Tony and Dolly Ellis

Our friends at the Capital Area Food Bank of Texas, and their partners Social Media Club Austin and 501Tech Club have finalized details on events for the great HAMup Tweetup.   You can get full details at http://www.austinfoodbank.org/HAM-up/ ,but briefly, here's how it will happen.

Thursday, September 11, there will be a kickoff at Whole Foods Market at 525 Lamar at 5:30, featuring food and live music.  

Saturday, Septmber 13,  events at the food bank will include a product recovery volunteer effort, a "drive through" food drive, and tours of the warehouse.  Go get an inside view of how this great food bank works to alleviate  hunger in the central Texas area.

On Monday, September 8, Tyson will be delivering the truckload of food that YOU made happen through your comments to this post.   Stay tuned for more information about how the 250 comments we got in addition to the needed 350 for the truckload, are going to make an added difference. 

Details about the HAMup here.

 

Vicki Escarra--President and CEO, Feeding America

Starting September 2008, America’s Second Harvest will become Feeding America. This new name best conveys our mission—providing food to Americans living with hunger—and will be supported through expansive public outreach campaigns that will raise awareness of domestic hunger and our work.

Despite a 30-year legacy of fighting hunger, America’s Second Harvest has been confronted with low awareness among the general public, and a broader misunderstanding of domestic hunger. Knowing that true, monumental progress can be made when the public is fully engaged in our cause, we have researched how we can best inspire people. We found that the name America’s Second Harvest was limiting and that a new name was needed to quickly and clearly convey our mission.

Our new name, Feeding America, directly conveys that we are providing access to food for people who need it.  It also communicates the positive power of food to be a catalyst in people’s lives.  In essence, “feeding” serves as a double meaning—both providing food and enriching lives. A careful migration strategy is underway to ensure that all key stakeholders and audiences understand that America’s Second Harvest is now Feeding America.   Be sure to visit us at www.feedingamerica.org
 

Ed Nicholson

We've now received more than 630 comments to our blog entry this morning about hunger in Austin and the work of the Capital Area Food Bank of Texas.

This was just phenomenal, with the 350 comments needed to fill the truck coming in less than six hours.  A big THANK YOU to everyone who made this happen:  Everyone who commented, and especially all who ReTweeted the original Twitter messages. This was really the power of social media put to work effectively. We're humbled, amazed and awed at the community that made this occur. 

Based on the responses we received, we will  be doing more with the Food Bank and--if they want--with Social Media Club Austin and 501 Tech Club of Austin.   Stay tuned. Meanwhile, if you're in the Austin area (and you guys are truly awesome)  please support the HAM-up Tweet-up to benefit CAFB. 

There were a lot of great comments made, and some very interesting questions raised, and some good suggestions that should provide more opportunity for discussion here.

We invite you to continue to be part of the discussion on hunger by subscribing to this site, that of the CAFB, or any of the other links you might see here.

Information from the website of the Capital Area Food Bank of Texas

Did you know

• Nearly one in five adults and one in four children in Texas are hungry.
• 41,000 children under the age of 18 in Travis County are confronted with food insecurity every day.
• 82% of Food Bank Partner Agency recipients are food insecure. 49% of recipients experience outright hunger. (Source: Hunger in America 2006: Central Texas Report, in association with America's Second Harvest)
• 61% of Austin Independent School District (AISD) students are eligible for free or reduced lunch.

Making Ends Meet  

• 76% of households receiving assistance from CAFB Partner Agencies report incomes below the federal poverty level. (Source: Hunger in America 2006: Central Texas Report, in association with America's Second Harvest)
• 106,930 (12.6%) of Travis County individuals live below the Federal poverty level ($18,850 for a family of four). (Source: Austin Community Survey, 2004)
• The annual income needed for a Travis County family of four without employee sponsored health insurance to "afford" to live in the Austin area is $53,080. That's 257% above the Federal poverty level. (Source: CPPP.org, The Family Budget Estimator Project)
• Austin continues to have the highest cost of living in the state of Texas, exceeding housing costs in Dallas, Houston, San Antonio and Fort Worth.
  Those Served are Younger
• While the child poverty rate in Texas is 23.2%, for the CAFB service area, 35% of the household members receiving food are children. (Source: Hunger in America 2006: Central Texas Report, in association with America's Second Harvest)
• While 12.4% of Texans in poverty are elderly, only 7% of households receiving food through CAFB are elderly. (Source: Hunger in America 2006: Central Texas Report, in association with America's Second Harvest

Working Poor

• Approximately 200,000, or 20%, of Travis County residents are classified as "working poor" by the Texas Department of Human Services.  (Source: Basic Needs Coalition, 2005)
• Between 2000 and 2003, the number of households in Travis County increased by 23,274, the majority of which (21,822 households) fell in the lowest three income brackets having an annual income of $24,999 or less.
  Who's Serving Our Hungry?
• Of Food Bank Partner Agencies, 71% of pantries and 37% of the soup kitchens are run by faith-based agencies.
• 59% of Partner Agency pantries and 12% of soup kitchens are entirely volunteer run with no paid staff.
• CAFB is by far the most important source of food for its Partner Agencies, accounting for 76% of food for pantries and 38% for soup kitchens.
  (Source: Hunger in America 2006: Central Texas Report, in association with America's Second Harvest)

No matter where you are, the statistics about hunger in your own community are just as compelling.

Find out how you can be a part of the great work of the Capital Area Food Bank of Texas and their mission of ending hunger in central Texas by visiting their site.  

Here's something you can do today:  For every comment this post receives indicating it has been read, Tyson Foods will donate 100 pounds of food (up to a 35K pound truckload) to the HAM-up (Tweetup), sponsored by the Food Bank, Social Media Club Austin and 501 Tech Club Austin.  Help us fill the truck.  Comment here (even one-word comments acceptable--BTW, since our comments are moderated, it might take a bit to get them up, but I WILL get them up).

 UPDATE--The response from the online community has been awesome. From your response, we were able to fill the truck in less than six hours.  THANKS!!!!

 

Courtesy of Capital Area Food Bank of Texas "Hunger is Unacceptable" Campaign

Ed Nicholson

I've previously mentioned two online spaces that do a marvelous job of giving residents in their communities an accurate and compelling image of the face of hunger:  Food for Thought and Invisible--the frontlines of hunger in Colorado.

This week, I was made aware of the online community-building being done by the Capital Area Food Bank of Texas in Austin.  Extraordinary work.  Lisa Goddard, advocacy and online marketing manager, is the architect of the food bank's online outreach, which supplements a very well-designed website with a wide variety of social media tools, the center of which is the Capital Area Food Bank of Texas Weblog .  

The blog, up since June, was originally launched provide an account of food bank CEO and President David Davenport's experiences with the Food Stamp Challenge.  It does a superb job of just that, with compelling insight from David, brought to life with helpful links and embedded YouTube and Google video. But Lisa has now taken it much further. 

David's blogging generated the phrase around which the food bank's latest effort was built,  an incredibly-creative Flickr-focused campaign called "Hunger is Unacceptable."  People are encouraged to upload their photos containing the message "Hunger is Unacceptable" to a Flickr group, where the photos are aggregated online.  It gets visitors actively engaged, allows them to make a personal statement about hunger, and provides a reason to re-visit the site.    You'll need to visit the site to see how they've made participation easy.

In addition to their blog and Flickr account, the food bank is using all of the most popular social media tools to build community, including a Facebook group and a LinkedIn organizational profile

In the ultimate social media activity, the food bank is working with the extremely active social media community in Austin, including Social Media Club Austin     and 501 Tech Club  on a HAM-up (Tweetup), mobilizing the well-connected community to a food drive via Twitter. Thanks to the outreach of  David Neff,  director of web and interactive strategy for the American Cancer Society, and highly connected and kinetic Ausitinite, Tyson Foods will be supporting this event in a unique way. 

Stay tuned here next week for more details early next week.  You  have a potential role in this. These guys in Austin have it going on,   having recently organized a highly successful blood drive Tweetup.

We'll be using this space to talk more about hunger in Austin, and specifically about the good work of the food bank.

Until then, go see what Capital Area Food Bank of Texas is doing.  It's definitely the most effective use of social media community building I've seen among hunger relief organizations. 

If you're aware of other online hunger relief efforts, let me know and we'll do our best to create awareness of them.

Ed Nicholson

For all too many of us, our image of hunger is informed by the obvious: A person with a sign on the freeway ramp, or one sleeping on a sidewalk grate. Someone queued up in line at a soup kitchen.

But people in the hunger community know that's only a small--and most often unrepresentative--part of the whole story.

I've previously mentioned Susan Adcock's compelling photoblog, Food for Thought, produced in cooperation with Second Harvest Food Bank of Middle Tennesee. 

There's another excellent photoblog, Invisible. The Frontlines of Hunger in Colorado, put together by the Food Bank of the Rockies in Denver. 

Both blogs do a great job of jolting us away from those parochial stereotypes that all too often define and confine our thinking on the issue of hunger.

Please visit these sites.  If you know of other places on the Web where good work is being done to educate, inform, or encourage conversation on the issue of hunger, let me know and we'll give them equal time here.

Ed Nicholson

As part of our effort to get the hunger community engaged in social media, I've discussed Twitter in a previous post. 

For some time I've been Twittering under name @ederdn,  In an effort to separate my personal Twitter stream from the official company stream, I've registered the name TysonFoods. 

Unfortunately, there have been some cases of corporate Twitter handles being appropriated by those who didn't have effective permission to use them.

Jeremiah Owyang, web strategist for Forester Research, and widely-respected social media expert,  has suggested cross-linking Twitter feeds to the organization's web site to validate.  Which is what I'm doing here.

If you'd like to follow the Tyson Foods Twitter stream, you can access it at http://twitter.com/TysonFoods

While I'm not going to add a Twitter widget--yet--you'll note that there's a link in our blogroll.

Thanks for the suggestion, Jeremiah.

by Ed Nicholson

It’s been kind of a crazy week here in the Tyson PR group.  Here’s why:
Last year, at one of Tyson’s 119 plants, a fresh chicken processing plant in Shelbyville, Tennessee, the RWDSU, the union representing team members at that plant, in contract negotiations, asked for a Ramadan holiday in consideration of the 250 Somali refugees working in the plant.  The Tyson folks at the negotiating table said, “Everyone at the company gets eight paid holidays.  You’d have to substitute it for one already in place.”   The union selected Labor Day as the holiday they wanted to substitute. This wasn’t as surprising as it might seem, since the plant, being a fresh chicken plant had traditionally worked on Labor Day to meet the demand for chicken for the holiday grills. The contract was ratified by union members in the plant.
Someone recently discovered the change, and word got out on the internet that Tyson had allowed a labor union to substitute the American holiday of Labor Day for the Muslim holiday of Eid al Fitr.  The response has been truly amazing.   Countless emails and phone calls.  Hundreds of blog postings, and interest from local, regional and national media. Responses ranged from truly concerned and open-to-dialog, to hateful, ugly, racist, even threatening.  Some were supportive . But the thing that impressed most was the level and intensity of anger among some groups.
This was all about a change at one plant, which was requested and approved by the union workers at that plant, and affected less than one percent of the company’s workforce. 
In the end, the company recommended, and the union members agreed that the contract be modified to reinstate Labor Day.  But the brouhaha over the matter was quite something to witness.
Now, I know that there’s great fear among some folks of the American way of life being threatened by “outsiders.”   And I realize that it’s our customers and the public who really decide where the Tyson brand resides.  I understand and respect the opinions of those who feel very, very strongly about this issue.  This is America.  Pride in our country is one of the things that makes it the best country in the world.  As do diversity of opinion and the right to free expression.
I’m not writing this to initiate a conversation on the merits of this particular issue. This space is focused on hunger and those who are engaged in the fight against hunger, so anyone who wants to comment on this as its own issue can go to the hundreds of other forums that exist for political discourse.
Here’s the intersection, and what crossed my mind during the days of response to this:  What if all of the passion, all of the energy, all of the thinking, arguing and action; all of the use of  communications resources, and people’s time and efforts that went into responding to this issue, were used to fight hunger?  What if as many people who became so righteously indignant over this were as equally impassioned over the fact that kids in their own communities are going to bed hungry?   What if people got angry over the fact that the greatest country in the world has hungry people in every one of its communities? And what if they acted with equal fervor over that anger?
Imagine what could be done.

Tom Laughlin, Executive Director of River Bend Food Bank in Moline, Illinois, discusses hunger and the work of the food bank.