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No Kid Hungry Blog

Let's Move

Posted by Janet McLaughlin on Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Yesterday, I visited the White House as Share Our Strength’s representative for the First Lady’s announcement of Let’s Move, a nationwide campaign to solve the epidemic of childhood obesity (called up to the big show when the big snow kept our Executive Director Billy Shore from making the trip from Boston).

It might seem odd for an anti-hunger organization to be at an anti-obesity event. But there is a natural alignment. Hunger is, at its core, a health issue. Whether we call ourselves anti-hunger activists, health advocates, or anti-obesity campaigners, we are all working to ensure that kids eat the nutritious foods they need to lead active and healthy lives.

On the Let’s Move web site, the text highlights that 16.7 million kids live in households that face hunger, though this didn’t make it into the First Lady’s remarks. Instead she focused on what could be considered more mainstream, or middle class, concerns around screen time, school meals, and working parents’ guilt.

But when you dig into the Let’s Move initiatives and whom they will help the most, I think that it will be the 20% of kids living in households below the poverty line (that’s about $22,000/year for a family of four) where both hunger and obesity are more prevalent. When you consider that over 60% of school lunches are served at a free or reduced price, it’s clear that addressing the nutritional quality and appeal of those meals will target those kids from low-income households.

View the video of the White House launch event.

Making healthy foods more accessible and affordable is one of the four focus areas of the initiative — and will primarily impact those of limited resources living in communities with limited resources. The kids most needing safe places to play are those who don’t have a backyard or a well-resourced PTA. I believe our role as a nonprofit with a mission to “end hunger and poverty” is to use our efforts and influence to ensure that kids with the least get the most benefit from the Let’s Move campaign.

Now I’m young enough (or old enough, depending on your perspective) to remember Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign, and I remember it being everywhere, from school to the skating rink to the Punky Brewster episode where she firmly says no and pushes away the hand of the “cool” girl offering her drugs in the treehouse. I’m hopeful that that same omnipresence will accompany this campaign — and that all our kids will find that being healthy and hunger-free is normal or, even better, cool.

This is a movement — and a moment — where, as the amazing Will Allen of Growing Power noted yesterday, all of the most powerful stakeholders are on the same page: corporations, universities, farmers, government, doctors, and our First Lady. All agree that change is coming and critical — and it’s up to us to make sure that it benefits the least powerful. Let’s move.

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February 10, 2010 | 1 comment(s) | Tags: childhood hunger, let's move, white house