I Was Hungry: Cultivating Common Ground to End an American Crisis

Everett, founder and executive director of the Texas Hunger Initiative, asks readers to help feed the needy in his persuasive debut. “Hunger is a solvable problem,” he writes, and “the time to do so is now.” Mining his years of experience working on crisis relief and within chronically impoverished communities (primarily in Texas and Maine), Everett tells of massive efforts he was involved in to coordinate food supply chains and demonstrates the power of working together. Citing biblical mandates such as Matthew 25:31–46, he believes that helping one’s neighbors is something all Christians are called to do. Everett does no hand-wringing, and instead intersperses his personal stories with research and practical solutions for addressing hunger and poverty. He lays out “five steps to create a hunger-free community coalition”—recruit, establish structure, plan for action, take action, assess progress—and addresses potential political hurdles, such as partisan deadlock on legislative committees. To show how perseverance can pay off, he includes an instructive anecdote about how infighting on the National Commission on Hunger was eventually overcome through slow, incremental building of consensus toward reform. Everett’s book will appeal to Christians looking to give back to their community, as well as any reader interested in the plight of America’s poor. (Aug.)