Acting Locally

STUDYING AFRICAN HUNGER ISSUES in an environmental studies class led Rebecca "Becca" Heller '05 to mobilize more than a dozen of her classmates to address the problem closer to home.

Working with local farmers, the students initiated a program of "gleaning," the removal of produce that remains in fields after crops are harvested for sale.

After the environmental studies class disbanded, the gleaning project became a part of Students Fighting Hunger (SFH), a group that operates through the Tucker Foundation to serve weekly dinners and run canned-food drives.

SFH delivered gleaned food directly to shelters such as the LISTEN Center in Lebanon either in raw form or as part of prepared meals. Last fall the entire gleaning operation cost $l2 (for plastic storage bags) and generated more than 1,300 meals. It is being repeated with this fall's harvests.

"We were learning all about hunger and famine issues in Africa, and I thought that instead ofwriting a term paper about what is going on elsewhere, we could make some actual change in the Upper Valley," explains Heller, who will study hunger and food security in Africa this fall before spending winter term in India and Cuba as a senior fellow and then returning for two terms on campus to complete her degree.

After investigating existing relief structures, Heller and her fellow students learned that hunger in the area isn't caused by a lack of calories, but by a lack of access to healthful foods such as fresh vegetables—and by limited knowledge of how to prepare them for maximum nutritional benefit.

SFH has also teamed up with the Children's Defense Fund (CDF), which in February taught 15 SFH members about issues related to state-based aid programs such as food stamps. CDF lecturers discussed barriers to signing up for aid such as literacy, embarrassment, daily work commitments and changing state eligibility requirements, and discussed with students how SFH can reach out to the more than 50 percent of eligible people who are not signed up for aid.

Waste Not, Want Not Becca Heller ’05was given a Howard R. Swearer HumanitarianAward for her gleaning efforts.

QUUOTE/UNQUOTE "If you track the career.of a computer scientist as lie progresses, the ability to make ideas known to other people is more important than the ability to write programs." COMPUTER SCIENCE PROFESSOR TOM CORMEN, ACTING DIRECTOR OF THE COLLEGE'S NEW WRITING PROGRAM