of approach, housing and poverty, income, 
and food.
    I agree with Norma, food insecurity kind of glosses over 
what I feel is the question of hunger.
    So holistic view, holistic view of how to approach it with 
a Federal overlay, State and local government, private sector, 
individuals, charities, to try and as efficiently as possible 
bring relief here. So that is the second piece.
    Ms. Schanzenbach, you raised Milton Friedman, who I never 
really put him in this category. And so I am kind of interested 
to ask you that, because I have always thought of Milton 
Friedman as there is no such thing as a free lunch, a pretty 
rough character who was not particularly--I never even thought 
of him in these terms of hunger.
    So could you expand on that a little bit?
    And, with that, I would like to yield my limitless time 
after that to whoever comes after me.
    Ms. Schanzenbach. Yeah. You know, I really do promise I 
have my students read ``Capitalism and Freedom.'' One of the 
last chapters is all about, how would you design an antipoverty 
program?
    And he takes a step back and thinks about incentives and 
how do we make sure that as we are phasing out benefits--
because we do have to phase them out eventually.
    We call that the old iron triangle, that if you give them 
to everyone it costs a lot more money, and so you have got to 
phase them out at some rate. And so he thinks about what is the 
rate at which we should phase it out.
    You might have heard of he called it the negative income 
tax. And in fact, during the Nixon administration they ran some 
real randomized controlled experiments on the negative income 
tax, found some really important findings from that, that it 
did some real good.
    And then I really will say that a lot of our programs are 
based on that same sort of foundational way to design programs, 
and it works.
    Mr. Perlmutter. Well, all I can say is you are a lot nicer 
than Milton Friedman. So you are putting a nice component to 
sort of his economic principles, where I think there are two 
things going on here. Milton Friedman would be more of a 
monetary politicist. He just focused on particular incentives.
    But there also has to be setting these goals and directing 
it in a fiscal way, which then can put some power behind the 
incentives, that this is the direction we want to go. And I 
know the Chairman's goal here is let's eradicate hunger. And it 
is going to take about everything we have got to do that.
    And I know in a wealthy country like ours we should be able 
to do it. But it really is going to take a good look at the 
individual and a holistic approach involving all of government, 
the private sector, and hospitals, where there are good ideas.
    So I am going to yield back to the chair, but if Ms. 
Scanlon wanted to grab my time or--I don't want to give it to 
Mr. Morelle, because he will use it forever. I will yield back 
to the chair.
    The Chairman. So I should say to the witnesses, Mr. 
Perlmutter is kind of joking about his limitless time. But as 
you probably have figured out by now, the Rules Committee is a 
little bit different than other committees. In other 
committees, questions and answers are within 5 minutes, which 
is good and bad. It is good because you get the hearing over 
with. It is bad because sometimes you can't have the kinds of 
conversations that we are having here today. And I think these 
conversations are incredibly important.
    And, again, the Rules Committee, every bill that comes to 
the floor goes through us. We are like, I don't know, like the 
Wizard of Oz, no one quite knows what we all do here. But the 
bottom line is that we bring everything together. And so we are 
the perfect committee to kind of head this effort up.
    And, again, I go back to the White House conference. There 
are lots of different ideas that are being talked about here 
today. Ms. Curry talked about connecting the dots, which is 
incredibly important. It is hard to connect the dots in the 
system that we have, because we only talk about little bits and 
pieces of this, depending on what committee you are on.
    And so that would be the hope of the White House 
conference. Similar to the select committee that George 
McGovern and Bob Dole were on, the White House conference could 
be that vehicle to connect the dots to bring all this together 
and to develop a road map that involves everybody. I mean, not 
just government, the private sector, medical institutions, 
educational institutions, everybody. And so I appreciate that.
    So I am now happy to yield to Ms. Scanlon of Pennsylvania.
    Ms. Scanlon. Thank you so much, Chairman McGovern. As you 
know, I have been really looking forward to this hearing.
    I am sorry. I am just pulling things up as I am bouncing 
between too many hearings. So I just need one second.
    So I have had a fair amount of engagement in this area over 
time, working with community gardens and local food banks. I 
was on a school board where we were implementing the 2010 
nutrition regulations for school breakfasts and lunches.
    And I represent Philadelphia, which is the poorest of our 
large cities. And, therefore, I think the statistics 
prepandemic were that we had one in four people in our city 
were hungry. So this is a longstanding issue for the region 
that I represent.
    Obviously, during COVID-19 our food banks have seen a huge 
increase--I think 60 percent is the figure that we see--a huge 
increase in need, with a lot of people having to turn to food 
banks for the first time ever.
    Since the pandemic began, I have made a point of attending 
food drives, food distributions, and farm markets just about 
every week or weekend in our district. So I have been able to 
talk to a lot of our constituents as well as people who are 
doing what they can to try to meet this need. But, as Dr. James 
suggested earlier, for many people dependency on food banks has 
become a constant even prepandemic.
    We have great local organizations that have been fighting 
hunger in the Philadelphia area, folks like the Greater 
Philadelphia Coalition Against Hunger, Philabundance, which 
began as an organization that collected food from corporations 
and other places that had excess food to distribute it, but now 
is our major food bank in the region. And then we have had 
Delaware County Human Services and Citizen Corps. Almost every 
weekend they have a food drive drive-thru where the local food 
banks come, open the back of their car, take what they need, 
and then go use it.
    I have got a constituent, Desiree' LaMarr-Murphy, who runs 
a food pantry in her backyard every week for her neighbors.
    So we are really grateful to all those folks who have 
stepped up, but we need to address the underlying issues, as we 
have been talking about here today. We need additional funding 
for the food banks. We need to make sure that the safety net is 
there and working when people need it.
    And I am really encouraged by the way we have been able to 
implement programs throughout this pandemic, whether it was 
increasing SNAP benefits, providing summer lunches to students 
who wouldn't otherwise have access to food, expanding the child 
tax credit, and taking some of these other measures that I 
think do need to be made permanent.
    So, obviously, as a school board member, I have had a 
strong interest in the school lunch, school breakfast program, 
what we can do to make sure that is more nutritious. And I am 
concerned about the fact that we saw some rollback in those 
regulations in the last couple years. But there are additional 
issues we need to introduce there.
    And I am also interested in the WIC program. I am a member 
of the Black Maternal Health Caucus. And we know that the U.S. 
has such a terrible track record, much worse than any of our 
peer nations, with respect to maternal mortality. And I 
understand there are some things we could do with WIC that 
might help address some of those issues.
    The good news is we have a base to work from, the work that 
was done 50 years ago, and programs like SNAP and WIC do exist 
and give us someplace to start, which is great.
    Dr. Schanzenbach, can you talk a little bit about how WIC 
and the child tax credit may be helpful with respect to the 
issue of social determinants of health, maternal mortality, and 
infant hunger?
    Ms. Schanzenbach. Yes. So we absolutely know that that 
early life period, so from in utero through age 3 or 5, is just 
extremely important. It is extremely important for brain 
development. Our number one priority, frankly, should be 
protecting people in that age range, especially in times of 
economic downturn.
    And let me say clearly, we did an exceptionally poor job of 
that during COVID. We know that that is important and, 
nonetheless, we let rates of hunger increase more for families 
with kids.
    But we do have programs. I am extremely excited about the 
potential for the child tax credit, which we think will halve 
child poverty next year.
    And another feature of that which will be really useful is 
that it is paid out on a monthly basis. And so that means that 
when families sort of get into a bind at the end of the month, 
they are going to still have money. They don't have to wait 
until their next tax payment in February or March. So I think 
that is going to do some real good.
    Now, let's talk about WIC for a minute. There is a lot, of 
course, to admire about this program, but I do think that it is 
in need of some modernization or some incentives, frankly.
    So it does a fantastic job with making sure that infants in 
the United States have access to the formula or the breast milk 
that they need. Participation rates are very high. Something 
like 80 percent of infants who are eligible participate.
    But where it falls short is both in those prenatal 
conditions, which we know that if maternal nutrition is 
adequate the baby is going to be born at healthier birth 
weight. There are all sorts of health problems down the road 
that get sort of headed off if mom is in good health.
    And then, similarly, participation rates really drop off 
dramatically as kids get age 1, 2, 3, and 4, even though we 
know how important it is to protect kids in that age range from 
hunger.
    And furthermore, there is this gap. So you age out at WIC 
on your fifth birthday. Sometimes you are not in kindergarten 
for another couple of months. And so there is just nothing, 
even though we know how preciously important this time is.
    So I think it is in my comments in the record. It is past 
time to set up performance standards for WIC. And we can let 
States and local areas figure out how to address why is 
participation falling off so much. But some incentives I think 
will go a long way there.
    Ms. Scanlon. Thank you.
    I think you also wrote some about SNAP and the need to work 
on recalculating the amounts that are necessary to produce or 
to put healthy food on people's tables. Can you talk about that 
a little bit?
    Ms. Schanzenbach. Oh, yes. Thank you for that question.
    So we are in the midst of rethinking the Thrifty Food Plan. 
You might remember that Congress ordered the Department of 
Agriculture to take a look at the Thrifty Food Plan as part of 
the last farm bill, and they sort of dragged their feet a 
little bit on that.
    So let me just sort of paint a little bit of a picture for 
you. Basically, no matter how hard they try, the Department of 
Agriculture can't figure out a way to just make the numbers add 
up, to sort of make you capable of purchasing a healthy diet 
for the amount of money that they have. And so they try.
    And so my favorite example is that the Thrifty Food Plan 
calls for a family of four to drink over 20 pounds of orange 
juice per week every week, and to top that off with five more 
pounds of fresh oranges. I love orange juice, I am sure you do, 
too. That is about five times what families actually consume.
    Similarly, the plan calls for more than twice the normal 
weekly consumption of milk, of potatoes, of rice, of bananas.
    So it will go a long way to sort of have this Thrifty Food 
Plan a more reality-based plan.
    Another one of my favorite examples is it assumes that it 
costs the same amount to feed a toddler as it does a teenager. 
And let me tell me you, I have two teenage boys in my house, 
that is empirically false. Teenage boys are a lot more 
expensive to feed.
    I. know that the Department of Agriculture is working hard 
on this, on let's relook at the Thrifty Food Plan and make it 
more based in reality. And I think that is going to go a long 
way to this goal that we have of ending hunger.
    Ms. Scanlon. That sounds right. Having had teenage boys in 
our house, I could not agree with you more.
    You mentioned, I think several people have mentioned the 
impact on academic performance for when children are hungry. 
And we have talked a little bit about in the K through 12 
context.
    But I have got 19 colleges and universities in my district, 
and I had not realized before getting into this line of work 
what an issue it is to have hunger on college campuses and the 
fact that most of our colleges now have to have a food pantry 
to keep people fed.
    Have you looked at that issue at all?
    Ms. Schanzenbach. I agree that that is extremely important. 
It harkens back to that 1968 documentary, ``Hunger in 
America,'' that the chairman started by quoting from. I will 
always remember that one of the quotes from that was that the 
mind comes in second when the belly is empty.
    And so, to be sure, we see that having access to SNAP, 
having more consistent access to SNAP, all of those things mean 
that kids do better in school.
    So when it comes to colleges, there are just a lot of 
thorny issues around that. It is definitely the case that the 
college rules for SNAP are antiquated and just aren't 
reflecting the fact that many people are going back to college. 
It is not just 18- to 22-year-olds who are in college anymore. 
A large fraction are over age 25. Even 10 percent, I think, are 
over age 40.
    And so I do think that we need to take a careful look at do 
we have those right. I know that there was some change in some 
of the relief packages.
    But we need to sort of take that on more systematically, 
because the last thing we want is for people not to finish 
their degrees, which can then be a path to sort of better jobs, 
more stability, because they can't feed their stomach in the 
very short run.
    Ms. Reynolds. And if I could just add one point to that 
comment, is that there has been a growing body of evidence over 
the last decade on what it takes to get people to persist and 
to complete their college degree.
    I think that there have been about six RCTs that show 
successful interventions that are working. And a common thread 
is helping college students, low-income college students deal 
with personal barriers, poverty obstacles that they are dealing 
with.
    And so where we have done a great job is in, like, getting 
to the point of access. We just have so much further to go with 
persistence and completion.
    And so much of it is because, again, if you were in poverty 
and you don't know how you are going to feed your child tonight 
and you are in school, education is going to be the first thing 
to go if you can't first take care of today's needs.
    Ms. Curry. I would like to build on that a little bit and 
just provide a little bit of perspective from the fact that, it 
is true, every school should have some sort of a food pantry 
when it comes to college education.
    Because I think it is just ironic when you look at needing 
to focus that food really is medicine, but it seems as though 
it is easier for college students these days to have access to 
an Adderall prescription rather than some brain fuel from their 
local college food pantry.
    So I think that really is something to look into.
    Ms. Scanlon. Okay. Thank you.
    Playing off the theme that food is medicine, I was going to 
direct a question to Dr. James.
    I know at CHOP, Children's Hospital in Philadelphia, a few 
years ago they initiated a program, yet another PPP program for 
my congressional colleagues, but this one is the Prescription 
Produce Program. So trying to address nutritional needs of 
children by prescribing produce and other healthy foods to 
them.
    I that related to some of the things you are doing in your 
program, Dr. James?
    I think you are muted.
    Dr. James. Thank you. I am sorry.
    I at least one of them for sure, and as well as the food 
pantry, because we have the Grow Clinic. And one of the things 
it does is prescribe the sorts of nutrition-heavy foods that 
children need to actually grow.
    We have seen countless--every year we have a fundraising 
event--seen countless ``look at me now'' stories, from a 
picture of a little baby to a grown person in college even.
    And part of what goes along with that program is not only 
providing people with access to those nutritional foods, but we 
have, as I was mentioning earlier, a teaching kitchen that 
actually helps people to prepare those types of foods, and 
actually not only in one way of preparing it.
    We have the most diverse patient population in our city. 
And so there are ways of teaching people and orienting them to 
actually prepare these healthy foods in their own cultural 
sorts of ways as well.
    So we first of all provide them with access to these 
nutritional foods, and then also help them with learning about 
how to prepare them. So it sort of runs the entire gamut.
    Ms. Scanlon. One thing that kind of has masked some of the 
hunger issues in our country is we also have this obesity issue 
moving forward. Can you speak a little bit to how someone could 
be obese but not be getting adequate nutritional food?
    I mean, we have seen in the school lunch context that as we 
rolled out healthier alternatives, it started to address some 
of the obesity issues, because kids were eating better and not 
eating so much junk.
    Can you talk to that link?
    Dr. James. Obesity is complex. It is a really complex 
thing. First of all, what might be considered obesity in one 
culture may not be considered obesity in another culture.
    And so we create these sort of standards by which we 
measure people. And in some healthcare settings, the honest 
truth, they judge people. And it is not really good, because 
the patients feel that.
    I actually saw it, I saw a doctor tweet about that the 
other day, about how she herself was not enjoying being a 
doctor because of the perceptions people have about obesity. 
And she considered herself that, I guess.
    So I think it is that, that is first of all. I mean, I 
actually once did a study on that in our emergency department, 
asking people whether or not they considered themselves obese, 
first of all. And I know I am not getting to your answer--your 
question yet, but I will.
    We were asking people whether or not they considered 
themself obese, and then we measured their BMIs and things like 
that. And there were huge discrepancies in what people 
considered as obese and not based on culture.
    And the other thing I asked people was would they ever be 
interested in exercising, learning about health and fitness and 
this type thing. And 85 percent of the respondents said they 
would absolutely be interested in those things if they could 
just manage the stress in their lives first. And those things 
were all focused on, like, food insecurity, housing insecurity, 
lack of resources to be able to even prioritize their health.
    And so a lot of the things that people have access to, to 
eat, to answer your question, they are just things that aren't 
things that add nutritional value. They may be things that just 
pack on calories. They may be things that are just like heavy 
in like carbohydrates, heavy in sugars, and this type thing.
    And, listen, I have always had this notion in my head, 
actually it is a mantra, and it is, given any opportunity, 
barring things like with the exception of mental illness and 
substance use disorder, given any opportunity, people will not 
choose suffering. And so there is always a reason for these 
things. But we just have to understand and take the opportunity 
to understand what the reason is, just by asking people 
themselves.
    Ms. Scanlon. I suspect you may agree with a pediatrician in 
Philadelphia who wrote an op-ed a little over a year ago. He 
said that a friend asked me the other day what would do the 
most to improve the health of the children he sees in his 
clinic, and he said, raise the minimum wage.
    And it speaks to these other issues, the fact that people 
have so much on their plate and they can't afford the housing 
or the medication, and it is just this cascade of things, 
including food insecurity. So I have found that something I 
cite quite a bit.
    Going back to Dr. Schanzenbach, one of the things, you were 
mentioning reducing barriers and access to nutritious food. And 
that is something we tried to work on over the summer, trying 
to make the ties between farm markets and our local 
populations, making sure that people could use SNAP and EBT at 
the farm markets, that folks could get deliveries from the farm 
markets.
    Are there other things in that reducing barriers to access 
that we should be looking at?
    Ms. Schanzenbach. I think sort of besides expanding access 
and farmers markets and things like that and delivery--both of 
those I think are pretty first order--another is, about a 
decade ago the Department of Agriculture ran a randomized 
controlled trial, so really top-quality evidence, about what 
happens when we give people a price break when they buy fruits 
and vegetables. And so we will give them 30 cents back for 
every dollar they spend.
    So recognizing that cost of these have been increasing 
disproportionately, lo and behold, maybe to no one's great 
surprise, it increased the likelihood--or increased the amount 
of fruits and vegetables that people buy.
    I think that is more than ripe for primetime, and I would 
love to see us implement that sort of on a large scale through 
the SNAP program.
    Ms. Scanlon. Ms. Curry, you have done a lot of work around 
school food programs, and I spent some time in the trenches on 
that one as well, whether it was trying to make sure that kids 
who were using the free and reduced lunch and breakfast didn't 
feel stigmatized, making sure that the quality of the food was 
good, et cetera.
    Can you speak to what you are seeing in that realm and how 
we could do better?
    Ms. Curry. Yes, absolutely.
    So it is so interesting, speaking about obesity, Oakland 
actually has high obesity rates and high rates of food 
insecurity. And it seems so counterintuitive, but they are 
definitely linked. And it is because healthy food is more 
expensive than the other things that people have access to.
    And so I think what you were speaking to is great with the 
incentivizing. The 30 cents back for every dollar I think is a 
great thing to implement.
    But what we have found to be really helpful for us to 
change that is to, working with our--getting these local 
organizations like ourselves to work with the local farmers to 
actually bring the produce to the schools and the different 
school districts and to the people in the communities that way, 
and just kind of have this direct-to-consumer model I think has 
been very helpful for us on the ground.
    And we find that people, they want the healthy foods. They 
just don't have access to them or can't afford them. And so 
kind of bridging that gap I think has been really helpful, in 
our eyes, and we have found people to be really grateful for 
the help.
    Ms. Scanlon. You also had some interesting statements in 
your statement about philanthropy cannot solve everything, and 
I have certainly been concerned about that, attending food 
drives where the pantries that show up at those food drives are 
dependent on whatever happens to come in that day.
    Can you speak to that a little bit?
    Ms. Curry. Absolutely. So you are saying that people 
receiving whatever comes in that day. Yeah, absolutely. We are 
completely dependent upon people volunteering and showing up to 
help and to really be boots on the ground. And people kind of 
take what they can get, and that is the sad truth of it.
    But we have been fortunate that we are here in California 
and have had some amazing, like, local farmers and dairy 
providers come and help.
    And we have also implemented having our local hospital, 
Kaiser Permanente, have a huge help. And I have found that to 
be extremely helpful from both a mental health perspective for 
the community and nutrition.
    And so I would encourage us to figure out how to connect 
other local nonprofits with their local hospitals, because I 
feel like it makes a huge difference in amplifying.
    And I think awareness is a huge thing, too. A lot of people 
don't realize that the help is there. And so figuring out how 
to raise more awareness about the help that is available to the 
community I think is really important. And for us, partners 
like Kaiser and our local food bank have really, really helped 
in doing that.
    So, again, I hate to repeat myself, but really connecting 
those dots on the small things has been so important for us 
from the ground level up.
    Ms. Scanlon. And I think that goes back to the barriers 
issue, and particularly when we have had to rely so much on 
internet and not everybody has access.
    But that would keep me going on for a lot longer. So thank 
you very much, and I will yield back.
    The Chairman. Thank you.
    Before I yield to Mr. Raskin, I just want to ask unanimous 
consent to put into the record a statement from Luis Pedraja, 
who is the president of Quinsigamond Community College in my 
hometown of Worcester, Massachusetts.
    [The information follows:]
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    The Chairman. He wrote to tell me how students are facing 
food insecurity today at levels obviously compounded by the 
COVID pandemic. And let me quote. He says:
    ``Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, a 2018 study done by the 
Wisconsin HOPE Lab found that 49 percent of students had low or 
very low food security and went hungry on a regular basis, 11 
percent were homeless and 54 percent were in an insecure 
housing situation.
    ``Shockingly, 7 percent of students experience hunger, 
housing and homelessness together, all three, while 66 percent 
experience one of these basic needs insecurity, and the 
pandemic has only compounded these concerns.'' End of quote.
    So nobody is immune from this crisis and we have to act.
    And by the way, this statement was submitted through the 
Rules Committee's new online portal at rules.house.gov. I want 
to encourage anybody who is watching this today to take a 
moment to log on and share your story, any research you have, 
or whatever you think we should know as we continue this work.
    And, again, I think the conversation has been really 
superb, but it all points to the same thing: We have a hunger 
problem in this country. And it involves not just one program 
or not just the government. It involves all of us.
    And, again, part of what we are trying to do here is to 
highlight some of the challenges, but also move toward, again, 
connecting the dots, as Ms. Curry says, because I think that is 
how we solve this.
    This is a big problem. It is going to require some big 
thinking. And we have to get everybody who has a role together 
and figure out what our road map is going to be.
    So, having said that, I am now happy to yield to the 
gentleman from Maryland, Mr. Raskin.
    Mr. Raskin. Thank you, Chairman McGovern, and thanks for 
convening this excellent discussion.
    And I want to express my appreciation to the panelists for 
their really terrific contributions.
    My congressional district in Maryland is in certainly the 
top 25 percent of congressional districts in terms of wealth, 
in Montgomery County, Maryland, in Frederick County, and 
Carroll County. But I have been very focused on this issue, and 
we have seen some terrible outbreaks of hunger and poverty over 
the course of the COVID epidemic.
    And one way of seeing it is with a group that I have worked 
with for a long time called Adventist Community Services of 
Greater Washington, which is not far from my house. They 
basically went, during the course of the first several months 
of the crisis, they started serving ten times the number of 
people as they had seen a year before.
    And then whole new groups arose. In our school area, we 
call it the Takoma Park Middle School Cluster, a new food 
support group was founded by my friend Wendy Kent. They started 
by serving 33 families a month, and they went to serving 
thousands of meals a month, because the demand was so 
overwhelming, with people skipping meals and not able to feed 
their families nutritious lunch and dinner.
    So it is a serious problem even in areas that sounds to you 
like they might not have a problem, like Montgomery County, 
Maryland.
    The question that I want to ask, given this amazing 
outpouring of human compassion and solidarity that we saw, not 
just in Montgomery County but in Frederick County and Carroll 
County and throughout, is whether we should continue to depend 
on that.
    In other words, do we want to work with and mobilize these 
networks that have formed in our area around school clusters, 
or is that a manifestation of the failure of our broader food 
systems and a failure of the government?
    So I am just curious as to how you integrate the emergence 
in civil society of efforts to transfer grocery gift cards and 
canned goods and fruits and vegetables from farmers market 
directly to people who are hungry versus trying to think of it 
as a more systemic issue.
    And I don't know, Dr. Schanzenbach, maybe we could start 
with you.
    Ms. Schanzenbach. Yeah. You know, great questions. And it 
was certainly heartening to see just the overwhelming response 
when needs surged so much.
    I do think that we will want to continue to nurture these 
networks, but the expectation and hope is that, as the economy 
continues to improve, as we sort of fix some of the 
shortcomings of SNAP, just the pressure will be taken off of 
those.
    And so then we can really turn to thinking about some of 
the more fundamental causes of why you are having trouble 
making ends meet, what can we do to be more sustainable here.
    But I do think, of course, we want local organizations, we 
want grassroots people to be part of the solution. I think we 
are going to need them to be part of the solution.
    Mr. Raskin. Yeah.
    Ms. Schanzenbach. But they are going to be better on top of 
SNAP.
    Mr. Raskin. Well, and, Ms. Curry, I wonder if you would 
reflect for a moment about the dynamics of the kinds of things 
that have happened in my community, and I am sure it is not 
unique across the country.
    It is wonderful to be part of food drives where people are 
bringing food, people are bringing canned goods, people are 
contributing money. There have been, like, drive-thrus where 
people come up, we hand them bags of groceries, and so on.
    Is that ultimately what anti-hunger initiatives should look 
like in America, or do we want something that is more systemic 
and more structural and more sustained to be taking place?
    And what are the dynamics in terms of how people feel about 
it, both the people who participate in giving and the people 
who participate in receiving? Is it better to have that kind of 
face-to-face thing? Is it embarrassing? I am just curious.
    Ms. Curry. Right. Right.
    I definitely think that programs like ours and many others 
should definitely continue going forward with the added benefit 
of the strengthened SNAP program.
    But I would say I haven't seen embarrassment, as you said. 
I have seen more graciousness and gratefulness from a family 
perspective, especially during this time.
    And what happened here was a pandemic. So we had to do what 
we had to do and get things to people the way that we needed to 
get them as fast as we could. And so that model really worked 
for us.
    And with our partnership with the World Central Kitchen, 
who has implemented this same program in many different places, 
it just works, and it has that back-end benefit of helping the 
hospitality industry as well. And so that part of things has 
been really great structurally.
    But I think systemically, absolutely, it would make more 
sense to have more structure there. But I think that there is a 
world where both things can live, because we are not going to--
until we see this completely end, I feel like we are going to 
need all of the help that we can get and then some.
    And when this pandemic ends, we are not going to see, 
unfortunately, this go away right away. If anything, I think it 
will get worse, a little bit worse, before it gets better, 
because we will be in that rebuild stage.
    So I think it is really important to have strong forces 
behind the hunger initiative to make sure that we are taking 
care of everyone until we get to a place where we know that the 
SNAP and WIC programs that are put into place are truly 
working, if that answers your question.
    Mr. Raskin. Yes. And I want to thank you for what all of 
you are doing. I want to thank Adventist Community Services in 
my area, and I want to thank Wendy Kent from the Takoma Park 
Middle School Food Support Cluster, and I want to thank 
everybody who has stepped up at this moment.
    And let's just hope that we will be able, through these 
different legislative initiatives, to strengthen the overall 
resiliency of our nutrition network in the country.
    I yield back, Mr. Chairman.
    The Chairman. Thank you very much.
    I want to ask unanimous consent to insert into the record a 
letter from the Food Bank Coalition of Massachusetts in support 
of today's hearing and the need to convene a White House 
Conference on Food, Nutrition, and Hunger, and our goal to end 
hunger in the United States by 2030.
    [The information follows:]
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    The Chairman. I am now happy to yield to Mr. Morelle.
    Mr. Morelle. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, first of all, not 
only for convening this hearing today, which is so important at 
this point in our Nation's history, but your long history of 
working on this. And I am very, very grateful to you for your 
leadership and to all the witnesses who have stayed now through 
a couple of hours-plus answering our questions. And I think the 
questions have been great. I think the subject is important.
    I actually was going to ask something about hunger, but I 
have been inspired by the chairman's call to talk about this in 
a bigger way. And I was also inspired by Ms. Curry's story 
about Christina, I think she said the young woman's name is. So 
if I can just take a moment.
    Four years ago I was the majority leader of the New York 
State Assembly and we had just come through a bruising State 
budget battle. We pass our budget, adopt it in April. And what 
I was frustrated by was how many different groups, well-
deserving, well-meaning, came to ask for money. And I represent 
Rochester, New York, upstate New York, second-highest child 
poverty rate in the country, sadly.
    But I was reflecting on my frustrations. There were so many 
people, sometimes in the same space, asking for State funds. 
And I was thinking about, boy, we are doing so well. All these 
groups would come and say, we get so much return on our 
investment. If you invest a dollar, you get three dollars back 
in avoided cost.
    And I thought, all these services are great, all these 
organizations will claim to be so successful, but in some ways 
we are not helping people. It is just people are getting worse. 
Our situation in our community was getting worse. And I thought 
it is like the organs of the body are doing well, but the 
patient is dying.
    And so I was haunted, too, by a story, and this is the 
story part. My wife was an English language arts teacher in 
seventh grade. And we were near the end of the school year this 
time of year, and she had come home talking about this boy 
Dasani. And Dasani had been one of her favorite students, 12 
years old, a lot of personality, very smart, but there was some 
issues in Dasani's life.
    And she came home one day--and she had talked about him a 
lot, so I knew who she was talking about. She said, ``Dasani 
got suspended from school today.''
    And I said, ``Oh, I am sorry to hear that. What happened?''
    She said, ``Well, he got in a fight with some other 
students because they were teasing him. He has been sleeping on 
the playground and sneaking into school buildings at night 
rather than going home.''
    And I said, ``Gee, that is unfortunate. Why? Why would he 
be doing that?''
    And she said, well, his older brother, who my wife had also 
taught, had been killed in a gang-related shooting, and the 
mom--she was a single mom--was having mental issues dealing 
with her son's death and the violent way in which he died.
    So I said, ``What is going to happen to him?''
    And she said, ``I don't know.'' And she never saw him 
again.
    So I was haunted by that story and haunted by what had been 
this bruising State budget battle. So I convened in my office 
at the time the local United Way, my two major hospital 
healthcare systems, and the Rochester City School District, 
which had all kinds of challenges. It is an urban district, 
very, very poor achievement rate.
    And I said to them, I don't understand why, as adults, 
well-meaning, caring adults, with a lot of services, why we 
have these terrible results and why we don't integrate social, 
health, and educational services. Why a classroom teacher 
doesn't know that a child that they have and their family, the 
fact their family have housing issues, have food insecurity.
    When you go to discharge folks from the emergency room at 
our hospitals, I would hear the emergency room attendants tell 
me, ``We didn't discharge the person, not because of a medical 
reason. We don't know what is going to happen to them and they 
are on the precipice of falling apart.''
    So I challenged these four or five people gathered around 
my room.
    So 4 years later, I just want to talk about what we have 
done in Rochester, New York. We have now 50 organizations that 
meet every month for several hours. I have work groups with 
hundreds of people. We have a staff of about six, seven, it 
continues to grow. Because I convinced the State of New York to 
allow me to start creating a pilot program in Rochester to 
start integrating services, health, education, and welfare, not 
to create a single program. There are plenty of silos. It is 
just the silos aren't connected in any meaningful way.
    So we have been at it for 4 years. We are about to enter 
into a big agreement. We are funded by the State of New York, 
gave us $15 million to integrate services.
    So we have built a shared language protocol, an ecosystem. 
We have gotten all these different agencies in the health, 
social, and educational space to agree to share data with one 
another. And we are building, again, no new services. It is 
really about alignment and integration.
    But out of that, what we hope to build--and we have got 
pilots we are about to implement--a holistic, human-centered 
design, with a big lens towards racial equity. We have an 
Equity Review Board that looks at everything. Even the 
algorithms we are building with IBM, who is our selected 
vendor, we brought in a company to look at the algorithms to 
make sure there is not racial bias in the algorithms. We have a 
huge community engagement piece to this.
    But the frustration--and this really gets to what the 
chairman was talking about--is when I described it--part of the 
value I bring to this--so I co-chair this with another longtime 
friend who is a member of the State Board of Regents and is in 
the healthcare space.
    And so I bring these folks together and I spend hours on 
this every month. And the real kind of reason I am there is I 
don't know that much about healthcare policy or educational 
policy or housing or hunger. But they will come to meetings, if 
then the majority leader of the assembly convenes them or now 
the Congressman convenes them.
    And so what I do is I troubleshoot. When one of the 
hospitals is thinking maybe they are going to design something 
that deals with social determinants, I called the head of the 
hospital. I said, ``You have been in these meetings, you know 
this is important, you are committed to this collective work.'' 
So they will go and make sure that people are brought in, and 
we have continued. That is why we have hundreds of people now 
working on work groups.
    So we are on the cusp. It is really hard. I mean, we talk 
about this in rooms like this, virtual or otherwise. And it 
sounds easier than it is, but I know all of you know how really 
difficult it is. You deal with egos. You deal with programs 
that are designed for 10- to 12-year-olds, but then when you 
become 13 you might still be hungry and you might still be 
homeless, but you are no longer in that program. So we don't 
have really good funding streams.
    But the worst part this--and, Jim, you mentioned this, so 
that is why I am getting so animated about it--is if I weren't 
in that room I am not sure it would work well in Rochester, New 
York, because I sort of say I am the muscle in the family, I 
make sure everybody is at the meeting.
    Now they have gotten to the point after 4 years where they 
work together. There is faith. There is trust. We are all part 
of this belief system that we are going to change the world and 
we are going to have the first fully integrated health, social, 
and educational services. And the hospitals talk to social.
    And there will be no what we call warm handoffs, and no one 
will fall through the cracks. You are at one settlement house 
and then your family moves, and now no one knows what happened 
to you. Whatever information about you while you were at the 
settlement house was great, except you have moved to a new 
neighborhood and no one knows who you are and no one knows what 
interventions have happened in your life or your family's life.
    So I relate this not because I am pessimistic. I am very 
optimistic. I mean, we are doing some things. We have consulted 
with San Diego 2-1-1, which is doing some great things. We know 
about the project in Fort Worth, Ms. Reynolds, that you talked 
about.
    But I guess the question that I think we should all sort of 
be contemplating is how to build--and maybe it is through--when 
I talk to--I will just say this one other thing, then I will 
get to the question. Sorry.
    When I talk to the folks in the Ed and Labor Committee 
staff, of which I am a member, or I talk to other folks in 
public policy and I say to them, ``We really need to break down 
barriers and bring people together in a holistic way,'' and I 
think everybody sort of intuitively says, ``Boy, that is really 
what we are all trying to do.''
    But the way we design things in government and public 
policy makes it almost impossible. I am going to have a fight 
tomorrow with the State of New York about some requirements on 
how we enter into this agreement with our integrator, because 
they just don't--they helped me invent the program, they came 
up with the funding, and they still don't know how to do this 
because they are stuck in the old way.
    So I guess the question is, maybe less for right now but 
something to think about and help us with, is how to really 
have a serious conversation about true integration. That those 
silos that we have built, well-meaning people over decades and 
decades because there was a problem they wanted to address, how 
do we break it down? How do we create regional or State 
approaches that really worry about a community but really at 
the end of the day worry about the individual and the families?
    Because for all the other things that we do, if we are 
not--and moving people from crisis and the fragility that 
poverty puts on people to--I heard the word ``self-
sufficient.''
    I don't want to get people self-sufficient. I want them to 
thrive well beyond self-sufficiency, so they are thriving, they 
don't fall back into poverty, they don't fall back from--they 
are out of the program for 2 weeks. They get a flat tire. They 
lose their job because it is the third time they have been late 
for work. They are now back in poverty again.
    So we have got to do much more than just getting them over 
some arbitrary line, the poverty line. We have got to get them 
in a whole different place.
    So sorry for the rambling, Mr. Chairman. I really apologize 
for that. But this is something that I and so many people here 
in town have dedicated themselves to. But it is tough. It is a 
slog to even get people to think creatively about, how do we 
break this down, how do we truly get to integrated, holistic 
solutions?
    With that, I am going to shut up. And maybe I can just ask 
each of you to just offer a little thought about things that we 
could do to make that better.
    The Chairman. Why don't we begin with Dr. James.
    Dr. James. Mr. Morelle, I just want to really congratulate 
you on this really upstream, transformational way of thinking, 
really focusing on root cause. I want to thank you for not 
accepting the status quo but believing it can be better and 
being willing to push that.
    And then I like the notion of pushing toward equity. And 
here is the thing about equity that I have discovered, is that 
equity is really tricky. I like the way that you kept 
emphasizing well-meaning people. We are, indeed, well-meaning 
people, well-meaning.
    And even as well-meaning people, when we don't or if we are 
not able to recognize inequity when we see it, even when we 
might be inadvertently participating in it, it is hard to 
create something that reflects equity, because we don't know 
what inequity looks like. And there have been some recent 
examples of that, for example. So it takes a lot to actually 
focus on equity first.
    And so I would say that in this city right here the 
hospitals have been working together really, really well, 
especially since 2019, when we did a community needs health 
assessment together. And then we created--what emerged from 
those needs assessments became our community health improvement 
plan. These are things that are required by the Affordable Care 
Act every 3 years.
    And so in achieving something that you are actually talking 
about right now our goal and our aim was to push toward equity.
    For our own hospital, one of the first things we did when 
we decided that we would choose equity over charity exclusively 
was to look inside ourselves, look at our policies and programs 
and outcomes to see where we might be inadvertently 
participating in things that reflect inequity.
    And to nobody's surprise, of course, we found things, 
because that is what we wanted, because that is the sort of 
information we needed and insight we needed to be able to 
choose a path that reflects equity.
    But what I have found, particularly working in groups with 
others, other organizations, other hospitals and things, is as 
we are creating transformational types of initiatives, what I 
have seen is that oftentimes you propose something and then 
people will sort of like undo it, unravel it, take parts of it 
away until they get it back to a place where they are 
comfortable, and that is generally a place of inequity.
    And so it is really hard, it is a challenge, it is a 
challenge to get people to, like, shift their mindset on this 
thing. But what you have to do sometimes is draw the line.
    And in the beginning, I didn't realize what was happening. 
I couldn't understand why people weren't getting it, why were 
they pushing against this thing that clearly was a 
transformation and would take us to a different place. But I 
realized that it is inequitable, but they don't recognize it as 
such. And so they are comfortable in this space of inequity, 
the status quo.
    And so that is when we really started to do things like, 
honestly, as recently as this week, Monday, like drawing the 
line and saying to people: This is what is happening here. You 
probably don't recognize it, but I want you to realize what is 
happening here. This is what you are doing. And I know you are 
well-meaning and you don't mean to do this, but this is not 
working and we have to push beyond this.
    And so, I mean, that is what I would say. And I would just 
encourage you please not to give up on it and not allow others 
to take it back and lose the opportunity to create and capture 
value in each and every human being you encounter, because that 
is where the transformation lies and that is where the changes 
in outcomes and data happen.
    Mr. Morelle. Thank you.
    Ms. Reynolds, I don't know if you had any comments. You 
looked like you wanted to say something.
    Ms. Reynolds. I do. I just have a few quick points, or 
three points, really.
    One, just congratulations on that focus on silos and 
breaking those down. There is a huge problem in the industry at 
every level, and I so appreciate that.
    My biggest thought on that, which is kind of point number 
two, is I think what is really needed in this space is that we 
become extremely person-centered. Who is the end user? Who is 
the person struggling in poverty? Because we have silos at the 
Federal level, we have silos at the community level, and we 
often, coming from a large multiservice organization, we have 
silos within those organizations.
    And I used to say all the time at Catholic Charities, it is 
my job to make the accounting team and compliance team's work 
extremely difficult, not easy. Because what was often so 
tempting is you got a new funder to give you something or a 
government grant or whatever it may be, and so you started a 
new program, a/k/a a new silo, for a client to come into. And 
so instead of it being the headache of accounting and 
compliance, it shifted to the client, and that shift has to 
change.
    And then the last thing I just wanted to note is, do 
remember, even though busting down silos, as you do that, take 
it the step further and, even with all the well-intentioned 
organizations you are pulling together, build evidence about, 
are what are they doing really working.
    I know when we built evidence at Catholic Charities Fort 
Worth with the new WEE is a program of theirs but not sure this 
is the right one WEE at LEO, there was so much I thought, I had 
a hunch as a social worker was working and, frankly, it really 
wasn't. And so having that evidence, that causal evidence, 
really can make a difference.
    And you should be really proud in your district, because 
LEO has studies going with the city of Rochester on the earned 
income tax credit program as well as Action for a Better 
Community and Catholic Family Support Center, all on intensive 
case management to move the needle on poverty. So you guys are 
already off to an amazing start there.
    Mr. Morelle. And I will say, Catholic Family Center, Action 
for a Better Community, the city of Rochester, all part of our 
systems integration work.
    And you make a really good point, which is people forget 
what we are trying to do. And trying to get the best practices 
is tough, because--I hate to say this, it pains me--sometimes 
poverty is big business for some people. And they are good. 
``We are like good where we are. We are fine. It is good.'' 
Just it is the wrong thing and it doesn't focus on the outcomes 
that we need to focus on.
    So anyway, I appreciate everything people have done to 
contribute to this and to all of your work. And, hopefully, we 
will be able to meet again offline or at a different venue.
    But thank you, Mr. Chairman. I will yield back.
    The Chairman. Let me just say, Dr. Schanzenbach or Ms. 
Curry, I don't know if they want to respond to your--are you 
all--are we all set or----
    Mr. Morelle. I didn't want to impose, but I would love to 
hear if they have any comment.
    Ms. Curry. Yeah, I will say something.
    First of all, I think what you are doing and have 
implemented already is just so incredible. And I just, like, as 
a mom and an empath in general, just your story of your wife 
and Dasani, it is just heart wrenching, and it makes me feel 
like I just wonder if there was something that could be done. 
You know what I mean?
    We raise our children and tell them every single day: You 
are unique, you are special, you are an individual. But then 
the healthcare and the nutrition and the plans that are put in 
place for them just aren't special or unique. They are just 
very broad, and everybody is kind of thrown into a bucket. And 
you are right, I think people need to be addressed on an 
individual level.
    So I wonder if there was some sort of database with all of 
these local organizations that you put together, if there was 
some database that they all could access to see people's charts 
and their medical history and their mental health history and 
have something that is accessible in each community, still on a 
confidential level, but just so that it could be seen. I wonder 
if that might help start change.
    Because I do think about somebody showing up to the 
hospital and not wanting to discharge them because you don't 
know what they are going to do, it is true. And you don't want 
to have to ask the question because nobody wants to unpack 
their past again and go through their history and their record.
    Mr. Morelle. I don't want to interrupt you, but that is a 
great question. One of the things we do is there is going to be 
a dashboard that brings together your health [inaudible] and 
social. But the permission will be granted by the individual so 
that no one will see the information that they are unwilling to 
give.
    But that is part of building this shared data ecosystem and 
the shared language, so that a hospital worker knows what the 
housing specialist is talking about because we have built this 
shared language protocol.
    And we also share the same--there is, like, several 
domains, and we have all agreed on the empirical data which 
would say this person is in crisis around housing or food or 
proper age-appropriate development from a behavioral health 
point of view.
    So that is really important. And, yes, one of the things 
that will make this work is everybody, basically the adults who 
touch the lives of this child or adult, could be a senior 
citizen in crisis, that they all have common data points that 
they are working off of and this dashboard which--but, again, 
because of privacy issues, it would be activated on someone's 
smartphone or however that individual regulates who has access 
to their information and their data. But it is a great point.
    Ms. Curry. Yeah, I think that is great, and then it allows 
each organization to address each person's needs as they come 
through and they are able to filter through who needs what.
    So I think that is great. So I feel like the model you are 
building out then is great, and it is just about implementing 
it into different communities.
    Mr. Morelle. Yes. Thank you.
    The Chairman. All right. Let me ask unanimous consent to 
insert in the record a letter from Defeat Malnutrition Today 
calling for action on the national level to combat older adult 
food insecurity and malnutrition, which is, sadly, a growing 
problem.
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    The Chairman. And I also ask unanimous consent to insert 
into the record a letter from the National Education 
Association emphasizing the importance of providing healthy 
school meals to all students at no charge to them.
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    The Chairman. Let me now yield to the gentleman from 
California, Mr. DeSaulnier.
    Mr. DeSaulnier. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Really, thank you 
for a terrific hearing. Thank you for your passion about this 
subject matter.
    And I also want to thank all of the panelists and invite 
you to the San Francisco Bay area, to Oakland. I had the 
pleasure of--Ayesha, I think you used to be a constituent, I am 
told, when you lived in Walnut Creek, California.
    But my wonderful friend and neighbor, Barbara Lee, who 
represents Oakland, we have done a lot of things together in 
the 80 corridor, in Richmond, California, and we have really 
done some good work. And I would encourage you to come out 
here. Good partnerships with the nonprofits, the Bay Area 
Partnership amongst them.
    And in that regard, like Mr. Morelle, when I was in my 
previous life in the State legislature in California, at the 
request of the Bay Area Partnership, I headed a task force that 
was bicameral where we went around the State of California to 
look at nutrition issues for kids in particular.
    So if we are going to deal with hunger--I appreciate how 
much time we have spent on this--is that we could focus 
generationally.
    And having had another career as a restaurant owner and 
been engaged many years ago, owning a restaurant in Berkeley, 
with school gardens and a colleague/competitor, Alice Waters, 
at Chez Panisse. And I would invite you all to come to the 
Martin Luther King Middle School in Berkeley, of which the Vice 
President and I have talked about. Having grown up there, she 
is very familiar with these programs. But that was about 
letting kids have the tools.
    So I remember being on this task force in a disadvantaged 
community in South Central L.A. as we went around the State 
talking to young persons on after-school programs--that we 
funded, by the way, in a bipartisan way. Then Governor 
Schwarzenegger was very supportive of these.
    But I asked a young man who had been in gangs why he was 
spending his time in after-school programs out in the garden, 
learning to cook and learning about nutrition, not just food. 
And he said, ``When I go home, my mom is a single mom, and I 
get to teach her how to bake bread from scratch with the 
ingredients I bring from the school in South Central L.A.''
    So that to me is another anecdotal story that really 
informs us about how we can make generational change.
    Mr. Chairman, I think, to go to your comments and Mr. 
Morelle's comments, in our hearing yesterday with Secretary 
Buttigieg that you referred to, when I mentioned these silos--
and it is like I have to go to therapy when we start talking 
about it, having been involved--but if we could be focused on 
the clients with performance standards.
    And we can look at other public health models. Teen 
pregnancy. This country did a great job of informing young 
people, particularly in disadvantaged communities. So we 
dropped those for the betterment of everybody.
    So we can take those models, focus on the client, and I 
think we can really start to move the dial.
    So to Ms. Curry, we have programs that work. And I am all 
for starting new programs. But as we looked at this, look at 
what the chairman of the Appropriations Committee was able to 
do just in the child credit and the earned income tax credit. 
We have got all kinds of research that shows that by doing 
those together, we already have the infrastructure, we have 
lots of benefit from that.
    Similarly, we have infrastructure in this regard. And I 
know in the Bay Area, and I am very familiar with these 
programs, I have a high school in East Bay, Pittsburg High 
School, it is a disadvantaged community. I have been out there 
multiple times. Every Friday before COVID, every product, even 
to those students, came from a farm within 50 miles of that 
school, in an urban area, granted, closer to San Joaquin 
Valley.
    These are all farm-to-fork nutritional foods that give big 
value. And to see young people in a community like that to 
respond and have that value generationally I think is really 
where we turn the dial in the long term, Mr. Chairman.
    So maybe any of the panelists, just to respond to that, how 
we can focus on the child and how we can support programs that 
already work in communities.
    And I would love, Ms. Curry, I know your work and your 
passion. Some of your husband's teammates once teased me at an 
event when you lived in Walnut Creek that your husband might 
want to run for Congress. And I said, ``I am more worried about 
your wife.'' But I think I would be supportive.
    So if you could respond to that. Your experience informs so 
much of this. And I would add my experience. And we partnered 
with multiple superintendents of education.
    And then for my colleagues, my predecessor who chaired the 
Education and Labor Committee in the House, George Miller, for 
40 years was so instrumental in this.
    So we have got a lot of history is what I am trying to get 
at. Let's bring these programs to scale and really show that 
they can work, but also have performance standards and let the 
community be active partners with that.
    Ms. Curry.
    Ms. Curry. That is exactly what it is. And when we launched 
Eat. Learn. Play. it was the July right before that pandemic 
hit that next January, February, and so we had to be boots on 
the ground and learn very, very quickly.
    But what we came to realize was that the infrastructure was 
there and that there were amazing organizations doing amazing 
things. And it really was about bringing people together to let 
people know, ``Hey, so and so is providing produce over here, 
and this organization is helping to scale jobs over here. How 
do we bring them together and have this all make sense?''
    And so really you are right, the infrastructure is there, 
and it is about that awareness and the amplification of all of 
the amazing things that are going on so that everybody can help 
one another out in the community.
    And that is really what we do with Eat. Learn. Play. And we 
have seen that the model works. And we have a very scalable 
model, I think, with a lot of facts and evidence to back it up. 
So I would love for anybody here on this call today to reach 
out to my team and I to hear more about it.
    But I agree with you, the structure is there. It is just 
how do we amplify it.
    Mr. DeSaulnier. I am looking forward to getting the 
chairman to leave Worcester, Massachusetts, which he loves 
dearly and I spent 4 years of my life, to come out to the Bay 
Area and see these programs.
    Mr. Chairman, unless another panelist wants to respond, I 
just want to thank you again. And, lastly, promise, we can save 
so much suffering but also save a lot of money. We go upstream 
and help these kids, they are hitting performance standards 
throughout their lives, and their kids are going to be 
significantly improved, whether it is educational retention or 
their physical and emotional health.
    Thank you, Mr. Chair. Unless any other panelists wanted to 
quickly respond, I know we are near the end of the hearing.
    The Chairman. All right. Okay. Before I yield to Ms. Ross, 
let me ask unanimous consent to put into the record a statement 
from the Root Cause Coalition in support of today's hearing.
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    The Chairman. I am proud to say that I have worked with 
this coalition since day one. Barb Petee, the executive 
director, has been a friend and important partner in my work to 
end hunger. Tom Dorney, the director, worked for our late 
friend, John Lewis. I think of John often, and I am so grateful 
for Tom's work. And I am looking forward to working more with 
Barb and Tom as this project moves forward, and I appreciate 
their support.
    And now I would yield to Ms. Ross.
    And thank you, Ms. Ross. I know you have been very patient 
and you have been in other hearings. The floor is yours.
    Ms. Ross. Well, this is an important issue, and it is worth 
all of our time, not just today but going forward. And I want 
to thank the chairman and the ranking member for their 
bipartisan leadership on this issue.
    For the panelists--and I will not take more of your time, I 
know what it is like to sit for 3 hours and look straight ahead 
and be attentive.
    I do want to raise an issue, after I tell you a little bit 
about my State, that I would like to add to the bucket of 
systemic issues that the chairman hopefully will get a White 
House conference on.
    I am from North Carolina. In North Carolina, more than 13 
percent of households are food insecure, which is higher than 
the national average. Every night in North Carolina almost 
600,000 households don't have enough to eat. Thirty-eight 
percent of the households receiving SNAP have children. One in 
seven North Carolinians struggles with hunger and one in five 
children. And almost a million children in North Carolina are 
at the risk of going to bed hungry every night.
    And then, of course, we have problems in the school system. 
But in North Carolina, nearly 60 percent of the students 
enrolled in the public schools qualify for free and reduced-
price lunch.
    And I know that we have touched on a lot of these issues 
throughout the last couple of hours, so I am not going to ask 
you to revisit them. But I am asking you to think about this in 
a different lens, and I will just tell you a very brief story.
    I, too, was a State legislator. I remember going to the 
neonatal intensive care unit at one of my hospitals, which was 
known as one of the best neonatal intensive care units for 
having premature babies do better and eventually do okay.
    And I said to the doctor, ``Well, this is wonderful, what 
you are doing, but what could we do to prevent these children 
from being born premature in the first place?''
    And he said, ``Respect women. Respect the mothers.''
    And so I really think that fundamentally, since so many 
people who are food insecure are women with children or elderly 
women who don't have retirement income, that one of the ways to 
remedy this problem is to have economic equality for women.
    We know that when women earn a fair wage they are going to 
invest it in their families first. We know that so many women 
live longer than men, and they don't have a pension, and they 
don't have that retirement security, and that is why they are 
food insecure.
    So I want to ask you, because we have got four pretty 
diverse women here, if we lift women up financially--and we 
just passed a pay equity bill on the House floor--will this 
help with hunger?
    Ms. Schanzenbach. Absolutely, without question. Women's 
economic empowerment has really driven a lot of our growth as a 
Nation. I edited a book a few years ago called ``The 51 
Percent,'' which is about women's economic activity, and I am 
going to send it to you right away.
    You are absolutely right that women face a disproportionate 
amount of hunger, of poverty, of food insecurity at all ages of 
the distribution, especially those elderly, but then younger 
women with children.
    There is a lot that we can do. And I agree with you that 
certainly issues around building that human capital, that 
childcare, elder care options, and opportunities for education 
will really go a long way.
    Ms. Ross. Thank you.
    Does anybody else have anything to add?
    Ms. Curry. I 100 percent think that that would help. You 
know, I watched my mom growing up work 12-hour days, sometimes 
15-hour days, 6 days a week, never to have time for herself and 
always to take whatever it was that she was bringing in and 
give it back to us kids. So I 100 percent think that that would 
help bridge that gap.
    I mean, as a mom, like any mom on this call knows, that 
whatever is coming in, it is going straight to the kids, I 
mean. So I think that that would definitely help, if women were 
respected in that way a little bit more--a lot more.
    Dr. James. I, too, agree--1,000 percent actually--because I 
think, just as the previous two speakers just stated, I mean, 
women are always sacrificing. They are always thinking about 
their families first, always thinking about their children 
first.
    And I would say, even in the work world, I am not so sure 
that women receive the kind of respect that they should. There 
is wage inequality.
    In the academic world, like in medicine, you don't see 
women rise to the ranks of profession and things like that at 
the rate that men do, and it is because they are making 
sacrifices, making their families first.
    But they should not have to lose out because they are 
raising their families. They often get made to start all over 
again when they take time out for maternity leave and these 
types of things.
    But I think women are natural entrepreneurs, to be honest 
with you. I mean, raising your family is a bit of an 
entrepreneurial kind of endeavor if you really think about it.
    And also, during COVID, on a social level, women were 
impacted more than others in terms of things they had to give 
up to take care of the family staying at home, the kids can't 
go to school, all these various different things.
    So thank you so much, Ms. Ross, for raising that.
    Ms. Ross. Thank you.
    Ms. Reynolds. And if I could just say, they all said it 
beautifully, and I concur. And also a special thank you to 
Chairman McGovern and Ranking Member Cole for having four women 
testifying today before this hearing.
    Ms. Ross. So, Mr. Chairman, I just want to put that on the 
table for one of the issues for your conference, which I pray 
will happen soon.
    And with that, I yield back.
    The Chairman. Well, thank you very much.
    And before I yield to Mr. Cole for any final comments, I 
just want to make sure that you all have the opportunity to 
share a few brief words if there is anything that we have 
missed.
    Let me just say, Ms. Curry, I want to make it a point to 
come out to California. Hopefully we will bring others out to 
see your incredible program.
    And, Dr. James, I want to bring people up to see what is 
going on at Boston Medical Center.
    And we will go to Northwestern and Notre Dame. Those are 
two schools, when I applied for college, I couldn't even get 
into the cafeteria, never mind be accepted to attend those 
schools. But, interesting enough, George McGovern got his Ph.D. 
at Northwestern, so there is a connection there.
    But let me just begin, Dr. Schanzenbach, why don't I begin 
with you. Any final words? And then we will just go around, and 
then I will yield to Mr. Cole for any closing remarks.
    Ms. Schanzenbach. I just want to thank you for this, for 
both of you, for convening this hearing.
    Ending hunger is something that we as Americans can do, and 
it absolutely should be a bipartisan effort. And so I look 
forward to continuing to be part of that and working with you 
all.
    The Chairman. Thank you.
    Ms. Reynolds.
    Ms. Reynolds. Well, thanks to all of you for having me 
today at this hearing.
    Chairman McGovern, you are welcome any time to Notre Dame. 
And I know our university, one of the things I love so much 
about it is in our mission statement it talks about a 
disciplined sensibility to approaching issues of poverty and 
injustice and inequity. So this is an issue we as a university 
just care so much about, and so to continue to be a part of 
that in any way, we would love to do.
    I also just want to note, I think a major to-do coming out 
of this is for LEO to do a research project on Ms. Curry's 
amazing project, so we can build evidence, so when the point 
comes to it, all of you as policymakers will scale up what she 
is doing across the Nation.
    That is it for me.
    The Chairman. Thank you.
    Ms. Curry.
    Ms. Curry. I guess I just want to say thank you for this 
amazing, productive meeting. It is my first time being in a 
room like this, and I have learned so much, but realize there 
is so much work to do.
    So I really hope that that next step of getting everybody 
in a room and connecting those dots and having a big, giant 
meeting of the minds to figure out how to really tackle and 
resolve this issue happens. I really hope it happens, and I 
feel confident that it will.
    So just thank you for having me here today to speak on what 
I have seen in the community.
    The Chairman. Thank you.
    Dr. James.
    Dr. James. I, too, just want to thank everyone, and thank 
you, Chairman McGovern, for inviting me here today and for the 
privilege to be here with the panelists, as well as the other 
Representatives.
    I am so hopeful because I have listened, I have learned, 
and there is so much opportunity I see that is in front of us, 
and I don't think we are starting from square one.
    I too, am trying to imagine this conference, this White 
House conference, and what that could do in the way of 
transformation.
    So thank you to everyone. I really, really am grateful for 
this opportunity.
    The Chairman. And now I will yield to the birthday boy, Mr. 
Cole, for any closing remarks he may have.
    Mr. Cole. Well, thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
    I actually will be part of the escort party for the 
President tonight, so I will try to put a plug in for your 
White House conference. I am sure it will help a lot.
    But I do want to thank you very much for the hearing.
    I want to thank all of our witnesses. They were all 
spectacular, well chosen.
    I appreciate your insights. Much more profound. I just 
appreciate the workthat each of you is about and how you have 
dedicated your time and your careers and your interests and your energy 
to things that are truly important in making life better for every 
American.
    And who knows, Mr. Chairman, we get that conference, you 
may not have been able to get into Northwestern or Notre Dame, 
but I bet you could snag an honorary degree.
    So thanks again. And thank you particularly, Mr. Chairman. 
It is a good hearing. It is an important topic. And thank you 
for your passion.
    More importantly, thanks for not being a flash in the pan 
on this issue but somebody who has literally spent a career on 
working and advancing these causes. It is something that we are 
all proud of in this committee in a bipartisan sense. Your 
leadership here is much appreciated and I think will make a 
meaningful difference in the years ahead.
    Yield back.
    The Chairman. All right. Well, first, I thank the gentleman 
for his kind words, and all the members of the committee, and 
the witnesses, too. This has been over 3 hours. And so I 
appreciate you being part of this.
    And as I mentioned in my opening, hunger, ending hunger has 
been a focus of much of my time in Congress, and I really want 
us to step it up and go to the next level here where we 
actually think out of the box, we reimagine how we combat 
hunger, and we do something meaningful about it that actually 
ends hunger in this country.
    This hearing I think is an important first step. And there 
will be a lot more hearings and briefings and site visits. But 
this is a first step.
    But I would like to leave with just a couple of points.
    First of all, we have a hunger problem in this country. 
There is not a congressional district in America that is 
hunger-free. And as I said at the beginning, I am ashamed of 
that fact. We all should be ashamed of that in a country with 
all of our riches.
    And if you have ever met a hungry child--and I, 
unfortunately, have met way too many in my lifetime--it breaks 
your heart. Because it doesn't have to be. And people are 
hungry who are young, people are hungry who are old, everything 
in between.
    MAZON, which is a Jewish response to hunger, reminds us 
that there are many members in the military who are defending 
our country who are hungry as well.
    But the thing is that hunger is real, but it is also a 
solvable problem. That is what makes it so frustrating. It is 
not like that there is no way to solve it. There is. We just 
have to choose to solve this problem together and make it a 
political priority.
    Second, the people who are hungry, who are dealing with 
hunger, deserve respect. They deserve dignity. And that starts 
by listening to them and not talking at them.
    We have all been meeting leading up to this, and we will 
have hearings with people who are dealing with the challenge of 
hunger right now, who have lived experiences.
    The bottom line is these people are not caricatures. They 
are individuals. They are our neighbors. They are our friends. 
Some of them are our family members. And between work, school, 
volunteering, and taking care of loved ones, they have a 
schedule that would make any one of us on this panel--I mean, 
on this dais--blush.
    Being poor is hard work. Struggling with hunger is hard 
work. And these people, they do it while trying to figure out 
where their next meal is going to come from and how they are 
going to put food on the table for their families.
    And I know that developing this road map to end hunger 
sounds hard. And as we talked here today there is all of these 
different things that we need to consider and aspects that need 
to be put on the table.
    But you know what? What is harder than solving this is 
being hungry. And so not knowing how you will feed your kids, 
having to choose between food and medicine, that is hard.
    And we can end hunger in this country. So please join me in 
this effort. You are the first panelists in our effort here. We 
hope that we can rely on you for additional information along 
the way. If you have ideas, please get in touch with us. 
Hopefully, we will visit some of the programs that were talked 
about here on site. Follow our work in the Rules Committee.
    And to those who are listening, give us information, go to 
our web page. Because it is going to take an ``all hands on 
deck'' approach to end hunger.
    Again, we are doing this with the intention of trying to 
persuade the Biden administration to do a conference. The last 
conference on this issue was 52 years ago. And actually the 
President at the time was Nixon. And my last name being 
McGovern, I am actually saying something nice about Nixon. I 
can't believe it. But in any event, as imperfect as that 
conference was, it produced a lot of results.
    The final thing I am going to say is that, and I think 
everybody here made this point, when we talk about ending 
hunger we are also talking about promoting nutrition. Ending 
hunger is not just about filling somebody's stomach up with 
whatever. It is also about making sure that we are promoting 
nutrition. And so that is another key factor here.
    So I, again, am grateful to everybody. Thank you so much.
    And with that, the hearing is adjourned.
    [Whereupon, at 3:22 p.m., the committee was adjourned.]
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