Mothers Fighting Poverty: Rev. Terry Kukuk of Mexico, Missouri

Leading up to Mother’s Day, the NCC Poverty Initiative is sharing a series of stories lifting up, celebrating, and praying for mothers who are fighting poverty and alleviating suffering in their communities.

Prayer for Terry: God, thank you for expressing your love through Terry to the children and families who are hungry in her community. Thank you for filling her heart with love of her neighbor. When times get tough, fill her with your grace and courage. Bless and strengthen her family and her work. In good times and bad, let her life overflow with the deepest joy that only You can give. Amen.

Recognized by: Brad Sheppard, Executive Director, Our House: Caring for Callaway’s Homeless

First Presbyterian Church in Mexico, Missouri has a pastor with a passion for keeping children and families free of hunger. When Rev. Terry Kukuk of Mexico, Missouri learned in the Spring of 2012 that the Buddy Backpack program (which provides food on the weekends for eligible school children) for Audrain County, MO, would be reduced substantially due to the lack of funding, she immediately organized an event that raised over $100,000 for the program. That lead her to a broader concern for hunger in Audrain County. Next, she organized a group of community leaders to launch an effort to bring a new food distribution center (food pantry or bank) to the county; that effort is now underway.

Mothers Fighting Poverty: Rev. Kathleen Wilder, St. Louis, Missouri

Leading up to Mother’s Day, the NCC Poverty Initiative is sharing a series of stories lifting up, celebrating, and praying for mothers who are fighting poverty and alleviating suffering in their communities.

Prayer for Kathleen: God, thank you for expressing your love through Kathleen to hungry and sojourning people of St. Louis. Thank you for filling her heart with love of her neighbor. When times get tough, fill her with your grace and courage. Bless and strengthen her family and her work. In good times and bad, let her life overflow with the deepest joy that only You can give. Amen.

Rev. Kathleen Wilder is an ordained elder in the United Methodist Church and has pastored Centenary United Methodist Church in St. Louis since 2007. She has cultivated a ministry of caring and courageous people with a strong commitment to serving the city of St. Louis. Centenary church provides a significant part of St. Louis’ plan to end homelessness through The Bridge (formerly CENTENARY CARES), the primary drop-in center for the City of St. Louis. Through The Bridge ministry, the church has served over 200,000 breakfasts, lunches, and dinners seven days a week to homeless and food insecure persons since November 2005, and provides many additional social services as well. Rev Wilder is an outspoken advocate for social justice, and a deeply compassionate and hard working person. She holds up her staff, and is a great collaborator with other ministries in St. Louis. She is the loving mother of three children; Andy, Jesse and Grace.

Recognized by: Dr. Deborah Krause and Dr. Martha Robertson of Eden Theological Seminary

Mothers Ending Poverty: Dawn Peters, River Rouge, Michigan

Leading up to Mother’s Day, the NCC Poverty Initiative is sharing a series of stories lifting up, celebrating, and praying for mothers who are fighting poverty and alleviating suffering in their communities.

Prayer for Dawn: God, thank you for expressing your love through Dawn to her neighbors in Flat Rock who are hungry, and to her family. Thank you for filling her heart with love of her neighbor. When times get tough, fill her with your grace and courage. Bless and strengthen her family and her work. In good times and bad, let her life overflow with the deepest joy that only You can give. Amen.

Recognized by Rev. Dr. Terry Gallagher and Sinclair Gallagher, United Church of Christ ministry team and founders of Sacred Conversations.

We first met Dawn and her children at the First Congregational Church in Flat Rock when we started the community meal program in 2006. 

She and her family were one of the first guests to come.  With the severe economic decline in the area, and her hours reduced driving the school bus, Dawn said coming to the weekly community meal was the only way she could ’take her kids out to eat’. Over the years, we have seen Dawn struggle to support her family.  We were pleased to be able to provide modest assistance through the Flat Rock Community Meal and the Gibraltar Food Pantry.

When her car broke down, she would walk the 7 miles to work.  When her youngest was 1 1/2 and not walking, she took her to all the specialists available through local Medicaid resources to get the necessary help.  When she was not talking at age 3, she took her to different specialists. When her 10 year old son was diagnosed with autism, she took on that challenge simultaneously dealing with her own health issues.  As a single Mom, struggling to make ends meet, Dawn still found ways to count her blessings, and out of these blessings the means to help others. 

Dawn and her children work as part of the “Feed Da Streetz” Team in the poverty stricken neighborhoods where they live. They seek out left over produce and other food commodities and distribute them to neighbors. They have now expanded this work to include harvesting salvageable items from homes slated for demolition and again disperse these items to neighbors in need. This past Christmas, when asked what gift we might purchase for the family they asked for a power tool and some work gloves to help their salvage work provide even more items for their neighbors in need.

There is not an “It’s a Wonderful Life” movie type ending to this story. Dawn still struggles to feed, clothe and house her family everyday. Multiple health issues abound, their home still gets extremely cold in the winter, that old decrepit truck still breaks down frequently and so miles & miles need  to be walked by Mom & her kids alike.  But there is something more to this life then a fairy tale ending would provide. There is a sense of purpose & wholeness that derives it’s joy from the life action of “love of neighbor” and this one family’s actions spills over into a life example for all of us. This is the stuff of a way of life that the Gospel calls us to live.

Frequent Flyers Move the Hearts of Congress.

Many have already begun to experience the harsh impacts of the foolish Budget Sequester that set in motion indiscriminate slashes to government funding on Friday, March 1, 2013. Budget experts said it would be very difficult to reverse the sequester, and most did not have insight into how to help the 600,000 women and young children projected to lose nutrition aid from the Women, Infants, and Children program, or the estimated 70,000 young kids projected to lose access to Head Start preschool. All we could do was keep advocating for a change of heart in Congress and to finally create our long-awaited “grand bargain” bipartisan budget deal. Some thought we’d have to wait for the second coming before that happened.

When the Sequester created furloughs for air traffic controllers who ensure flight safety, Congress received many complaints about delays from those who fly and the industries that support them. Lo and behold! Where there is a will, there is a way. The U.S. Congress speedily responded. Fight delays have been eliminated overnight. Then, they went home for a week long recess.

They went HOME?! They should have been just getting started.

Christians have long looked to Matthew 6:21 to understand the federal budget from a faith perspective: “Where your treasure lies, there will your heart be also.” Where are the hearts of Congress? Why respond with such urgency to flight delays, and leave waiting – indefinitely – the thousands for whom the sequester could mean homelessness, hunger, and family hardship. If our hearts are with “the least of these,” that is where we should invest our treasure. We have a Congress whose actions just sent our nation’s most vulnerable a message that their hardships are less of a priority than the inconvenience of light delays.

We are also a people of hope, and long before the sequester started, we said that there are faithful alternatives to sequestration. We still believe that, and we see the hope in Congress’ action, however flawed the timing and prioritization. It is not too late to reverse the sequester and pursue these faithful alternatives.

It is up to us to generate the will in Congress to make a better way forward. Tell them they must fly back from recess, fix the sequester, and set things right.

Please adapt and personalize your message to your Senators and Representative. If you or someone you know are personally impacted, it is important they know, so they can put face those who they are harming, and put you and those you care about in THEIR hearts. Ask them to reverse the sequester’s impact on the most vulnerable, and instead embrace a Faithful Budget that creates a Circle of Protection around the programs serving the most vulnerable — a budget that puts our treasure where our hearts lie.

Join in Asking for a Faithful Farm Bill

Can’t Make it to Ecumenical Advocacy Days?

Join with thousands of faith voices in our 2013 Legislative ASK:

A FULL, MULTI-YEAR REAUTHORIZATION OF THE FARM BILL.

Our nation’s food and farm policies, as embodied in the farm bill, affect people from rural America to inner cities, from our local communities to less industrialized regions around the world. The farm bill is the single largest piece of federal policy impacting our food system. A good farm bill can strengthen nutrition programs, help our struggling rural communities, support new and socially disadvantaged farmers, enhance global food aid to the world’s most impoverished, and encourage farming and ranching practices that protect God’s creation. Congress failed to pass a farm bill in 2012, and a number of important programs that promote a just and healthy food system are currently without funding. Other programs are continuing, but need the certainty provided by a multi-year farm bill.

Congress should enact a farm bill this year that alleviates hunger and malnutrition, supports vibrant farms and healthy communities, and protects God’s creation. Send an email to Congress, urging them to support a full, multi-year reauthorization of the farm bill that:

Alleviates hunger and malnutrition:

• Protects and strengthens programs that reduce hunger and improve nutrition in the United States. We ask that funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP (formerly known as food stamps) be protected from cuts and harmful structural changes that would increase hunger in our nation.
• Sustains robust international food aid and improves the nutritional quality of food aid. In view of the ongoing threat of high food prices, natural disasters and humanitarian crises around the world, we ask for robust funding for programs that provide emergency and non-emergency food aid for the hungry. As the world’s largest provider of international food aid, the United States must also lead the way in improving its quality to maximize the nutritional benefit.

Supports vibrant farms and strong communities:

• Helps beginning farmers and farmers from socially disadvantaged groups start in the business of agriculture.
• We ask Congress to support new farmers by funding programs that are critical in growing the next generation of farmers, an imperative goal in light of the aging of American farmers and in bolstering women and minority farmers.

Builds local and regional food systems and the rural communities at their center.

• For communities in the United States, we ask Congress to support programs such as the Farmers Market Promotion Program, which provides new markets for small and mid-sized farmers in suburbs and cities, offering consumers the opportunity to support local producers and giving people in vulnerable communities greater access to fresh food.
• For communities around the world, we ask Congress to reform international food aid by purchasing more of the food in the areas where it is consumed. The Local and Regional Procurement Program can help more hungry people for the same cost, support rural development in low-income countries and increase global food security.

Protects God’s Creation:

• Strengthens policies and programs that promote conservation of soil and water and protect creation from environmental degradation. We ask Congress to protect funding for conservation programs, particularly those for working lands such as the Conservation Stewardship Program, which have substantial waiting lists and serve a diverse base of farmers and ranchers. Funds for these programs should not be used to pay for other priorities. Farms and ranches account for a majority of the land base in many states, and play a key role in ensuring soil and water quality and in maintaining open space and wildlife habitat.

Harvest Season is Anti-Hunger Season – Fall 2012 Newsletter

Friends in Faith,

The Fall edition of the NCC Poverty newsletter is here.

Harvest season is upon us. From CROP hunger walks to a national Fair Food Day of Prayer to Christian education webinars on food justice, Christian communities all over the U.S. are making it a priority in October to walk, learn, advocate, and pray for a day when all are fed.

If only we could say the same about the election 2012 candidates. Last night, poverty was barely mentioned in the presidential debate. Christian voters must continue to keep the concerns of Matthew 25 central to election conversations. This edition of our newsletter contains some ideas on how.

Read about all this and more here.

Grace and Peace,

Shantha

Inside this Edition:

News

• Churches Pray for Fair Food on Friday, October 5th
• Church World Service CROP Walks Underway Across the U.S.

Take Action

• Pray the Vote. Make poverty a central issue in the 2012 election.
• Join or organize an event about Affordable Housing with the Fighting Poverty with Faith mobilization November 8-18

Events

• Food Justice Opportunities Abound! Celebrate World Food Day on October 16 and join food justice NCC webinars October 17 & 23.
• Celebrate the National Observance of Children’s Sabbaths this October
  

Resources

• HOME: An Interfaith Study Guide on housing and hospitality
• Book: Money and Faith: The Search for Enough

Click here to read our newsletter with all these stories and more.

A Labor Day Sermon by Rev. Michael Livingston: Best Seat in the House

Best Seat in the House

James 2:1-10, 14-17

Rev. Michael Livingston; Director of Public Policy, Interfaith Worker Justice

Delivered at the United Methodist Chapel at 100 Maryland Ave NE Washington, DC on September 5, 2012

I’ve got a new friend.  Her name is Vernell Livingston.  I met her last October at the fall mobilization for Fighting Poverty with Faith.  It’s an interfaith effort to eliminate poverty as soon as possible—to engage people of faith across the religious spectrum in understanding the dimensions of the problem and more importantly—doing something about it.  There is always a “Take action” component:  You know, like the text—“Faith without action is nothing.”   The focus of the mobilization was on hunger and we decided to issue a Food Stamp Challenge, to people of faith across, the congress, to religious leaders.  The center of the event was an experience shopping at the Capitol Hill Safeway grocery store.

We invited members of Congress, religious leaders, and a White House representative to shop with food stamp recipients in the District of Columbia on the $31.50 for a week of groceries provided through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program—that’s what we call food stamps now. So, I met Vernell. We talked first about the coincidence of having the same last name and tried to figure out if we were related but her North Carolina clan didn’t seem to have any connection to my Louisiana/Texas bunch.  It was instructive watching her make decisions about what to buy based on what she had already and calculating what she’d need for other necessities during the month.  That’s no longer my reality.

I got in touch with her after the event wanting to write an article about her, telling her story.  So we talked by phone and we met and I got to know her better and I learned about her life.  Vernell was one of the oldest of 12 children in South Carolina.  What were you doing at 12?  I was playing little league baseball and learning the Clarinet; I was in the Boy Scouts and praying the Lakers would one day beat the Celtics and Elgin Baylor and Jerry West would win an NBA championship.  Vernell was picking cotton and tobacco alongside her father in sweltering heat.  After he suffered a debilitating stroke, Vernell’s fate was sealed.  She never went back to school and spent what would have been her junior and senior high years in those fields inhaling the deadly fumes of tobacco plants and pesticides sprayed with farmworkers in the fields.  She’s not much older than I am.

As a young woman she was sent to Washington DC to keep the children of an aunt while the aunt worked and she soon began domestic work in DC homes and that led finally to work as a maid in the motel industry in for most of her life.  Disability following hip replacement surgery ended her days on her knees cleaning bathtubs and toilets and dusting under beds in motels and she lives today in government subsidized housing on $885 a month Social Security.  Earlier this year her nearly $200 a month SNAP benefits were cut, without explanation, to $31.  She’s still trying to understand what has happened.

What has happened?  It is a good question for all of us.  We listen to lie upon lie from candidates running for every political office and that has become normal discourse barely commented upon by mainstream media and fodder for ridicule on cable stations that reach a few million people a night.  Our great (?) nation has the most unequal income distribution among all major industrialized nations on the planet.  In the last 40 years our economy doubled in size and yet the average income for 90% of us fell by 6% while annual income of the top 1/100^th of 1% grew by nearly $20 million.  We’re talking about 16,000 households here.    Vernell’s isn’t one of them.

What has happened here?  Forty-nine million Americans living in poverty; 12 million of them are children.  There are only two congressional districts in the entire nation that have had a statistically significant decrease in poverty since the recession began in 2007.  145 have stayed the same 388 have seen a significant increase in people living in poverty since 2007.  And we keep electing people to congress who don’t work to lift people out of poverty.  Dr. William Barber is the President of the NAACP in North Carolina.  A friend sent me a video of his remarks from their recently concluded annual gathering.  He put words in the mouths of political candidates today:  “Elect me and I’ll take your health care, I’ll take your voting rights, I’ll take your social security, I’ll re-segregate your schools, I’ll ignore your poverty”—and he said, “…they still get votes.”

What has happened?  Workers are fighting to bargain collectively, to be paid fairly, to afford health care, to send their children to college and hope they graduate without crushing debt, to expect that they will be able to afford to live comfortably in the last years of life. Labor Day is a hollow shell, just another not so long weekend in a hard year. President Eisenhower said in 1956 that the right of workers to organize would be a permanent part of the platform of his administration and that anyone who opposed it would be, his word, “stupid.”  Times change.

This text from James has been the occasion for the ages old debate—what is more important, faith or works?  There is no choice here and I think James makes that clear.  This is not just about remembering the poor in our prayers, not about having our consciences pricked or raising the level of our awareness.  This goes beyond sending money to organizations that serve the needs of the poor.  It is more than sophisticated political advocacy on Capitol Hill of the kind we are engaged in here.  It includes but is deeper than addressing the root causes of poverty, the structural impediments to a fundamentally just society that is vigilant in its opposition to racism and effectively guards against the unfettered greed that so infests our system, turning corporations into people and money into speech while grinding real people into dust.

All of this is essential; we had better attend to it, but not at the expense of missing the deeper truth.  Wherever we are on the spectrum of human life, whatever our age, level of education, whatever our status, class, place of work, sexual orientation, age, race, color, or creed; if we don’t have a job or a safe place to sleep, if we’re the elite of elites or the last among the lost, whether we’ve inherited riches or are rich in our humanity alone– We are all one people; all in this together.  No one is better than any other, more worthy, closer to wherever heaven might be.  James reminds us that building relationships of mutuality and respect, that treating people—whether rich or poor is the measure of our grasp of the divine among us: the image of God on every face.

So James says “If Donald Trump comes in your church and a poor person in dirty clothes comes in and you seat the Donald and make the poor person stand—your mind is poisoned with sin and the whole weight of moral law falls on your head.”  We know that in early Christianity in Syria, this teaching took root. If a poor person showed up, and no seats were available in the congregation, the bishop had to give up his seat.

We are living in a nation at a time when the wealthy get all the good seats:  Jack Nicholson on the floor at the Laker games, the Royal Box at Wimbledon, the legacy admissions at top colleges…and on and on and on.  James says:  Vernell gets the best seat in house, and doesn’t she deserve it?  Amen.

Why Food Stamps Matter: A Profile of Vernell Livingston

By Rev. Michael Livingston, Director, NCC Poverty Initiative

Vernell Livingston thanks God for getting up every morning “with a portion of good health.” She’s had the blessings of marriage and motherhood and she is in good health, though she is a diabetic, as she lives a life of modest contentment as a senior citizen.

Mrs. Livingston participated in the Food Stamp Challenge that launched the Fighting Poverty With Faith Mobilization last fall responding graciously to our invitation to her to guide congressional legislators on Capitol Hill and religious leaders on a shopping trip on the weekly allotment given to SNAP recipients ($31.50). The coincidence of our last names (we are not related) created a bond between us and she welcomed an opportunity to share more of her story.

The second eldest of 12 siblings, Mrs. Livingston has had a life of hard work for very little compensation. She was picking cotton and tobacco in South Carolina alongside her sharecropping father when she was 12 years old. She never went to college, indeed, she wasn’t able to finish high school so that she could help the family make ends meet and assist her mother with the raising of their large clan.

When her father suffered a stroke, her fate was sealed. She did back breaking work as a day laborer picking cotton and was exposed to toxic chemicals picking tobacco until she was eighteen or nineteen years old. The young Vernell moved north to Washington, DC with an aunt and cared for the aunt’s son for a few years before returning to South Carolina where she married a logger and gave birth to a daughter.

In the following years she worked several extremely low-paying jobs and after returning to Washington DC she spent most of her adult years working as a maid in the hotel industry.

Her last eight years working were as a floor manager for a motel chain. Chronic knee pain led to a full disability and eventually to two knee replacement operations on the same knee. She received disability checks until she began receiving Social Security benefits in 1991. In all her working years she never had an employer supplied pension plan and her low wages insured that her Social Security benefits would be meager.

When I asked Mrs. Livingston how much her monthly Social Security checks amounted to, she lowered her head sheepishly, paused, and said, “Reverend Livingston, I get $885 a month.”

I cannot say precisely how she felt, but any and all shame should be the province of a society that has not taken good care of those who have labored long and hard and been denied access to opportunities by familial necessity and the structural inequalities, racial and economic, so prevalent in our society.

Mrs. Livingston, many years a widow now, lives on $885 a month plus what she receives in SNAP benefits (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program). Those benefits were cut, without explanation, from about $200 per month at the end of 2011 to $33 a month in January of this year.

Before the cut in SNAP benefits she had an annual income of $13,020; her income in 2012, after the cut, will be just over $11,000. She pays $181 a month in rent in a government subsidized senior housing complex and has a car note. After rent and car expenses, Vernell has about $500 per month for everything else. SNAP is a lifeline. She’s thankful for what she has so far received and worried about the recent cut and the awful possibility that more cuts could be coming.

The NCC’s Poverty Initiative works with other ecumenical and interfaith partners to ensure that programs that are lifelines for vulnerable people like Vernell Livingston. We are working to make certain people like Vernell are not further victimized as a result of the critical budget and tax decisions that will be made in the months to come and especially in the “Lame Duck” session of congress at the end of this year.

Your support for our work, your work really, is essential to the witness of people of faith in the 37 member communions of the National Council of Churches.

I wrote earlier that I was not related to Mrs. Livingston, though we share the same last name. To tell the whole truth, we are related, to each other and to you, through our belonging to the human family. We are all God’s family, make in God’s image, each one of us. I hope you will remember Vernell Livingston in your prayers and in your giving. (Click here to make a contribution to the Poverty Initiative of the NCC.)

Fighting Poverty with Faith is an annual mobilization of faith communities across the United States in common actions against poverty. Co-chaired by the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, Catholic Charities, and the National Council of Churches, the mission of Fighting Poverty with Faith is to educate the public and build political will to participate in the goal to cut U.S. poverty in half from 2010-2020.

Click here to sign up for more information and get involved in the Nov. 18-28, 2012 mobilization.

Join us for a Food Justice Webinar Thursday March 15 at 1:00pm ET

Last week, I was fortunate to have been invited to fast for six days with farmworkers seeking a decent wage and livable working conditions. It is a scandal that the very workers who pick 80 percent of the tomatoes consumed in the United States often have difficulty feeding their own families.

Please join World Council of Churches North American president Rev. Bernice Powell Jackson and me, along with Fast for Fair Food organizers Rev. Noelle Damico of the Presbyterian Hunger Program and Gerardo Silva of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, for an opportunity to interact live and for free on a webinar.

“From Harvest to Home: Farmworkers, Food Justice, and Hunger.”

March 15th – Thursday afternoon – 1:00pm EST

We’ll share information about the fast and ways you can get involved in next steps during the first half hour, then open up the second half hour to answer your questions.

Click here to register for the webinar.

Please register early, as space is limited. Members of the press are welcome for this webinar. Please spread the word.

I look forward to seeing you online!

Grace and Peace,

Michael Livingston

Director, National Council of Churches Poverty Initiative

Princess and the Pea, Publix and the Penny

Media covering the Fair Food Fast ask us, “How do you respond to Publix’s offer to “Put the penny in the cost and we’ll gladly pay it”? Publix’s statement is that they respond to market forces, and: “our policy is not to get involved in labor disputes.”

Just a penny per pound more would make all the difference in farmworkers' lives.

The extraordinary change in the relationship between growers and farmers at this moment is not a labor dispute. Over 90 percent of the Florida tomato growers and the Coalition of Immokolee Workers (CIW) have already agreed upon a Fair Food Code of Conduct. The corporations that have signed on have agreed to pay the Fair Food Premium, which is a small price increase that is designed to give the workers a penny wage increase for every pound of tomatoes they pick.

Ask Publix CEO Ed Crenshaw to meet with the farmworkers and sign the Fair Food Agreement.

Greg Asbed, staff with the CIW likens the Fair Food Premium to the reverse of the Princess and the Pea story. The Princess feels discomfort at the placement of a pea at the bottom of stack of many mattresses, whereas Publix could sleep soundly and never notice the discomfort of a little penny. Meanwhile, farmworkers will experience significant gain from the expenditure of a penny a pound on the part of the corporation. Yet Publix refuses to talk to the farmworkers or even consider signing the agreement. By refusing, Publix undermines the efforts of the farmworkers to labor in environments free of abuses that have characterized the system for over three decades. Publix provides an alternative, a shelter for growers that have not signed the agreement. By so doing, they participate in practices that are unjust and immoral.

As the largest corporation in Florida, Publix exerts enormous influence in the food industry. Publix has the opportunity now be a part of the healthy changes that are taking place in the industry. Or, Publix can tacitly support the continuation of a system that does not recognize the humanity of the men and women who pick the tomatoes it sells in groceries stores it lauds as offering a “pleasurable shopping experience.”

How can we enjoy buying goods when we know the farmworkers who pick them are underpaid and overworked, who labor without pension and health benefits and when some of them may have been subjected to forced labor? The scriptures of the Old and the New Testament are clear in calling for justice for the worker and the creation of each one of us in the image of God.  We stand with farmworkers as they strive for a new day in fields and a future for their children in a “Fair Food” universe.

Ask Publix CEO Ed Crenshaw to meet with the farmworkers and sign the Fair Food Agreement.

Until tomorrow,

Michael Livingston

Director, National Council of Churches Poverty Initiative