'Hungry for Justice' in Illinois
At the end of each day our hotline staff at the Illinois Hunger Coalition looked overwhelmed and sad, frustrated that they were barely keeping up with the volume of callers.
The Hunger Hotline had been ringing persistently for nearly a month, as 1,300 households were given help in applying for food stamps or in tracking down their worker at the Department of Human Services because they had not received their desperately needed food stamps.
What they were hearing all day, every day, from laid-off men and women was the fear that if they couldn’t pay their mortgages they would lose their homes. They and their children would become homeless. Increasingly, callers were middle-class, college-educated, two-parent households.
I asked the staff to gently ask callers, “How many people were laid off with you?” “How many more will lose their jobs?” “How did you hear about us?”
The answers frightened us. The most common was that 75 or more were laid off in one day and they expected even more to be laid off shortly. The unemployment offices told them to call us because there were no job openings, but at least we would help them find food.
In just four months, 100,000 people in Illinois began to receive food stamps. Now 1 in 9 residents of the state participate. Food stamps are totally federally funded. They serve as an economic stimulus. And if Illinois enrolled all those eligible we would bring in $403 million in federal funds.
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But we will not retrieve those federal dollars to prevent hunger if our legislators vote to lay off thousands of Department of Human Services workers—40 percent of the workforce—and close offices.
DESPERATE, ANGRY, WEEPING
Increasingly the men who call the Hunger Hotline weep. They say they are desperate and they don’t know where to turn. Many are angry because they have worked hard for decades. When they swallow their pride and ask for help, they are turned away because the lines at offices where they seek help are too long.
I knew we needed to do more to make policymakers understand the pain. Sadly, the human suffering of these cuts is not quantified in the mounds of paper produced to justify them.
In a last-ditch appeal to the General Assembly, I joined eight others May 27 in the “Hungry for Justice Hunger Strike” in the state Capitol. Day-long solidarity hunger strikers joined in across the state. We called for a fair increase in revenue, through a higher income tax, not further punishment for hundreds of thousands of people. We broke the fast May 31, the day the Assembly voted against the bill.
With labor and community groups we continue to meet with legislators and to organize public rallies, pressing for the faces of the people, not the politics of upcoming elections, to drive the decisions about the state budget.
