'It looks like us,' Feeding America CEO talks realities of hunger in America in Speaker Series

ELYRIA — Claire Babineaux-Fontenot, the CEO of Feeding America, told a Lorain County crowd that she had always known that there had been hunger all around her in her native Louisiana. This makes her an exception in the United States in many ways, she said. Babineaux-Fontenot spoke Wednesday at the Elyria High School Performing Arts Center in the third instalment of "In the The Spirit of '76 Speakers Series" hosted by the Lorain County Civic Engagement Coalition on Wednesday. She said in her address that there have always been misconceptions in the U.S. about the realities of hunger. Unless those misconceptions are met head on, she said, the country would always struggle to tackle it. "We need to open our minds to the reality of who it is that experiences food insecurity," she said. "And if you wonder what hunger looks like, we need to only look in the mirror, because it looks like you. It has been, and it looks like me, it looks like a little girl who your daughter plays with at school. It looks like the little boy who is on that softball team. It looks like that man who got a chance for a job, and he's trying to focus, but he hasn't eaten in a couple of days. It looks like us, because it is part of us." Feeding America is the largest charity organization by revenue in the United States. It links and helps oversee a network of hundreds of regional food banks across the country, including the Lorain-based Second Harvest Food Bank of North Central Ohio. Babineaux-Fontenot became CEO of Feeding America in 2018 after a career as a tax attorney, and shepherded the organization through COVID-19, during which she visited food distribution centers in every state in the nation and several of its territories. During this time, she said, she saw that America had what it took to tackle the issue of hunger, if only its people could agree together to do so. Babineaux-Fontenot pointed out that despite the drastic increase in need for supplemental food, during the pandemic, overall food insecurity actually went down. "How could that possibly be?" she asked. "Because we decided as a nation to stand together. We have all kinds of things that we decided we were going to stand apart on, but on hunger, we decided we could stand together. Some of the most profoundly important bipartisan measures passed during COVID were in service to neighbors experiencing hunger. So the good news is, we know what works." As the CEO of Feeding America, Babineaux-Fontenot visited food distribution centers across the country during the pandemic, but also appeared regularly in the media to discuss Babineaux-Fontenot said that she was frequently asked what her biggest concern was with feeding people during the pandemic, but that she would say she was most concerned with what would come after. "What I told them is that I am concerned that all those long lines that people are seeing are going to return to the insides of buildings," Babineaux-Fontenot said. "And that when they do, people will think that hunger went away. Unfortunately, I think that is happening. So when you choose to spend your evening like this, you choose to be educated on what is in fact the challenge. You choose to not bury your head in the sand and hope it goes away. I hope you also choose to stand shoulder to shoulder like you did during COVID, like you did before COVID, hand-in-hand." While Babineaux-Fontenot said she acknowledges that fraud occurs in America's food distribution systems, she challenged common misconceptions about that fraud. She said that when discounting for the elderly and children, the vast majority of people in America who receive food assistance have at least one job. "I am the first person to say, let's get rid of all of the fraud, right?" she said. "And then let's make sure that these resources are being made available to the people that need them. SNAP (the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) was meant to be temporary. There are people who for many, many, many generations are on SNAP. And again, they are not having babies and saying 'Yay, this (SNAP) is going to be a part of my legacy.' They want to thrive, they want to move forward, and we have to address some of the systems that perpetuate people staying in the situations that they are in." Contact Owen MacMillan at (440) 329-7123 or omacmillan@chroniclet.com.