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Budget

Call (800/826-3688) or email your representative and senators and urge them to:

• Oppose harmful structural changes to SNAP, Medicaid, and international development assistance.
• Oppose any budget cuts that would increase hunger and poverty in the U.S. and around the world. Worldwide, nearly 800 million people are hungry, including 20 million at risk of starvation in Africa and the Middle East due to famine.
• Fully fund domestic safety-net and international development programs that end hunger and poverty. This includes providing at least $60 billion for international affairs in the fiscal year 2018 budget and adequately funding programs like SNAP, Medicaid, WIC, and summer EBT.

President Trump and Congress are pushing for unprecedented cuts in programs that help hungry people in our country and around the world, turning back the clock on decades of progress. Demand they make a better choice.

For more information on this issue:

• 2017 Offering of Letters: Doing Our Part to End Hunger
• Budget 101: Block Grants, Flexibility, and Per Capita Caps

Watch for action alerts. For additional talking points, contact organizing@bread.org or call 800/822-7323.

Schedule your letter-writing event

The 2017 Offering of Letters: Doing Our Part to End Hunger is available in English and Spanish.

Complete Your Activist Field Report Form

Have you met with a new member of Congress? We would love to hear about it. Tell us about your experience using the field report form.

Activists in Action

Illinois Catholics To Bring Over 5,000 Letters to Washington, D.C.

Kayla Jacobs, justice and peace coordinator for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Joliet in Illinois, and parishioner Sue Swedler, will carry 5,400 letters to their members of Congress when they travel to Washington, D.C., on June 13th for Bread’s 2017 Lobby Day.

Jacobs and Swedler will join more than 500 faithful activists on Capitol Hill this week, meeting with their members of Congress. Lobby Day participants will be delivering a clear message: pass a fiscal year 2018 budget that makes ending hunger a priority.

A diocesan-wide Offering of Letters is not unusual for the Joliet Catholics.  Last year, 11 parishes produced 3,000 letters.  This year’s remarkable increase is a testament to being mutually encouraged by one another’s faith.

“We can do so much more together,” Jacobs said..  “It gives us a real sense of doing something good — not just as individuals or churches, but as a single body.  We encourage each other and share a common goal - to end hunger.”

In March, Jacobs and Chicago-based Bread for the World organizer Zach Schmidt led an Offering of Letters workshop for a handful of lay leaders in the diocese. Those leaders then led letter-writing events in their respective parishes. By the time they reconvened at the beginning of June, the number of letters had skyrocketed. Over 5,000 letters to Congress from 16 parishes were blessed at the meeting!

Jacobs and Swedler will be supported by more than just letters when they meet with with U.S. Sens. Richard Durbin, Tammy Duckworth, and their respective representatives to ask for funding for anti-hunger programs in the next budget. Hundreds of activists will be calling the offices of their Illinois members of Congress reinforcing their message as part of Virtual Lobby Day.  During last week’s leader meeting, Schmidt passed out copies of the Lobby Day call-in script and encouraged the leaders to recruit callers.

“As someone who isn’t Catholic, I have been blessed not only to work with Kayla and lay leaders in the Joliet Catholic Diocese,” Schmidt said.  “But also to get a taste of Catholic faith and practice and to learn what their faith has to say about justice and advocacy — which is quite a bit!”

More Resources: Activist Tool Kit

The Activist Tool Kit is intended for new and current Bread grassroots hunger activists. It provides a set of how-to sheets for carrying out advocacy and fact sheets on the current issues Bread for the World is working on.

It's ideal as a starter toolkit for new Bread activists or as a set of updates for current activists. Form your own toolkit by printing out some or all of the sheets in the kit.

How-tos:

• How to Conduct an In-District Meeting with a Member of Congress (or the Staff)
• Effectively Using Public Meetings to Engage with Members of Congress
• Writing a Letter to the Editor of Your Local Newspaper
• Social Media Kit for #IVote2EndHunger
• Conducting an Offering of Letters

Issues-related pieces:

• Hunger and Poverty State Fact Sheets
• Hunger by the Numbers (2016)
• Fact Sheet: Get the Facts About SNAP
• Budget 101
• Budget Reconciliation 101
• Budget 101: Block Grants, Flexibility, and Per Capita Caps
• Immigration as a hunger issue
• Analysis: The BRIDGE (Bar Removal of Individuals who Dream and Grow our Economy) Act
• Poverty-Focused Development Assistance (PFDA) 101
• The Affordable Care Act 101
• Mass Incarceration and Over-Policing Fact Sheet
• Hunger and Poverty in the Latino Community
• Hunger and Poverty in the African-American Community

Biblical resources:

• The Biblical Basis for Advocacy to End Hunger
• The Bible and Immigration Reform
• The Bible and Poverty-Focused Development Assistance
• The Bible and Mass Incarceration
• The Bible on Health as a Hunger Issue