Interview with Billy Shore, Founder of Share Our Strength, on Solving Childhood Hunger in America

In episode 29 of the Disruptors for GOOD podcast, I speak with Billy Shore, founder and and executive chair of Share Our Strength, on solving childhood hunger in America.

Since founding Share Our Strength in 1984 with his sister Debbie, Billy has led the organization in raising more than $700 million to fight hunger and poverty and has won the support of national leaders in business, government, health, and education, sports and entertainment.

Billy is also the chair of Community Wealth Partners, Share Our Strength’s for-profit consulting firm which provides strategic consulting to help leaders and communities solve social problems.

Before founding Share Our Strength, Billy served on the senatorial and presidential campaign staffs for former U.S. Senator Gary Hart and as chief of staff to former U.S. Senator Robert Kerrey. In 2014, congressional leaders appointed him to the National Commission on Hunger, tasked with finding innovative ways to end hunger in America.

In addition to his work with Share Our Strength, Billy is a leading voice in the national conversation on hunger and poverty. He is the author of four books focused on social change, including “Revolution of the Heart” (Riverhead Press, 1995), “The Cathedral Within” (Random House, 1999), “The Light of Conscience” (Random House, 2004) and most recently, “The Imaginations of Unreasonable Men” (Public Affairs, 2010).

He also hosts Add Passion and Stir, a weekly podcast that brings together high-profile chefs and change-makers to talk about the central role food plays in social justice.

A native of Pittsburgh, Pa., Billy earned a Bachelor of Arts at the University of Pennsylvania and his law degree from George Washington University in Washington, DC. He has been an adjunct professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business and an advisor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government. From 2001 to 2011, he served as a director of The Timberland Company.

Interview Transcript

Grant: What’s up, everybody? This is Grant from Causeartist. Today we’re chatting with Billy Shore, the Executive Chair and Founder of Share Our Strength and the No Kid Hungry campaign. In this conversation, we delve into hunger, how it affects families, especially children in elementary and high school, and how school lunch programs have evolved over time.

We even touch on how World War II soldiers influenced the school lunch program as we know it today. Billy has spent over three decades addressing hunger in America, finding innovative ways to ensure children receive the meals they need. With 22 million kids on free or reduced lunch, this is a massive issue that doesn’t always get the attention it deserves. I found this conversation incredibly educational, and I hope you will too.

Billy Shore is the founder and Executive Chair of Share Our Strength, the parent organization of the No Kid Hungry campaign. Billy and his sister Debbie started the organization in 1984, and since then, they’ve raised more than $700 million to fight hunger and poverty through policy creation, grants, and private company partnerships.

We talk a lot about these partnerships and their impact. Before founding Share Our Strength, Billy served on the senatorial and presidential campaign staffs for former U.S. Senator Gary Hart and as Chief of Staff to former U.S. Senator Robert Kerry. In 2014, Billy was appointed to the National Commission on Hunger, tasked with finding innovative ways to end hunger in America.

He’s also the author of four books, and we might hear about a fifth one coming up. Billy also hosts a podcast where he talks with innovative chefs about food and its role in our social fabric, and how everyone in America should have access to three meals a day.

03:42

Grant: I always like to start with the journey that led individuals to where they are today. Your journey has been long and illustrious. Could you start by telling us about how you got into the fight against hunger and poverty in America? What inspired you to dedicate most of your life to this cause?

Billy: I’ve always been interested in public service. I grew up in a family that was involved in it—my father was the district administrative assistant to a congressman from Pittsburgh. I went to school in Philadelphia and always had it in mind to work in Washington on Capitol Hill.

Literally the day after I graduated from Penn, I drove down to D.C. and started knocking on doors. I ended up getting an internship with Senator Gary Hart from Colorado, eventually becoming his Chief of Staff.

After his unsuccessful presidential campaigns, I was left with a lot of organizing skills and was trying to figure out how to use them. Around the same time, there was a catastrophic famine in Ethiopia, which got me thinking about how to apply those skills in a different arena.

That’s when the idea for Share Our Strength came about. We started by organizing the restaurant and food service industry because hunger seemed like a solvable problem, especially in the United States. Although the Ethiopian famine was the catalyst, we eventually focused on domestic hunger, particularly child hunger, because it felt like a problem we could actually solve.

05:57

Grant: Hunger seems like an issue that would garner bipartisan support. Have you seen that throughout your career?

Billy: Yes, we’ve seen a lot of bipartisan support, although there are limits to it. When we focused on the No Kid Hungry campaign, the idea was that by fully leveraging existing food and nutrition programs, we could ensure kids get three meals a day.

These programs, like the School Lunch and Breakfast Programs, have been around since World War II when admirals and generals returned and told Congress that our troops weren’t strong enough or fit enough to fight effectively. That led to the creation of these programs, which have had bipartisan support because of their security implications.

Today, 22 million children in the U.S. get a free or reduced-price school lunch, 100% subsidized by the federal government. However, only 12 million of those kids are getting breakfast, even though they’re eligible.

Our work has been to increase that number, and we’ve intentionally kept our efforts bipartisan, recruiting both Democratic and Republican governors to ensure it doesn’t look like one party’s initiative. However, the tricky part is that while everyone supports feeding hungry children, not everyone supports doing what’s best for them, which is strengthening their families. That’s where the politics can get complicated.

09:39

Grant: Can you give us an overview of what hunger has looked like in America over the past few decades? Has there been improvement, or has it stayed the same?

Billy: There has been dramatic improvement, especially over the last 10 years. Hunger in America is less visible compared to places like Africa or Asia. We don’t have kids literally starving to death, but we have many who are food insecure. Teachers are often the best witnesses to this because hungry kids can’t learn or pay attention as well.

When we started the No Kid Hungry campaign, our goal was to ensure kids get three meals a day. We focused on existing programs because there’s a lot of money available for them.

For example, when we started, only 9 million kids were getting breakfast; today, it’s 12 million. We’ve added 3 million kids to the program by moving breakfast from the cafeteria to the classroom, which has made a huge difference.

There’s still work to do, especially with summer meals, where only 3 million of the 22 million eligible kids are getting them. But we’ve made significant progress—childhood hunger is at its lowest level in history, having been reduced by about 30% over the last eight years.

15:11

Grant: Summer seems like a big challenge. How do you address hunger when school is out? Are there any programs that have been implemented to help with that?

Billy: When the Summer Meals Program was created, it was assumed that schools would have summer school, where kids could get meals. But due to budget cuts, many summer schools have been eliminated. So, we’ve had to build a patchwork quilt of alternatives—Boys and Girls Clubs, church-based facilities, Parks and Recreation Departments.

However, it’s a clunky system that reaches relatively few kids. The money is there for summer meals, but the infrastructure isn’t. We’re constantly trying to get the attention of governors, school superintendents, and other leaders to address this issue. Every governor we’ve spoken to, regardless of politics, has jumped at the chance to address childhood hunger once they understand the resources available.

18:43

Grant: How does the creation of food for these programs work? Does it come from companies, or is it sourced locally? Does it vary by state?

Billy: It varies almost everywhere. Each state or locality contracts with a food service provider that meets the federal government’s requirements for nutritional value and cost.

Some schools are more intentional about contracting with providers that purchase locally and offer healthier, less processed foods. For example, in Boston, the school infrastructure is old, and until a few years ago, there weren’t kitchens in the schools.

All the food was being cooked on Long Island, frozen, and then shipped to schools, which was far from ideal. A foundation helped renovate and build kitchens in Boston schools, so now they can cook their own meals, which are healthier and more appetizing. But it’s different everywhere, and there’s no one-size-fits-all solution.

20:58

Grant: What are the current priorities for the No Kid Hungry campaign? What’s the strategy for the next decade?

Billy: Our number one goal is to cut the breakfast gap in half again. While 22 million kids are getting lunch at school, not all of them need breakfast at school. Some will have breakfast at home with their families. So, we aim to ensure that about 70% of the kids who get lunch also get breakfast.

We’re also focused on addressing the significant gap in summer meals. There are federal regulations that make it challenging to feed kids in the summer, such as the requirement that they eat on a congregate basis, meaning they have to eat together, which limits the flexibility of the program. We’re working on finding solutions to these challenges.

24:51

Grant: You mentioned the private sector earlier. How has the private sector helped No Kid Hungry or your cause in general over the past decade?

Billy: The private sector has played a huge role for us. We’ve always believed that charity alone wouldn’t solve the problem at the scale it exists. We needed to be a nonprofit that not only redistributed wealth but also created it.

We started by organizing chefs and restaurateurs, believing they would have a connection to the issue of hunger since they make their livelihoods from feeding people. That turned out to be true, and today we have about 25,000 chefs and restaurateurs deeply engaged with us.

This also created opportunities for cause-related marketing and corporate partnerships with companies like Citibank, Williams-Sonoma, and GrubHub. These partnerships have been crucial to our funding—of our $85 million budget, about $65 million comes from corporate partnerships, events, and sponsorships.

Our consulting firm, Community Wealth Partners, also helps other nonprofits learn how to engage with businesses effectively.

29:15

Grant: Food waste is a big issue. Does your organization address it, and how?

Billy: Food waste is a significant issue, with about 30% of all food in the country being wasted. While it’s not our primary focus, it’s something we’re very concerned about.

We’ve funded organizations that address food waste, and we’re exploring partnerships with companies like Amazon, GrubHub, and DoorDash to use their delivery expertise to get meals to people efficiently.

We’ll always focus on large-scale systems change, but there are always people who fall through the cracks, and addressing food waste could be a part of the solution.

33:21

Grant: You mentioned earlier that the Ethiopian famine was a catalyst for you. Does Share Our Strength work globally, and what’s the state of global hunger today?

Billy: Global hunger exists on a much larger and more severe scale than in the U.S., with people literally dying of famine and starvation in places like Africa, Haiti, and India.

While we’ve been very focused on domestic hunger, we’ve recently started some international grantmaking. For example, we’re funding an organization in India called Akshaya Patra, which delivers meals to school kids.

We’re looking at how we can apply what we’ve learned domestically to global issues and vice versa. The world is more connected than ever, and we believe there’s mutual benefit in learning from and supporting each other.

35:09

Grant: You’ve written a few books, but it’s been a while since your last one in 2010. Are you working on anything new?

Billy: You’re killing me, Grant! I wake up every morning intending to write, but the day job has taken over. I do think about writing a lot, and there are a couple of things I’ve been considering.

One is a book based on the conversations we’ve had with chefs on our podcast, Add Passion and Stir. We’ve had about 150 conversations with chefs about their passion for making a difference in the world, and there’s a lot of interesting material there.

I’m also thinking about writing something on why we give lip service to investing in children but don’t live up to our words, exploring the political and social forces that keep the status quo in place. Your question might just be the catalyst I need to get started!

36:31

Grant: Speaking of chefs, are there any chefs or restaurants that stand out to you for their work in the social impact space?

Billy: Many chefs are doing amazing work. For example, Sam Polk in Los Angeles started Everytable, which provides prepared meals in small retail outlets for low-income families with variable pricing based on the neighborhood. Jason Alley in Richmond, Virginia, is creating a restaurant where all the profits go back into the community to support the local food bank.

Chefs are fundamentally in the business of taking care of people, and many of them are using their skills to make a difference in their communities. We also deploy chefs and volunteers through a program called Cooking Matters, which is a nutrition education program that teaches low-income families how to grocery shop and cook on a budget.

39:41

Grant: You’ve been at this for a long time, starting in 1984. What are you most proud of? What has the last three decades been like for you?

Billy: One of the biggest learnings is that it takes longer than you think it will, and you have to invest the time. We’ve been nothing if not stubborn, and stubbornness is probably one of our most important attributes.

It does take time, and you have to calibrate your strategy realistically to how long it will take to solve a problem. Another big learning is that everyone has a strength to share. I’m most proud of the number of people who have felt empowered through Share Our Strength to give back to their communities.

Solving the problems we face in this country requires everyone—politicians, nonprofits, businesses, and individuals—to work together. Seeing chefs, restaurant owners, and others realize they can make a difference in their communities has been incredibly fulfilling. We’ve still got a long way to go, but I believe we’re on the right path.

42:14

Grant: Thank you so much, Billy. This has been a really enlightening conversation. It’s gratifying to talk about how we can all come together to solve these monumental issues like hunger. I appreciate your time and dedication to this cause.

Billy: Likewise, Grant. Thank you for talking with us about this, and I know your listeners are the kind of folks who are making a difference in their communities. This has been a great opportunity for us, and we really appreciate it.