Ending Hunger in Maine

Hunger is a fixable problem, in our country and state.  Even as we deal with symptoms of hunger through increased access to healthy, affordable food, we should also collectively address the root causes of hunger including economic, social, and systemic conditions that perpetuate inequity and injustice. 

In 2019, the Maine Legislature and Gov. Janet Mills charged the Department of Agriculture, Conservation & Forestry (DACF) to develop a plan to End Hunger by 2030.  DACF’s first phase of work created Ending Hunger in Maine (generally referred to as the “Interim Report”) which was heard in the legislature in the winter of 2020. The Interim Report called for funding for a participatory process to expand Ending Hunger in Maine into an actionable strategic roadmap to end hunger by 2030.  When COVID shut down the legislature in March of 2020, the bill to fund and implement the plan (along with many other bills) was put on hold.  As COVID reinforced the urgency for collaborative, systemic work to address hunger and poverty, DACF approached the Sewall Foundation for support. 

In 2020 the Sewall Foundation awarded the State of Maine a $75,000 Twin Pandemics grant to ensure that this work would continue unimpeded by the COVID-19 pandemic.  Sewall’s Twin Pandemics grants supported work in Maine that addressed the two critical challenges – systemic racism and COVID 19..  The grant to Maine’s DACF was made with the requirement that people with lived experience of hunger would be at the table to contribute to the creation of the plan.

DACF worked with Resources for Organizing and Social Change (ROSC), who facilitated sessions with people with lived experience of hunger and poverty, through which they reviewed the Interim Report and then developed the Impacted Community Recommendations and Review. Their recommendations and visions for how hunger and poverty could be addressed and eliminated in Maine helped inform a broad-based participatory process that occurred over the spring and summer of 2021.  Over 200 people participated in regional dialogs and in sector-based conversations to further develop the plan and coalesce around goals, strategies and actions that could be taken by the State of Maine and by nonprofits, businesses, financial institutions, and communities. 

That process culminated in the creation of “Everyone at the Table: Maine’s Roadmap to End Hunger by 2030,” which went to the Maine Legislature on January 18, 2022.  This Roadmap presents “twenty cross-cutting strategies organized around five goals intended to meet the food needs of Maine people today while ensuring that far fewer people are food insecure in the future.”  Simultaneous to DACF delivering Everyone at the Table, the Legislature’s Joint Standing Committee on Agriculture, Conservation & Forestry took up consideration of LD 174, An Act to Implement the Recommendations of the Ending Hunger Advisory Group. That bill would fund implementation of the Roadmap while institutionalizing the requirement to have people impacted by food insecurity be part of the process going forward. LD 174 was passed out of the ACF Committee with a recommendation of “Ought to Pass” and is now awaiting consideration by full legislature. 

“Current levels of hunger and food insecurity—as high as 16.4% of the population in recent years—extract an enormous human toll. Each day thousands of our kids show up to school too hungry to learn, thousands of our workers are too economically insecure to thrive, and thousands of our neighbors are contending with entirely preventable ill health. This also translates into an economic toll Maine can ill afford. Today we spend or lose in excess of $1 billion annually when we treat the symptom of hunger when estimates suggest we could spend half that by eliminating hunger’s causes.” (excerpt from Roadmap).

The Sewall Foundation supports transformative work like Ending Hunger by 2030 which seeks to further equity and justice by creating integrative and collaborative solutions to systemic problems.  Recommendations in the Roadmap bring together perspectives from many sectors to develop strategies to improve economic development, social services and food systems work -- all pointing toward a single goal.  The Ending Hunger by 2030 roadmap is now one of the guiding visions for Sewall’s Food System Focus Area.  We are pleased to be a partner in supporting implementation of this plan to end hunger by 2030.

Laura Dover