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4 NORTHWEST HARVEST COMMUNITY REPORT 5

A BOLD NEW VISION IN FIGHTING

HUNGER ACROSS OUR STATE

A MESSAGE FROM CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER THOMAS REYNOLDS

For fifty years, Northwest Harvest has opened its doors to eight Washingtonians struggling to put food on the table and one
mothers, fathers, children, and elders. Each distributed bag in five children living in food insecure households, Northwest
of groceries, is accompanied by love, respect, and dignity. Harvest is setting forth with a new, more comprehensive strategy.
For several generations, farmers, producers, volunteers, We are asking two critical questions: first, how can we help
donors, and staff have banded together and accounted for people who are hungry get better access to healthy, nutritious
more than half a billion nutritious meals for our neighbors in food? And second, why is it that certain communities remain
need. We are a state that truly cares for its communities. chronically food insecure—and what can be done about it?
At the same time food insecurity remains persistently high. There is a narrative that suggests that hunger could be
Within an increasingly prosperous state economy, inequality is solved if all the food wasted in the US could be given to the
rising dramatically. In a recent report, Seattle was determined people who are hungry. I’m very skeptical of this simple
to be the third most unequal metro region in the entire country. equation. Given that rates of food insecurity differ based on
This has compelled us to step up even further and intensify our a multitude of factors (such as geography and ethnicity), my
role in addressing systemic causes of poverty and hunger—not hypothesis is that there are much deeper causes at the root
just in the Seattle area but across our entire state. With one in of hunger that our society must identify, expose, and tackle.