The Government Fix for

Food

[00:00:00] Isaac Toups: I said, “Okay, well, I still don’t care if the children are hungry. When is it okay for the child to go without a meal?” That normally shuts everybody up.

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[00:00:14] Amanda Renteria: Welcome to The Government Fix. I’m your host, Amanda Renteria. I’ve worked on Capitol Hill, in the classroom, on Wall Street, and now I’m the CEO of Code for America, an organization focused on using tech to improve public services and make government work well for everyone. This week, we’re talking about The Government Fix for Food.

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Helping make sure Americans are able to feed their families is a central part of the mission at Code for America. In 2022, Congress passed Summer EBT. For those who aren’t familiar, EBT stands for Electronic Benefits Transfer, and it’s a government-funded cash assistance program people can use to buy groceries. Summer EBT is specifically focused on feeding kids, many of whom receive free meals at school, but what happens when school is out for the summer or when a global pandemic shuts it all down?

This is where Summer EBT comes in. It works just like the SNAP program, a little extra on the EBT card to help families bridge the gap when those cafeteria meals are no longer an option. It is the first new permanent federal food assistance program in almost 50 years. At Code for America, in partnership with No Kid Hungry, a campaign of Share Our Strength, we developed a playbook for government partners to help make sure these programs work the way they’re supposed to.

Our goal? Remove as many barriers as possible to reducing child hunger in this country. We recorded this episode in October of last year during the government shutdown, when it looked like over 40 million Americans might lose their life-saving government assistance. In a dark moment, we wanted to speak with leaders who are committed to feeding the country’s most vulnerable when their government falls short.

At Code for America, we’re interested in talking to folks coming up with innovative ways to solve government problems. In this case, we talked to Isaac and Amanda Toups. Isaac is a chef you might have seen on Top Chef, and together with his wife, Amanda, they’ve created Toups Family Meal, a nonprofit that focuses on feeding the most vulnerable communities in New Orleans.

They’ve served over 175,000 hearty, chef-crafted meals since they started in March 2020 as a grassroots response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This episode is a two-parter. After you hear from Isaac and Amanda, we’ll chat with Billy Shore, founder and executive chair of Share Our Strength, who we worked with on Summer EBT. He gives us a bird’s-eye view of hunger in America.

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[00:03:01] Amanda Renteria: COVID really impacted all of us so much, and you all were right at the center of it, figuring this stuff out and delivered 100,000 meals over 18 months. What did that teach you all, or what did you see about hunger in New Orleans during that period of time?

[00:03:20] Isaac: Well, it started pretty organically. We have a staff meal every day twice a day at the restaurant that’s just called Family Meal.

[00:03:28] Amanda Renteria: Aw.

[00:03:28] Isaac: That’s where we sit down before a shift. We all just get something to eat, and the kitchen provides it. It’s just so you have fuel for the day. It’s something a lot of restaurants do. It’s very normal. During the pandemic, we had to furlough a couple of employees. We kept all of our managers, but we told them, “Hey, look, come every day during Family Meal. I’ll make sure I have extra food out. Even though you don’t have a job, you always have something to eat.”

The very next day, one of the cooks called us up and said, “Hey, I’m coming in for a meal, but my roommate, he got laid off, but we don’t have any food. Can he come over as well?” I said, “Absolutely.” Instead of 10 Family Meals, I made 12. Then the next day, it was 20 because other people, “Hey, we don’t have food either.” I’m like, “Okay.” The next day, it was 60, and that snowballed into 500 people a day.

How it happened was we just started emptying the freezers, and then word got out that we were doing that. Other chefs and purveyors were like, “Hey, well, look, we got all this food we don’t want to go bad. You guys are feeding the people. You just have it.” We were emptying other people’s freezers. Sometimes we had beef shanks, lentils, and collard greens. [chuckles] I laughed because I would have to Top Chef some of these meals.

“I got beef shanks, I got lentils, I got collard greens. Okay, we’re going to make gumbo out of that.” Every day, it was this challenge to, “You’ve got 4 or 5 hours to feed 500 people. I got two crawfish burners full of food and ovens full of food.” It really taught me how to just stay calm.

[00:05:00] Amanda Renteria: You were talking to other chefs, community folks. The word was getting out, of course. For folks who had the ability to give you money, to figure out, give you resources, and unlock their freezers, how did that happen, and then how did you keep it going?

[00:05:17] Amanda Toups: Isaac and I really had two different perspectives because I quarantined very hard with our children during that time because we knew that if we let COVID into the restaurant, that’s our only source of income, and that’s the source of income for the employees that we were able to hang on to, which was all of our management. We were mostly management.

We were absolutely sure we were not going to leave management because we thought it would be over in two weeks, like everybody did. Isaac was really on the front lines at that time and really just was like I would call, and I’d say, “All right, we got this many people coming and this many people coming,” because we didn’t know we had to be apart at that time. We didn’t know the distance was a thing. I really want to say that in New Orleans specifically, it took five days before the cupboards were bare across the city. It was only five days.

[00:05:57] Amanda Renteria: Wow.

[00:05:57] Amanda Toups: That should tell you how food-insecure New Orleans is. We’re one of the best food cities in the country, if not the best, where hospitality is the core of our city, the core industry of our city, and our hospitality workers were hungry after five days. That’s something that we just couldn’t tolerate. I was home. I started with the social media and putting it out there, and I was like, “Here we are.”

Of course, Isaac and I are long-time service industry people, so who are all of our friends? Restaurateurs or people who work in restaurants. They would hear what we were doing. They would text me. They would call me and go, “Hey.” Adolfo Garcia is a good friend of ours. He’d say, “Man, I got 50 pounds of brisket in my freezer. I’m coming over.” Isaac would take it and make whatever he could. Again, it was the five-day marker. We started with service industry people.

It’s a story I tell every time we tell the story of Family Meal because there’s sometimes moments in your life that will change everything in perspective. I had one day, and it was a mom who showed up to the restaurant, and Isaac was out feeding the people, and I’m home coordinating and doing everything I can. She rolled up with three little children in the back of her car and told Isaac, “You don’t have to feed me, but would you feed my children?”

[00:07:11] Amanda Renteria: Aw.

[00:07:12] Amanda Toups: Everyone started crying. They’re calling me on the phone, crying. I’m crying at home. She and I stayed in contact. They’re doing great now. It was an eye-opener for us because we were like, “Oh, we’re just going to feed the service industry because that’s who needs it the most, and those are our people, and they’re our friends.” Then the floodgates opened, and we went, “No, those people are hungry, too. If she was a hairdresser, why would we turn away a hairdresser? Why? Because you’re not serving tables?”

It went wide open. Right at the beginning, I reached out to World Central Kitchen, and I said, “Hey, I know that you guys work in disaster relief, but this is a disaster. The food insecurity in New Orleans is a disaster. It’s a man-made disaster.”

[00:07:55] Amanda Renteria: You literally picked up the phone and just-

[00:07:56] Amanda Toups: Yes, I did. I did.

[00:07:57] Amanda Renteria: -called whatever number was available.

[00:07:59] Amanda Toups: Yes.

[00:08:00] Amanda Renteria: Wow.

[00:08:00] Amanda Toups: I said, “This is a man-made disaster, but it’s a disaster.” They said, “Look, we’re not in New Orleans now, but we’ll reach out.” I kept it moving. I kept it pushing. I was very loud and the pressure–

[00:08:11] Amanda Renteria: Did you call anyone else, like World Central Kitchen? Did you call the state? Did you call?

[00:08:15] Amanda Toups: Oh, I just got really loud. I would take phone interviews constantly.

[00:08:19] Isaac: She has some choice words about some people.

[00:08:21] Amanda Toups: Yes. [crosstalk] Then Isaac has to smooth it over and be the good guy.

[00:08:27] Amanda Renteria: Well, he does have the food, so that helps a little bit. [laughs]

[00:08:31] Amanda Toups: We had a very well-known Saints football player reach out to us. He said, “I’m watching you, and you’re going to need money.” I was like, “Man, I want your money. It’s going to be over soon. I don’t need your money. We’re going to be fine.” He’s like, “I’m trying to give you money. Open a Venmo account.” He sent us $2,000 that day. I went, “Oh, [redacted] okay. Well, we can buy food with that,” because it started to look more and more like it wasn’t going to be over in two weeks.

Everyone’s scared. We don’t know what we’re doing. We never closed. We couldn’t have inside service. The restaurant only closed one day for the entire time of the pandemic. We dipped the restaurant in bleach, and then we started doing to-go food, and then we started feeding the people. Then, after that, I just started crowdsourcing. I would get checks from people who had never even been to New Orleans.

I would get checks from doctors in Philadelphia. I would get $2 Venmos from grandmothers. It was so touching. I see it now, even with Family Meal as it’s evolved. I always say this. “Your $2 donation means as much to me as the $20,000 check because I know it meant something to you, that you were able to give $2, and you did.” It was April 29th. Isaac and I were sitting in the backyard.

He had almost no days off the first 50 days of COVID. He was just there every day, feeding people. We were sitting in the backyard. He’s dog tired, just sitting there. I said, “Isaac, I think we have to pivot. We have to start making money. I don’t think we can keep giving away food. We have to pivot.” He was like, “I understand.” That night, World Central Kitchen called me that very night.

[00:10:04] Amanda Renteria: Oh, man.

[00:10:05] Amanda Toups: The guy said, “We’re coming to New Orleans, and you’re the first restaurant we’re ever going to onboard in Louisiana.” I said, “You got it.” I said, “How long are you going to be here?” He goes, “Maybe two weeks.” I said, “I’ll take it. I’ll take two weeks.” We cooked for them for seven months. During that time, it helped us afford to cook for the people we wanted to cook for, which was families and service industry.

During those, it was a little under 18 months, we were able to put out 100,000 meals into the community. We thought, “Well, we did it,” and we put our spoons down, and we thought, “We got to go back to real life now.”

[00:10:33] Isaac: Regular work.

[00:10:34] Amanda Toups: Yes, we have to go back to the regular hard work. Then Ida happened, and we fed the people again, and then in the beginning of 2024, funds for the children that were going to be losing free school lunch and free school breakfast during the summer, whenever they’re out of school. Isaac and I were taking a very rare vacation. We get one every other year. We were sitting at the beach just looking out at the ocean. Isaac looked at me, he goes, “Well, [redacted] we’re going to have to bring back Family Meal then.”

[00:11:02] Isaac: To reiterate, especially during COVID and whatnot, these were working people with two jobs, people that worked 40 hours one job and 20 hours at another, and then five days later, no food. These are hardworking, individual, long-time service industry and other industry people. We had no backup plan, no federal backup plan, no state backup plan. It was just a systematic failure.

[00:11:31] Amanda Toups: Nationwide.

[00:11:32] Isaac: Nationwide.

[00:11:33] Amanda Toups: It’s a national failure that our people are that food-insecure and that this would be an issue in modern America. When we decided to bring Family Meal back and become real boys and girls, we had to become a real 501(c)(3) because we were pirates before. We just didn’t have a–

[00:11:47] Amanda Renteria: Good pirates. Good old pirates.

[00:11:49] Amanda Toups: You gave us a bushel of corn, we made Corn Maque Choux, but now we needed to get real. We filed for a 501(c)(3) and got it. That was where I really came in, where my forte really started to shine as far as it goes, because I really spent a lot of time researching the problem and what the problem was specific to these people in New Orleans, and what their needs were.

Isaac’s like, “I can cook for as many people as you need me to,” and he’s got that part of it. He’s got the logistics down. I kept thinking. I said to him, I said, “The problem’s the same, but it’s different because we’re talking about children and the hands are still out hungry, but a small hand. What is it they need?” I selfishly held, in the spring of 2024, an Easter drive where we fed 2,000 Orleanians Easter dinner. We gave them the groceries to cook their Easter dinner.

During that time, I surveyed. The parents were mostly moms, about 95% moms and grandmothers. What I found out, which I did not know I was going to find out, which is now a core principle of Toups Family Meal, is that New Orleans is every bit transportation-insecure as it is food-insecure. That changed everything because if mom’s working two jobs, which a lot of them are, and she has to take a day off to get to the restaurant to get the food, that’s not helpful.

I’m not helping at that point. If mom is home with the children and she’s got to walk five blocks to the city bus with three babies and get to the restaurant, if maybe we had food left and maybe we didn’t, and if we do, she’s carrying a big box five more blocks back to the bus to carry five more blocks back to the house, it’s also not helpful. I also surveyed them and said, “Okay, well, what is helpful to you?”

[00:13:29] Amanda Renteria: You asked them directly. This is the real way to reach people where they are, is just ask them.

[00:13:36] Amanda Toups: I needed to know. I said, “Do you need groceries? Do you want hot food? Do you want cold food? A mix? Do you need snacks?” What I heard was, “I’m at work during the day in the summer, and my kids are home alone. I don’t want them using the stove.” I was like, “I get that. I’ve got kids. I don’t want them using the stove either.” We decided what we needed to do was we’re going to deliver the food from our restaurant to their porch, which is a little bit different from most other people dealing in this issue.

We had to figure that out and how we were going to do that. For breakfast, we would send, oh, oatmeal packets, granola bars, muffins, and bagels, things the kids didn’t have to do much to eat.

[00:14:11] Isaac: Or jellies. Fruit.

[00:14:12] Amanda Toups: Or jellies. For lunch, we wanted them to have real meals. They were all chef-cooked meals. We would heat them. We would cook them hot, of course, cool them down, put them in a microwaveable container so the kids only had to pop them in the microwave. I raised a volunteer army of delivery drivers. My incredible GM, Molly, routed our entire city and the homes into 45 routes across the city, across 200 families, across 533 children that we took on the first summer.

[00:14:41] Amanda Renteria: How did you get their address and information? How did that happen?

[00:14:44] Amanda Toups: It’s really simple because when people are hungry, they’re very willing to give you everything to help them. We have a pretty large social media following. It was very easy. I know where they are. I know where they’re asking for help. It’s mutual aid on Facebook, and then me just posting across our socials, like, “Are you in need?” Moms have been reaching out since the pandemic anyway, and so it was not hard to reach it. Then this year, which was devastating, was when we went to sign the children up again this year; our list was full in 30 minutes.

[00:15:20] Amanda Renteria: Oh, wow.

[00:15:21] Amanda Toups: We turned away 1,000 families within an hour, and then we had to turn it off. That tells me everything I need to know.

[00:15:29] Isaac: For as many people as we’re feeding and we’ve fed, it’s still a drop in the bucket. We’re the little restaurant that could. We will always be the little restaurant that could. We could only cook so many meals. We have 2 ovens, we have 12 burners, 2 fryers. Our professional kitchen is the size of probably your kitchen at your house.

[00:15:52] Amanda Toups: But we managed to deliver to their porches between the last 15 months about 200,000 meals. That’s delivered through the volunteer delivery drivers. We got to know our delivery drivers, and they’ll text me and check on me occasionally. Sometimes they fuss at me and go, “You gave them a route.” If somebody got there before them, they got to know these routes, and they got to know the families.

[00:16:18] Amanda Renteria: Yay, they got to know the actual families and got to deliver community and deliver with a person that sees you and looks at you.

[00:16:26] Amanda Toups: I’ve learned so much. I hate to be like, “Oh, it’s so joyful,” when so many people are in pain, but the joy is the community engagement that those drivers and my staff and all of us have, and the families, and they’re so grateful. We fight back against the trope of the welfare queens, and that these moms just– I would have people reach me like, “Well, why do they not want to feed their children?”

I’m like, “What are you talking about? Who doesn’t want to feed their children? What are you talking about?” Then I would have people come to me and go, “Well, how do you know they’re really in need?” “Because they told me they were. What do you want me to do? Check their bank statements? Shall I ask them for their W-2?” Everybody knows that there’s a small percentage that’s going to take advantage of anything, whatever it is. For me and for Isaac, that’s so small that why would we penalize the rest of the people? I’m not going to do it.

[00:17:19] Isaac: I’ve always thought about it. We’re giving away food. First thing, we’re giving away food; we’re not giving away money. If you need to steal some food, well, you probably needed it as well. On the other side of that coin, people say, “Well, some of these people are lazy or whatnot, or some of these people are drug addicts or not good parents.” I said, “Okay, well, I still don’t care if the children are hungry. When is it okay for the child to go without a meal?”

That normally shuts everybody up because I don’t care if the parents are good or bad. I hope they’re good, but maybe they’re in a bad situation. Well, what if they’re bad? Does the kid still deserve to go hungry? No, of course not.

[00:18:02] Amanda Renteria: The core of humanity, right?

[00:18:04] Isaac: That’s it.

[00:18:04] Amanda Renteria: Walking the walk and saying, “If you really care about humankind, you step up in these moments.” You’re in this community now, leading, “Here is how we think it can be.” How do you think about, even this idea that you go to the door and you’re like, “You need food, you’re asking for food, here’s food,” right? How do you manage not just folks who are coming at you and saying, “Hey, you should check verification of income, or you should check”?

How do you manage not only that kind of incoming, but also try and persuade, help people understand, government who does have funding, help them try and understand, “No, listen, we’ve got to do something about this. It’s five days when people came in. It’s kids who we know if they have food and they are healthy, they behave better in school. They’re able to get good grades. They’re able to focus.” How do you manage that?

[00:19:00] Amanda Toups: Well, I’ve learned how to speak to people. You have to know your audience. Like you just said about school, when I’m speaking with moms or teachers or people like that, I would say, “Now, a hungry child is disruptive. A hungry child may be disruptive to the class, disruptive to the people next to them. They’re tired. They’re not going to make good grades. Then what? They’re disruptive, and now they’re sent to the principal’s office, and then what? Expelled. Now they’re home, where there’s no food. This is not helpful.”

It’s sort of the same thing, a different problem. Same thing with eyeglasses. It’s like children who maybe can’t see the board; they’re disruptive. It’s the needs of children not being addressed. Then, when I speak with men, I come at it from a crime perspective. I say, “You want to lower crime in New Orleans? You’re always talking about crime in New Orleans and crime everywhere? Fill their bellies. I promise you crime will go down. I promise you it will.”

When people are hungry, they do desperate things. Whenever their children are hungry, they’re going to do desperate things. I think we’ve all seen in press now, as the SNAP benefit stuff is going out across the press, the anxiety levels have been skyrocketing among these families, and trying to figure out, “How do they survive?”

[00:20:12] Amanda Renteria: Yes, it’s interesting, right? I think some folks wonder how far national politics or policies being discussed versus on the ground, and you all are there. You see it. Your families. Are families aware when national policy changes one way or another, or how do they become aware from your vantage point?

[00:20:33] Amanda Toups: Well, I think right now it’s all over the press. They can’t miss it, can they? The SNAP thing has been everywhere. I think it’s important that we recognize that families will do whatever it takes to feed their children. I hope it means that the people in charge see the pain that they’re causing enough that they can move past their own egos and ideologies and really dig within their hearts and go, “This is humanity.” That could be your child.

[00:21:04] Isaac: When the government fails, we step up. If everybody stepped up, I think we could solve a lot of problems. I think doing that, we could show the government, “This is how you do it.” Set an example. I don’t speak very eloquently. I think when community gets together, and I think this very Southern thing, this very New Orleans thing, that nobody should go without food, and everybody’s welcome at the table, everybody is welcome at the table.

[00:21:35] Amanda Renteria: I want to get around your vision because you both are so innovative and creative and have a vision of what it should look like. You talked a little bit about everyone should have enough. What would New Orleans look like? What would that mean for you when we achieve that?

[00:21:56] Isaac: I think that’s affordable grocery stores. I think that’s paying a better living wage. I think that’s lower insurance cost. I think that’s lower rent. I think that’s easier transportation. Let’s make it easier on the working person, on the working mother, to have a living. In that novel, the people who are working full-time with kids, to make it easier on them, whether it’s free transportation, whether it’s higher living wages, whether it’s lower grocery bills-

[00:22:23] Amanda Toups: It’s like all of it.

[00:22:24] Isaac: -easier access to it, because we could feed people, and we could get people to help feed a lot of them, but let’s solve it the other way around. Let’s get them some resources. Let’s get them the food. Let’s get them the ovens.

[00:22:37] Amanda Toups: Yes, I appreciate that. These days, I feel like more of those visions and hope we need to see because I do think we’re seeing more and more challenges come at families, and even challenges they don’t know yet, but you guys know because you’re reading the policies, you’re reading what’s happening. One of the things that we try and do at Code for America when we come and try and help government understand of “How do you reach people where they are?” Go there, knock on that door. Drive to that house, right?

[00:23:04] Amanda Toups: They’re here.

[00:23:05] Isaac: Get in the world that you guys see every day.

[00:23:08] Amanda Toups: They’re your coworkers, baby. They’re your coworkers. If you’re inside a big office building, someone’s cleaning that office.

[00:23:14] Amanda Renteria: That’s right. That’s right. You can see them. You can ask them. You can say, “What do you need? How can I help?” I want to close out with a question that we asked all of our guests. I’m curious how you all are going to answer this. If you had a magic wand to change one thing about how government works, what would you fix first?

[00:23:35] Isaac: Higher minimum wage.

[00:23:37] Amanda Renteria: Higher minimum wage.

[00:23:39] Amanda Toups: I’d say full transparency to the people.

[00:23:41] Amanda Renteria: Full transparency. Thank you. Thank you both for joining us. It really is an honor to be in conversation with you.

[00:23:46] Amanda Toups: It was nice to meet you.

[00:23:48] Amanda Renteria: Thank you. Thank you for what you are doing. I grew up in one of the lowest-income communities in the state of California. I know how much it matters to the community, to people who grew up there. Food is everything. Just from the bottom of my heart, thank you so much for doing what you do.

[00:24:06] Amanda Toups: Thank you for having me and letting me speak.

[00:24:07] Isaac: Thank you, Amanda.

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[00:24:10] Amanda Renteria: It’s great to hear from Amanda and Isaac, who are really in the on-the-ground, day-to-day logistics of feeding folks in their community. They saw a need and got right to work doing what they already knew how to do so well: making and serving delicious meals for their neighbors. Up next, to give us more context on how to solve hunger in America, I’m speaking to Billy Shore, someone who has been in this fight for 40 years.

Billy founded Share Our Strength back in 1984, which you might know from their No Kid Hungry campaign. He’s seen this movement evolve from emergency food distribution to sophisticated policy advocacy. His organization was instrumental in getting Summer EBT passed, a new federal assistance program that provides lunch to children over the summer, and it’s been implemented across 37 states.

As I mentioned earlier, at Code for America, we partnered with Share Our Strength to create a playbook for Summer EBT implementation. We know that passing a law is just the beginning, and it takes an ongoing effort to make sure that states deliver on those promises, and that funding gets food on tables. Billy helps us understand the big picture. How did we get here? Where are we going? Why does he want to believe that hunger is an issue that is fundamentally solvable?

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[00:25:39] Amanda Renteria: I was thinking back to when you first started, 1984, Purple Rain was out there, Karate Kid, Ghostbusters, the Apple Macintosh, right? There was a lot going on at that time, and that’s when you created Share Our Strength, No Kid Hungry. I’m curious if you could take yourself back in that time. What was it that sparked this? Why, at that moment, was this particular program important to you, and what we needed in the country at that time?

[00:26:13] Billy Shore: Well, it was probably, Amanda, a combination of what was going on in the world and what was going on for me personally. One of the things that was going on in the world was the Ethiopian famine in late 1984, which was this catastrophic humanitarian event that there was really no parallel to at the time. For me, I had just finished working on then-Senator Gary Hart from Colorado’s presidential campaign, and I was trying to decide what I was going to do next, but at the same time wanted to do something a little bit more direct, a little bit more hands-on.

When the famine occurred, I remember talking to my sister, who’d been involved in Senator Hart’s campaign as well, and saying to her, “All of these responses to it are so great, Live Aid and We Are the World, and USA for Africa and Bob Geldof, but none of them are going to be here in five years. Maybe we can create an institution that would be more sustainable, more lasting.” That was the beginning of Share Our Strength.

[00:27:12] Amanda Renteria: What was the response at that time? You were creating this nonprofit, and it was a nonprofit. You were doing something that was bringing people together at a time where a lot was going on. What was the response at that time?

[00:27:28] Billy: The response was so depressing because nobody knew who we were. Nobody had any reason to support us. Our theory was that we would get in touch with chefs and restaurateurs and that they would feel a connection to the hunger issue since they made their livelihoods from feeding people. We literally sent out 1,000 letters to chefs and restaurateurs. We got not one response. Finally, we did, I guess, what entrepreneurs do.

We sent out another 1,000 letters. This time, we got one back from Alice Waters from Chez Panisse in the San Francisco Bay Area. She sent $500 in a note saying, “Let me know what else I can do.” I immediately called her, and I said, “I’ll tell you what else you could do. You could sign the letters because nobody answers mine.” She did. We ended up building from there.

[00:28:16] Amanda Renteria: That’s fantastic to hear. During that time, a lot of social impact nonprofit is really bringing people to the table, to the cause, to really come together in community-building. 40 years ago, when you were building that out, what was your just key thesis or belief that we could solve childhood hunger?

[00:28:41] Billy: Well, honestly, it was very naive. I think we start from a place of almost too much simplicity. Honestly, we had a very naive notion. We didn’t have a sophisticated sense of the hunger issue at the time. We thought that we would raise money. We would distribute it to food banks. They would help feed people. That would be what we did, and that would take care of hunger.

You don’t have to do the work for very long, as you know, before you start to realize that hunger is a symptom of a deeper problem. You’ve got to get to the underlying issues as well. The food banks, although they play and food pantries play a critical role in helping people at some emergency moment in their life is not the sustainable way or the best way to ensure that people are fed and that there’s not hunger.

We constantly evolved. We did that for a little while, and we realized that we had to find a more systemic way of doing it. What we were doing was important at the time. I’m glad we did it, and as we know, even today, there’s this tremendous need for emergency food assistance for people who were not being served by the best benefit assistance programs. In retrospect, it felt like a Band-Aid and that we needed to go further.

[00:29:55] Amanda Renteria: That’s how you learn, right?

[00:29:56] Billy: That’s how you learn.

[00:29:56] Amanda Renteria: You get in and you try and figure it out. Over the course of your For 40 years, it sounds like you have modeled that you evolve with the times. You figure it out while it’s moving. What are the key lessons that if a nonprofit were starting today, that you would have for them in terms of really coming after child hunger or really some of these social problems that we’ve all been trying to solve for some time? How would you start today?

[00:30:22] Billy: I’d say one of the key lessons is that policy is an indispensable aspect of what you do, that you’ve got to do advocacy and policy work and political work, in our case, in a nonpartisan or in a bipartisan fashion. It actually took us too long to start to use policy as the important lever that it is. It was even somewhat serendipitous. There was a time about 20 years ago where I’d read an article in The Washington Post about how the DC government was forfeiting $5 million that could have been used for summer meals at the time because it didn’t have its act together to have a summer meals program.

When I saw that that was going back to the federal government and knowing how, at the time, impoverished DC was, I thought, “Well, wait a second, we’ve got to understand that better.” Of course, that led to our work with school breakfast and school lunch, and realizing that there were so many benefit programs that were being underutilized and not accessed as well as they could be.

[00:31:22] Amanda Renteria: One of the things in recent history is the summer lunch programs that came to be in the last administration. Tell me a little bit about how you thought about summer school lunch programs, how long it took to get to the place where we had, actually, a federal program, one of the first entitlement programs in 50 years, to actually put into place to make sure kids are fed over the summer. That’s a long time coming. What do you think was the key to making sure that came over the edge on policy and actually getting it done?

[00:31:55] Billy: Well, that took a lot of work. In a way, it actually took the pandemic because I think the pandemic created some opportunities from a policy point of view that hadn’t existed before. Summertime had always been the most broken part of the child feeding ecosystem. We fed kids breakfast and lunch at schools. There was even an after-school and supper snack.

In the summertime, when the schools were closed, kids had to try to find either a Boys and Girls Club or a Parks and Recreation Department, or some alternate space that would comply with the federal summer feeding program and have to get reimbursed. The truth is, the participation rates were very, very low. They were at about 13% of 22 million eligible kids.

For years, we advocated for something different, both loosening other restrictions that said kids had to be fed on a congregate basis, which was very clumsy that they all had to be in one place and then, during the pandemic, Pandemic EBT, Electronic Benefits Transfer, was developed so that families would get an additional increase in their resources on their SNAP card, what we used to call their food stamp benefit. The impact has been amazing.

We’ve gone from 3 million kids getting summer meals 2 summers ago to 18 million kids getting summer meals this year. You and I are having this conversation at a time when it feels like everything is shrinking, everything is being curtailed, big things are not possible to achieve in the current political environment, and yet here we have this remarkable increase in summer meals, which is going to make such a big difference for kids.

I’ll tell you one crazy thing about this that is just shocking, and people should just know about it because it almost defies imagination. We have 37 states in. We thought our 38th was going to be Texas. The legislature there, on a bipartisan basis, included $60 million so that Texas could be part of this. About five weeks ago, the governor had to sign the Texas state budget.

It’s a $338-billion budget, $338 billion. He line-item vetoed one thing: $60 million for kids getting meals in the summertime. It kind of defied the bipartisan support that the legislature was behind. Hopefully, we’ll get it eventually, but it just underscores that we still have our work to do.

[00:34:19] Amanda Renteria: I knew that was coming, Billy, from you, which is going to be like, “But we’re not giving up.”

[00:34:22] Billy: No.

[00:34:22] Amanda Renteria: Here we go. I, too, wish these things, the bipartisan successes, the new ideas, the ways that we are taking care of one another and our kids throughout the summer, I wish that had headlines. I’d love to hear because I think sometimes people think about that one nonprofit, but the truth is, it is a broader ecosystem. I’d love to hear how you thought about that and ways that you have used these different groups at different times over the course of the organization.

[00:34:55] Billy: Well, as you point out, it definitely requires a broader ecosystem. I think about something. After that law passed in 2022, Speaker Nancy Pelosi called my cell. I was at home one morning, and she called, then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi. I say that like she’s called me often. She’s actually only called me that one time, [laughter] and not again. What she said on that call, and I think she was speaking as much about you and Code for America as Share Our Strength and the other parts of this ecosystem, she said, “The laws we pass don’t mean a thing unless organizations like yours help state and local governments make sure that everybody who’s supposed to benefit from them gets the benefits.”

I thought that was an interesting insight on the part of a legislator, because usually legislators think they pass the law and they’re done and they’ve solved the problem. She really understood that it does require that you have to follow the chain all the way down and make sure that state and local governments are availing themselves of everything they need, and they need a lot, as we know.

Our strategy has been, on the one hand, to identify a lot of partners at the state and local level that are on the ground, that know the politics, that know the systems, and to make sure that they have the resources that they need, whether it’s financial resources, technical assistance, or what have you. On the other hand, we’ve also tried to, in some cases, create some proof of concept or some models.

I wish we could be deeply involved in all 50 states, but we don’t have the resources to do that. We’ve always had to identify a few states where we thought we could move the needle so significantly that other states would say, “Well, what do we have to do to be a part of that?”

[00:36:44] Amanda Renteria: One of the things I’ve always appreciated about working with you is there’s a national view and vision, and yet there’s a local touch to the way you think about this work. It’s highly unusual, and it’s effective, and it’s hard to do. You have to consistently, on the one hand, make sure that that vision doesn’t go away, and you’re bringing people together to, especially on policy at the federal level, broadly understand what’s happening.

At the same time, to make it effective, it’s knowing what’s happening on the ground, and “How do you actually help people bring them into the system?” As you think about, I don’t know, 40 years from now, ah, let’s go 10 years from now, it’s a little bit hard to think too far these days, how do you hope that the plight to end child hunger, how do you hope this story evolves in this time we are in with emerging technologies coming forward, with more modernization happening, with more tech forward from new generations? What do you think? This movement, how should it change over time, or what’s the vision that you hope to see?

[00:37:55] Billy: Well, I think there’s a couple of components to it, one, which is for me at the core of all of this, and it’s not true of every issue that you and I care about and work on, but I think when it comes to hunger in particular, and especially childhood hunger in the United States, that’s a solvable problem. We always talk about that as solvable, and I think it gives people, in a time when so many problems, whether it’s what’s going on in Gaza, or Ukraine, or climate change, or a whole set of issues that seem like beyond our control, we know that in the United States, we have no shortage of food.

We have no shortage of effective food programs, like those we’ve talked about, school meals and SNAP, WIC, and so forth. One thing is, I want, as time goes on, for more and more people to realize and embrace that this is a solvable issue. This is one that we could actually win, take off the table, and go fight the next battle. The other, I think, has to do with what we were talking about a little earlier, which was our naive notion when we started Share Our Strength, understanding that hunger is a symptom of a set of deeper problems.

Our tagline when we first started Share Our Strength was “It takes more than food to fight hunger.” Although we didn’t have a sophisticated sense of it, we knew that this wasn’t just about getting enough kids school meals or enough food banks the resources they need, that we had to get to the root causes of why families were experiencing hunger, which gets to poverty, and of course, that’s a lot more complicated.

We know that we’ve got to create economic opportunity; we’ve got to create economic mobility for families. At the end of the day, I think if we could get people as excited and as committed to achieving economic mobility as they are to feeding hungry kids, I think that would be a big success. One of the paradoxes I think in our world, Amanda, is that everyone’s in favor of feeding a hungry child.

Nobody ever says, “No, I don’t want to do that.” Not everybody feels the same way about their parents, fairly or unfairly. There’s a little bit more stigma attached to parents and whatever issues they bring to their circumstances. Children are, of course, the most vulnerable and the least responsible for the situation that they find themselves in. There’s this natural sympathy towards kids. At the end of the day, kids need parents. Kids can’t climb out of poverty circumstances on their own. We’ve got to create the political will to make a difference for parents and families as well.

[00:40:27] Amanda Renteria: We do a lot of thinking around that because a lot of our benefits, of course, it’s broad and safety-net. Part of what I hope our country gets back to is how do we actually help communities thrive? “Communities” does include parents and kids, but I think about having grown up in the Central Valley of California in Tulare County, which is one of the lowest-income congressional districts in the country. Food was such an important part of rural America, too, right?

How important it is for not just what it means that you’re not hungry, but what it can be when it is plentiful or you don’t worry about it. I happened to also be a teacher there, and the idea of kids being hungry in class, not being able to focus, the idea that you can’t help the neighbor who comes over and is hungry, and you’re, “Hey, let’s sit at the table and grab something to eat,” I think people don’t quite understand the core and the reality of food deserts, hunger, and how much it means to a community, both for mobility, but just in general, the overall thriving of these counties across the country that really are grappling with this.

One of the things I have appreciated about being at Code for America, being in partnership with you and your organization, is that we are able to come together and really bring back that empowerment of “There is enough for everyone.” We want to make sure that our kids aren’t hungry in school, that we want to make sure this community in rural America can thrive just as much as a wealthy suburb that we see across the country. To me, that’s what wakes me up every day, is how do we do that? There’s nothing better than being in it with people who really care about this. I appreciate–

[00:42:17] Billy: Did you see it as a teacher, Amanda?

[00:42:19] Amanda Renteria: I did see it as a teacher.

[00:42:21] Billy: You did.

[00:42:21] Amanda Renteria: I saw also, at that time, the embarrassment of people who went to the lunch line and didn’t have to pay, and people who went to the other line that had to pay. That disparity, thank goodness, it’s no longer existent, right? It’s now available for all. You could see that, both as a teacher and, remember being a student there. It was worse when I was a student because kids aren’t nice to folks.

As a teacher and growing up and recognizing what difference it makes in the classroom as well, both the hunger and the shame of it, is why I’m so passionate about what we’re doing and what you’re doing, because this is something we can solve, and it has huge benefits across the board for communities that have been largely left out. Still, to this day, my parents see my work at its core of helping make sure people can eat.

It was a big deal for my dad when he was younger. It was a big deal for a lot of the labor camps back in the day. He remembers when the farmers would be like, “Here’s an extra bin,” and all the kids from the labor camp would go running to go get that. That really does still sit with me today as I think about “How do we make that easier so kids aren’t running to bins, but they’re fed with dignity?”

[00:43:32] Billy: When my son, who’s now a college junior, was in, I’m going to say, seventh grade, his teacher, Mr. Horowitz, asked me to come speak to the class about our work at Share Our Strength. I jumped at the opportunity, not realizing I should’ve checked with my son first because my very appearance in the class made it the most embarrassing day of his life, and I knew–

[00:43:52] Amanda Renteria: Right? [laughs] I’m a seventh-grader right now, so I hear you.

[00:43:56] Billy: Oh, so you know. He came down into the kitchen that morning, and he looked at me, and he just said, “Tell me you’re not wearing that shirt.” It was just a blue shirt, like I’m wearing now. He had a whole series of suggestions, including “Right before you come into the classroom, Dad, stop and brush down your eyebrows because sometimes they go every which way.” [laughter]

The reason I tell you this is when the class started, and I started to talk about our work, and I find that these questions only come from younger people, one of the little boys in the seventh-grade class raised his hand, and he said, “Mr. Shore,” he said, “I’m curious, at Share Our Strength, have you found a way to serve children and families without embarrassing them?” which I thought was just a really great question for a seventh-grader.

Another asked, “At Share Our Strength, do you get to know and see the families you serve, and do they feel seen, or do they feel invisible to you?” These, really, they go right to the heart of the dignity that you were just speaking about and that a lot of families grow up with, and when you think about that, for me, it changed the way we do our work and Share Our Strength.

[00:45:02] Amanda Renteria: I wish more people could feel that sense of “How do we help, right? How do we help that seventh-grader not feel the way he did, right?” Because that’s why he’s asking that question. You now worked in government agencies, and one of the things we think about is how important it is to be able to link into government in order to serve people at scale. What have you learned about this intersection of addressing hunger and working with government to do this work?

[00:45:32] Billy: Well, I think it’s absolutely essential. I feel like there are certain things that nonprofits can do that maybe they can even do better than government. I feel like nonprofits have the latitude to innovate, to take risks, to be closer to the people they serve, and to, in turn, learn from that proximity to individuals with lived experience; government often lacks that.

Once I think you’ve built a better mousetrap, once you’ve created a product or service, to really get it to scale requires public will and public assistance, and public support, which is another euphemism for government. People don’t like to talk about government, but government is all of us, and it’s the public saying, “We want to get behind something that works.” It’s really important to do it.

For us, it’s been important to do it on a bipartisan basis. We’ve just had a lot of success with that. It’s not for everybody. I divide the world into what I think of as bridge builders and bomb throwers. We’re more bridge builders. We’re thinking long-term, and we’re trying to work with people even when they disagree with us, which I think we need in our society more than ever today. The role of government is indispensable. As I say, if there’s one thing I could’ve done differently, I would’ve had Share Our Strength come to this realization earlier than we did.

[00:46:53] Amanda Renteria: Billy, I knew I would appreciate being able to get a chance to talk to you because there’s no better place than standing on a bridge for me, connecting different communities, whether it’s rural or urban or red or blue or the kind of work that we’re doing where we’re doing government, tech, hunger, and how to bring those folks together.

There’s nothing better than being right in the center of that, realizing that you’re bringing these worlds together to try and do something good. That gives me hope. Before we go, I want to have one last question that we ask all of our guests. If you had a magic wand to change one thing about how government works, what would you fix first?

[00:47:34] Billy: I think it would go to this issue of proximity of how government gets closer to the people that it serves. One of the unusual things in my life right now, and it’s a result of my son Nate, who I mentioned is in college, is, about five or six years ago, he got obsessed with joining the fire department, and he was too young to do it, so he talked me into doing it, and I didn’t want to be a firefighter. I’m not good at anything firefighters do. I finally joined up, and I’ve been a firefighter now for about six years. I drive our aerial ladder. I’ve driven it to about 600 calls.

[00:48:09] Amanda Renteria: Wow.

[00:48:09] Billy: One of the things that I’ve learned from it and that I always think about is what if, as a society, we responded to a child trapped in poverty the way the fire department responds to a child trapped in a burning building? What’s missing there is that proximity, that sense of shared purpose on the fire department. I haven’t been to 1,000 fires, but I’ve been to enough of them.

Having been to fires, you see this shared purpose that exists that is so missing in our politics today. I think one of the reasons for that shared purpose is you’re standing, all of you, in front of a building in which somebody needs to be rescued from the second floor in a house on fire, and your politics don’t matter because our fire department, our politics are all over the place. If anything, they’re way more conservative than I am.

That sense of proximity that comes from, “We will do whatever it takes,” I’ve been thinking about what I call the new morality of “Whatever it takes,” this notion that things that are never heard on the fire ground, you’re getting more than you wanted from this question, Amanda, but things that we-

[00:49:16] Amanda Renteria: No, I love it.

[00:49:17] Billy: -never say on the fire ground are, “Let’s study it for six months,” or “What if we can’t afford to finish this?” Right? Nobody ever leaves the fire ground until the fire’s out. Somehow, I think we need to create that ethic in our country.

[00:49:31] Amanda Renteria: I love it. I think that’s a fantastic way to think about, we are in this firefighting together to eradicate hunger, to do good in the world. I love the model of how you do whatever it takes, and you’re standing together. Nobody talks about the roles or the study or what side you’re on, but we could use a little bit more firefighters like you, Billy, in the world. I appreciate that. Thank you. Thank you for doing this with me. 

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[00:50:04] Amanda Renteria: The work Billy Shore and Isaac and Amanda do is crucial. We need big-picture thinking and folks on the ground, face-to-face, listening to what people need. Groups like Toups Family Meal and Share Our Strength have a common mission: fill stomachs. It’s that simple. We need to close the gap between food access now and food access in the long term. As Billy said, the issue of hunger is fundamentally solvable. It doesn’t have to be like this.

We have the food and bipartisan support to make sure that people don’t go hungry. In a time of such uncertainty, with major federal food funding cuts to programs like SNAP, it can be scary for families, but it also means this work is increasingly critical for all of us. There’s never been a better time to get involved.

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[00:51:02] Amanda Renteria: This podcast is brought to you by Code for America, the country’s leading civic tech nonprofit for over 15 years. We believe that government can work for the people, by the people, in the new digital age. We work with government at all levels across the country to make the delivery of public service better with technology. We partner with community organizations and governments to build digital tools, change policy, and improve programs. Our goal? A resilient government that works well for everyone. Learn more at codeforamerica.org.

If you liked this episode of the Government Fix, please rate and review the show wherever you get your podcasts.

If you listen to The Government Fix, chances are you’re an innovator, a problem solver, the kind of person who thinks outside the box. If that sounds like you, then Code for America Summit is the one event you absolutely cannot miss in 2026. We’re having our annual conference in Chicago on May 7th and 8th, and we’d love for you to join us. To find out more, visit Code for America dot org slash Summit twenty-twenty-six. We can’t wait to see you in Chicago!

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