On Sept. 22, a panel of members of New Creation Community Presbyterian Church gathered in the Greenleaf to share their experiences with combating hunger both globally and in Greensboro. Saron Smith-Hardin ’09 organized the event as her first initiative as an intern at New Creation, located downtown on Elm Street.

“My work is to get people our age involved in hunger issues in the area through our church,” said Smith-Hardin.

Smith-Hardin prompted the panel with the first question, “what does hunger look like to you and where have you seen hunger?”

The first to respond was Barbara Clawson, a Greensboro resident who has served for over 10 years on the hunger committee for her church, and traveled abroad to Congo and Ghana to help provide aid.

“When I envision hunger I think about the children who came to the nutrition rehab program in Congo that Pennies for Hunger helped support,” said Clawson. “I see women and children in Chiapas, Mexico, begging for food. I see families trying to make a living on very poor soil. I’ll never forget the scenes I just described and that is not to lessen the scenes I see right here in Greensboro.”

Another member of the panel, Rick Tatum experienced hunger firsthand for several years and is now involved in efforts at New Creation to provide hunger relief in Greensboro.

“I was there. My mom and daddy had it. But I lost it all,” Tatum said. “I had it and just like that it was gone.”

Frank Dew, pastor at New Creation Church and chaplain at Greensboro Urban Ministry, immediately thought of the hundreds of people fed daily by Potter’s House, the Greensboro Urban Ministry soup kitchen.

“When I think of hunger, I think of the scene in our Potter’s House soup kitchen,” said Dew. “One of the most powerful things is when I look around and survey the crowd and see how many people bow their heads to thank God for the food. The irony is the gratitude to God is coming there at the soup kitchen … not at places like Lucky 32 (an upscale restaurant in Greensboro). I’ve learned gratitude from the folks there.”

The panel focused on the projects that New Creation Church and Greensboro Urban Ministry are involved in to help feed the hungry in Greensboro. Aside from Potter’s House, which feeds 350 people on average daily, they are also involved organizing the CROP walk.

The Greater Greensboro CROP walk is a 5k walk that raises funds for efforts to end hunger, including Potter’s House and Church World Service, an international relief agency that supports sustainable self-help development. Last year the walk raised $228,000. In addition to being a fundraiser in the traditional sense, the CROP walk is also a canned food-drive.

This year’s CROP walk will take place on Oct. 18 in NewBridge Bank Park. Registration begins at 1:30 pm and the walk will kick-off at 2:30 pm.

Beyond these local relief efforts, the panel also discussed how we can make progress towards ending hunger worldwide.

Senior and Hunger Fellow Joel Popkin, prompted the panel to share what solutions they could offer to combat hunger beyond “the immediate canned food-type things.”

Clawson urged the audience to write letters to local politicians.

“Changing our trade policies could make a huge difference in terms of availability of food to people,” said Clawson.

Bryan McFarland, a New Creation hunger action advocate, stressed that lifestyle changes are the easiest way to start making a difference.

“Specialists in the area of food availability say there’s enough food on the planet currently to feed the planet four times over,” said McFarland. “It’s a shortage of sharing. The change of that involves doing more to compost, doing more to recycle, (considering) every lifestyle choice we make, policies, politics, everything. (Support) fair trade, fair wages, and farmer’s markets. Be involved with everything you purchase and eat; local and organic.”

McFarland referenced the Greensboro Farmer’s Market as a good place to start supporting sustainable agriculture.

“We are so entranced by corporatization of food,” said McFarland. “When we purchase food from a major grocery store, we are supporting one of four massive food companies.”

These corporations, he said, are putting small farmers out of business, which makes food more expensive for everyone. McFarland urged the crowd to see the documentary “Food Inc.”

Tatum voiced that the key to ending hunger is to increase education efforts in order to help prevent poverty.

“We have to educate our young people. I know a lot of young people who would rather have a five-minute high than buy the local bread,” said Tatum. “I know how it feels good to party. It’s nothing to be proud of but I’ve been there, done that. I could have cared less about eating at that particular time. Now there’s nothing more important to me than a good old Kentucky piece of fried chicken.”

The website for Food Inc. includes a tool where you can type in your zip code to find a list of restaurants, grocery stores, farmers markets, and community gardens in your area so that you can support local organic and sustainable food sources. http://www.eatwellguide.org/i.php?pd=Home. You can also visit bread.org to find out more about hunger issues globally and nationally.

On campus, the Hunger Fellows provide opportunities to get involved with supporting sustainable agriculture and ending hunger globally.

“You can get involved with the hunger banquet we are having in November to get everyone aware of hunger and homelessness on campus,” said senior and Hunger Fellow Andre Thompson.