ARVADA – The topic Monday at the fourth annual “Hunger Free Colorado Summit” in Arvada was fighting poverty.
About 200 community leaders and advocates at this year’s summit are discussing ways they can collaborate to improve access to healthful food for more Coloradans – and they will have more in common than their passion for the topic. Some have faced hunger themselves and have experience with the programs and services they were talking about.
Kathy Underhill, executive director of Hunger Free Colorado, says the organization wants to help bust the stigmas about poverty that keep some people silent and others unaware of the problem.
“There’s really no place in the public discourse for talking about the fact that you are struggling,” Underhill said. “That’s kind of a self-perpetuating cycle that doesn’t allow for a discussion about the systemic factors at play that create those situations.”
Underhill credits collaboration for progress the state has made since Hunger Free Colorado was formed in 2009. Just this year, new state laws are allowing some schools to serve breakfast in classrooms and giving farmers state tax credits for donating produce to food banks.
New U.S. Department of Agriculture figures indicate almost 14 percent of Coloradans struggle to afford diets that contain a good variety of healthful foods. Jim Weill, president of the Food Research and Action Center, said it’s a stark contrast to what is otherwise considered a prosperous state.
“Colorado is rich when you average out everybody’s income, but if inequality is growing, that doesn’t mean everybody can make a go of it,” Weill said. “To the bottom third of the population, wages have been going down, earnings have been going down, for two or three decades now.”
Weill was one of the speakers at Monday’s event. The lineup also included Sister Simone Campbell, organizer of the national social advocacy group Nuns on the Bus.
