In the United States right now, more than 34 million people are food insecure: ten percent of the population does not have consistent access to the caloric intake necessary to lead a healthy life. Before the pandemic, 38 million people were suffering from food insecurity in the United States. But at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, that number rose to more than 54 million people. As a career nonprofit employee and a chronic volunteer, I know that we cannot volunteer our way out of ensuring 34 million people are fed consistently every single day.

We have been duped into thinking that poverty and hunger—and homelessness for that matter—come as unintended consequences of having a society, that these are inevitable byproducts.

This reliance on volunteering is not necessarily our fault. In many ways, volunteering plays into dominant narratives, namely, the moral integrity of rugged individualism. Within this dominant narrative, rugged individualism is only occasionally offset by small-scale groups coming together to support one another during extraordinary crises. But these crises are brief, occasional, and solved fairly easily.

By relying on these myths, we have been put on a fool’s errand. We think our soup kitchens, food pantries, and corporate food-serving lines are going to consistently feed 34 million people. Similarly, we believe that by volunteering, we can permanently lift people out of poverty for good—if only those individuals would accept our help. We have also been taught, numbed, and fooled into thinking this number of people suffering is normal, okay, and even inevitable.

But it’s not. We have built this shocking and traumatic mechanism over a long time, and we have the power to stop it completely. No matter what you’ve heard, we can end food insecurity in the United States.

On the other hand, it’s also unfair to ask our volunteers and nonprofit employees to work under these structural conditions. When we look around, we see many examples of our values being reflected back to us in encouraging ways. Volunteering is part of that reflection, and the nonprofit sector is a steadfast reminder that we want structures in place when things do not go well. After all, things go wrong for any number of unforeseen reasons, but we can catch one another via support networks.

However, we cannot confuse these support structures as a solution to suffering caused by economic, politically driven insecurity. We must move upstream to interrogate the components of our capitalist structure and make some critical upgrades.

Read the full article about food insecurity by Regina Anderson at Blue Avocado.