Hunger in the Senior Community

As a fairly typical baby boomer who grew up in a secular Jewish home in the Midwest, I learned about social justice and the need to give back at a fairly young age. As a teenager I attended many conferences on civil rights and became a very ardent supporter of those causes. But another issue nagged at me from a young age. It was hunger. As an idealistic young person of the ’60s, I could not reconcile how the United States alone could feed the world and yet hunger pervaded not only African countries but sectors of American society as well.

The result of that early awareness has guided my tzedekah efforts throughout my life.  Maybe this is influenced too because I hate to feel hungry myself and thus don’t wish it on anyone else. I remember the pain I felt when I learned that my own cousins often ended the month short of money to buy food when they were at college. Of course they had too much pride to ask my family for help, but I thought if they were food insecure, there must be even more people who face this problem on a daily basis.

I tell you all of this because the pandemic in an interesting way brought this problem front and center to me in my professional life. Some of you may know that I help run a small nonprofit, the Center for Successful Aging, which serves the needs of seniors in our community. In mid-March, a local philanthropist called me and with great foresight told me of his concern that with the stay-at-home orders, low-income seniors would soon be hard hit and that he wanted to help some organizations deal with the pending food problems facing seniors in our county. I thanked him for his concern but referred him to a larger organization since I knew ours would not be able to undertake such a large geographic task.