Interviews

Telephone Interview with Shane Leach at the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare

Question: Are you seeing an influx in applicants due to the economic crisis?

Answer: Well we certainly did early on, right around when things started turning bad starting in 2007-2008. It is starting to level off now.

Question: Where do you get most of your funding?

Answer: Primarily federal and state funds, it’s a combination of both.

Question: Are you working with other organizations to increase aid to Idahoans?

Answer: There are a lot of other community action groups that we do partner with at different times. These are called CAP agencies such as the low income heating assistance program and the weatherization program. These are private groups that help us assist people in need. These programs are both contracted out and we also run some of these programs. We work together on some of these programs as well, we do the administrative part and the companies do the actual leg work.

Question: What are some of the goals of your organization?

Answer: The biggest thing is self-reliance, and that’s what we call our program (Self-Reliance). The purpose is to move people who are currently having challenges to having more self-reliance. A lot are working poor that have a hard time getting by on minimum wage, especially if you have a family so we support that and help families become more self-reliant.

Question: Do you have a current number of families that are receiving benefits in Idaho?

Answer: I could give you the one for food stamps or our SNAP program and that currently is about 100,000 families and 229,000 people.

Question: What does your Work Support Package consist of?

Answer: The concept behind this is to help working families become more self-reliant. One of our programs is called the child care program or Idaho Child Care Program (ICCP) and that is an example of a work support program. So if you are going to school the state will help pay for your child care as long as you are going to school.

Question: What is the maximum amount of time an Idahoan can receive assistance?

Answer: It’s different by program, one of our programs, TAFI or Temporary Assistance for Families in Idaho and it has a lifetime limit in Idaho of 24 months, which is cash assistance of 309 dollars a month at the federal level the lifetime limit on this program is 60 months or five years. Idaho is a bit more restrictive with only allowing 24 months some states take full advantage of the federal limit of 60 months.

Telephone Interview with J. K. Granberg-Michelson of The Alliance to End Hunger

Question: Do you think that collectively, organizations such as yours will succeed in meeting the MDG1 by the deadline of 2015?

Answer: Remarkably, since the MDG’s were enacted, poverty has been cut significantly and I believe it is on track to meet the goal of MDG1. Hunger on the other hand, is not. We are working to ensure that the new round of goals that will be set post 2015 will include a renewed commitment to reducing and eradicating extreme hunger around the world. There is a broad recognition that there needs to be more political will and leadership, especially around this issue of extreme hunger in order to really succeed at making a significant dent in the problem.

Question: What are some of the factors that contribute to such high concentrations of poverty and hunger in regions such as Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa?

Answer: Poverty and hunger are complicated problems; there are both natural and man-made causes for poverty and hunger in Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia. Some of the problems we are starting to see are changes in climate causing increases in droughts in some of these areas which is affecting crop yields. It’s not just can people grow enough food to feed themselves, but if they can grow enough to make a living. There is a broader problem with development and some of that has to do with political problems, some of which have persisted for decades. Failure in governments to take care of their populations, some governments have had other priorities such as fighting various wars instead of helping their population succeed. These failures can cause fairly moderate problems to really spiral to very serious problems. I have seen this a few times throughout the years I have been here. In East Africa last year was a good example of that the problems that were going on in Somalia which essentially hasn’t had a functioning government in some time were spilling over and affecting people in Ethiopia and Kenya as well, causing the refugee crisis among other things. So it’s hard to pinpoint the specific cause of poverty and hunger because there are multiple factors, but it is not an issue of global food supply, but it is an issue of distribution. We produce enough food to feed every single person on the planet, but we are not very good at distributing it effectively. The fix for this problem is not having developed countries to continue to grow more, but to help African and Asian small holder farmers improve their overall crop yields and productivity so that they can feed themselves with food that is produced there.

Question: Do you believe that there are enough organizations like yours out there and it will just take time to reach everyone, or do you think that there is a need for more organizations to be formed to step up to the task?

Answer: On one hand there are probably enough non-governmental organizations that exist, but what‘s missing is this element of political will of the U.S. governments commitment to ending hunger and other world governments commitment. The U.S. spends one half of one percent of its budget on foreign aid, even increasing that to one percent would double what we are doing now. It’s about having leadership in congress, in the White House, in international institutions, and in foreign governments who need to be willing to increase their commitments to ending global hunger and poverty.