Giving Compass' Take:

• Bard MBA student Michelle Aboodi interviewed Billy Shore, co-founder of Share Our Strength, to discuss childhood hunger in the U.S. 

• Billy Shore talks about the vast improvements over the years in childhood hunger, and says it is a solvable problem. What can donors do to help this effort? 

• Read more about food insecurity for kids. 

To Billy Shore, co-founder of Share Our Strength, childhood hunger in America always has seemed like a solvable problem. He understands the statistics: that over 11 million U.S. children live in food insecure homes, that 22 million U.S. children rely on the free or reduced-price lunch they get at school.

But he and the team at No Kid Hungry, Share Our Strength’s campaign against childhood hunger, also know that there’s no shortage of food in America. To them, the solution is connecting hungry kids to that food.

Bard MBA student Michelle Aboodi spoke with Shore about No Kid Hungry’s initiative to help educators and lawmakers make breakfast a part of the regular school day. They also discussed Share Our Strength’s origin story and its business model.

Aboodi: How have things changed in the 35 years you’ve been doing this work?

Shore: There’ve really been dramatic improvements. Particularly in the U.S., we got very focused on childhood hunger as a solvable problem. Over the last eight years we’ve driven childhood hunger down by about 30 percent. There are actually fewer children experiencing hunger here than at any time in the last 25 to 30 years.

Aboodi: Why are poverty and hunger still such a problem in the United States?

Shore: We still have a lot of inequality, unfortunately, and structural inequality in our economy. When the economy does well, it leaves people behind. Hunger really is just a symptom of the deeper and more complex issue of poverty.

The best way to solve it permanently would be to find ways to lift more people out of poverty. Ultimately, we’re going to have to make long term investments in education and in training people for the workplace of the future if we want to really get to these underlying problems.

Read the full article about childhood hunger by Michelle Aboodi and Katie Ellman at GreenBiz.