The 2010 Hunger Report

YouthBuild helps at-risk youth attain a GED and provides them with skills in a building trade. Many graduates use the income they earn from their construction jobs to pursue dreams like community college, a four-year degree, or apprenticeships in the construction trades. The program ensures that its graduates have a set of skills to fall back on as they work to expand their own opportunities. Some people have left their former neighborhoods never to return, but others have gone back to work with youth stuck in similarly troubled circumstances.

Rosebud and other Native American reservations in the northern Great Plains have some of the best wind power resources in the country. It’s not just how often the wind blows, or the speeds it reaches—it’s the density of the wind and the endless ridgelines that stretch across reservation lands that make this part of the country ideal for converting wind into electricity. Government studies estimate that the two dozen reservations in the northern Great Plains have sufficient wind resources to produce electricity to power half the United States.

Ronda Hawk, the director of the Crow Creek chapter of the Boys and Girls Club, knows that parents send their children to her because of the lack of food at home. She and her board members are very good at scraping together every available bite of food to give to the children. Ronda has spent her whole life working around hungry children and watching the effects of hunger carry over from one generation to the next.

In the early 1940s, the Miami City Planning Board established “a permanent dividing wall between white and colored occupancy in the north of Grand Avenue.” For the next two decades, well after the Supreme Court ruling that struck down “separate but equal” laws, the wall continued to separate the majority black West Grove from the rest of Coconut Grove. Parts of the wall remain in place today as an indelible marker of what West Grove once stood for. In the 1990s, blatant racism reared its head again in the guise of subprime lending.

In 1964, President Johnson launched the War on Poverty in Martin County in Eastern Kentucky. The photograph of Johnson kneeling on local resident Tom Fletcher’s porch with Fletcher and three of his children in the picture is an iconic image in the War on Poverty. The focus of the camera is on the two men, Johnson’s profile and Fletcher’s worn face with hardened lines and rotted teeth.

After becoming concerned about high rates of school dropout in South Texas, Acuña-Garza developed Abriendo Puertas’ “core lessons” on child and adolescent development, how to succeed in and graduate from high school, and how to access post-secondary education. The lessons are organized as a series of easy-to-understand flipcharts that parent volunteers can share with friends, neighbors, and family members in small group settings, whether across kitchen tables, on front porches, or in church halls.

Each week thousands of heavy trucks roll through Hunt’s Point—60,000 diesel truck trips per week. The neighborhood has some of the lowest air quality in the country. More adults and children from Hunt’s Point are hospitalized each year with asthma attacks than anywhere else in New York.