By Ellen Messer
Ten years ago, Brown University entered into an extraordinary partnership with R.I. philanthropist Alan Shawn Feinstein. Together, they launched the Alan Shawn Feinstein World Hunger Program, a university center for research and teaching uniquely dedicated to reducing hunger and eliminating its causes.
The program's model philanthropic-university alliance is based on a small but energetic faculty core who have defined "hunger" as an interdisciplinary academic field. A decade ago, different academic disciplines, sectored policy makers, and social or environmental action programs each addressed hunger issues in their own terms. In its first year, the World Hunger Program defined and linked these different understandings of hunger into a single typology, a framework that successfully mobilizes and merges the interests of those who study famine, poverty, nutrition and human values into a single but diverse set of program activities.
Through this fundamental achievement, the World Hunger Program has raised international awareness that although hunger is a multifaceted dilemma lacking a simple solution, there are steps everyone - at the grass roots level as well as at world summits - can take to try to make a difference.
For its own part, the program tries to make a difference by balancing research and education with service and action:
This network continues to be crucial to the World Hunger Program's international policy and advocacy effort to end half the world's hunger by the end of the 20th century. The initiative has involved individuals from the United Nations, non-government organizations, Third World nutrition institutes, journalists and ordinary citizens. In the process, the World Hunger Program itself has become a kind of non-governmental organization that contributes actively to food and nutrition policy and actions, and to which international organizations look for research, ideas and networking that literally and practically link the "summit" with the "grassroots."
Ten years ago there was no Alan Shawn Feinstein Hunger Program. Today, the program provides those working against hunger with a common point of reference at Brown University. Project by project, World Hunger Program researchers are strengthening knowledge and action networks that can better identify hunger violations and mobilize corrective actions, and are widening the scope of caring for the hungry from family to community, to region, state, and globe.
But shifts in the global, national, institutional, and philanthropic context threaten to cut short its life-saving potential. Despite measurable gains against hunger, global attitudes appear to be shifting from relative optimism to pessimism that such social problems can be solved. In addition, local and national institutions increasingly frame hunger more narrowly as a problem of "environment" or dilute the sharp focus on "hunger" by submerging it in broader, but vaguer concepts such as "human development" or "caring."
Short-term "bottom line" reasoning and the search for simple "sound-bite" solutions by political decision makers constitute a special challenge, since hunger is a complex problem with no simple solutions.
As World Hunger Program researchers take on the challenge, they continue their mission under a new administrative umbrella, the Watson Institute of International Studies, and in a greater Providence community that has been renewed by partnerships with the World Hunger Program and other initiatives sparked by the generosity and vision of its founding donor and of Brown University.
Ellen Messer is director of the Alan Shawn Feinstein World Hunger Program.