A dam walk in Texas helps kick off Spring CROP Hunger Walk season


April 6, 2011

CROP Hunger Walkers making their way across the top of Canyon Lake Dam. Photo: courtesy of Community Resource and Recreation Center of Canyon Lake

CROP Hunger Walkers making their way across the top of Canyon Lake Dam. Photo: courtesy of Community Resource and Recreation Center of Canyon Lake

You can excuse any residents of Canyon Lake in central Texas Hill Country for referring to their town’s annual hunger-fighting walk as, “That dam walk.”

The description is hardly a pejorative when the route of the walk indeed does take walkers straight across Canyon Lake Dam, which the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built years ago to reduce flooding of the Guadalupe River Basin below the lake.

On March 12, about 150 walkers gathered at St. Thomas the Apostle Catholic Church to begin the two-mile walk across the dam and back to the church for a lunch of rice and beans—deliberately simple food to symbolize what many people subsist on.

As with CROP Hunger Walks across the United States—there are more than 350 of them this spring, from Alaska to Florida—25 percent of the money raised by the dam walkers will stay right in the community to help stock local food pantries and soup kitchens.

“How many times have we seen people and wondered how we can help?” asks Nancy Alleman of Canyon Lake United Methodist Church, now in her first year as coordinator of the Canyon Lake CROP Hunger Walk.  “Well, this is one thing we can do.  It’s a wonderful way to raise money for hungry people.”

And just who are these hungry people? The answer that immediately comes to mind is homeless people with no jobs.

But, “that’s not true at all,” says Doreen Wohl, executive director of the West Side Campaign Against Hunger (WSCAH.org) at Church of St. Paul and St. Andrew United Methodist in New York City. “There is a total cross section of people.  Fifty-three percent are families with children and 15 percent are senior citizens.”  Adults without children make up the balance.

The people who come to the WSCAH, a beneficiary of the upcoming New York City CROP Hunger Walk (May 1), include retirees on fixed incomes, people who have lost their jobs and the working poor.

Wohl calls the support from communions involved with CROP “essential.”  Contributions from CROP and other community supporters provide some $75,000 of the program’s budget.  Wohl says that is enough to provide food for 144,230 meals at the supermarket style pantry where people select food based on preference and need.

According to the World Food Program, more than one billion people in the world do not have enough to eat.  In the United States, according to a report released by the Department of Agriculture in 2009, an estimated 49 million people did not have “consistent, dependable access to enough food for active, healthy living, with children making up almost 17 million of the persons living in food-insecure households.”

Hunger is especially devastating for very young children.  Experts say the lack of sufficient nutrition—attained through a regular diet of meals containing essential proteins, micronutrients and fatty acids—follows them for a lifetime in the form of poor physical and mental development.

Despite media reports to the contrary, Wohl says she sees “not one bit of evidence” that the economy is improving.  WSCAH has seen a 47 percent increase in the number of people using the pantry since the economy started slowing in 2008.

So when the New York City walkers step off for their May 1 walk, they will be walking for the same reason as walkers do annually in some 2,000 communities throughout nation: To help fill the shelves of soup kitchens and pantries in communities where walks are held and to help fund Church World Service poverty and hunger-fighting programs in developing countries around the world.

Although the dam walkers in Canyon Lake completed their CROP Hunger Walk just a few weeks ago, coordinator Nancy Alleman says they’re already starting to think about next year.

“We brought in six more churches to participate this year and that brought our total to 13 churches.  We’re still trying for more because the more people we have, the better it’s going to be,” for the three food pantries that benefit from the dam walk and for hungry people in the U.S. and around the world.

For more information about CROP Hunger Walks and to find a Spring walk in your area check our interactive U.S. mapof CROP Hunger Walk locations and dates.