It was my first time at the Kenneth Hahn Hall of Administration.  Nestled in the Civic Center downtown, it’s drab, bureaucratic aesthetic is no frills and all business.  It set the right mood, given that, today, Fed Up with Hunger was all about business.

We came to attend a meeting convened by County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky to review the progress of the county’s audit of its response to food insecurity.  The audit, which was requested by the Board of County Supervisors in response to Fed Up with Hunger’s ”Blueprint to End Hunger in Los Angeles”, will help the county determine how to apply the Blueprint’s recommendations.  Over a half a dozen county department were in attendance, as well as the Jewish Family Service of Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank, Feeding America’s spoke person David Arquette and the California Food Policy Advocates. 

The meeting was held in a wood-paneled eighth floor conference room with a large table that stood out like a butte in the middle of the room.  Once everyone had gathered, Supervisor Yaroslavsky leaned forward in his chair like Larry King does when he gets serious about an interview.  He thanked everyone for attending and, without much further ado, set us to task.

Food stamp enrollment was the soup d’jour.  Our “Blueprint to End Hunger” makes it clear that food assistance programs like food stamps are some of the most powerful tools we have to address food insecurity.  As it stands, Los Angeles County’s food stamp program is severely underutilized, resulting in a loss of nearly $1 billion dollars of emergency food aid. 

One of the primary reasons for the low enrollment in food stamps is the requirement for applicants to have an in-person interview.  While this may seem minor, for those who are elderly, disabled, lack transportation or who can’t take off during work hours, traveling to the county office and waiting in long lines for a meeting can be logistically impossible.   Many other counties across the nation have addressed this problem by waiving the in-person interview.  In most cases, an in-person interview is actually superfluous: eligibility can be determined electronically by checking whether an applicant is already enrolled in a governement assistance program.

I’m happy to report that our meeting with the County was ultimately productive- the Department of Social Services committed to fully implementing the face-to-face waiver by June.  While it is true that in government deadlines are not hard-and-fast, we are excited that the county is moving towards making food stamps more accessible to the hungry in our community.

I left the meeting with a little skip in my step that I couldn’t help.  It was wonderful to see how the seeds of change planted by the  ”Blueprint to End Hunger in Los Angeles” have taken root.  In the coming months, I’ll be excited to watch them grow!

Thank you County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky for making hunger a priority and helping us to strengthen food security in Los Angeles!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 12th, 2010 at 12:56 pm and is filed under Celeb Champions, Political Proponents. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.