By Marisa Young | Staff Writer

Hunger kills more people daily than COVID-19 did at its peak, according to Dr. Jeremy Everett, the founder and executive director of the Baylor Collaborative on Hunger and Poverty.

The most shocking part of the issue is that statistically, there is enough food produced worldwide that no one should be going hungry, Everett said. The Baylor Collaborative seeks to attack the root of the hunger issue by closing the accessibility gap, envisioning a world “without hunger.”

“Our mission is to cultivate scalable solutions to end hunger,” Everett said. “If there’s enough food, it’s just an issue of access, and the focus is what we can do to start closing those gaps in a way that’s systematic in nature.”

To achieve this goal, Everett and a team of community leaders traveled to Washington in September to discuss proactive solutions for hunger in America with legislators.

Dr. James Morris, assistant professor of social work at Stephen F. Austin University, serves as a Baylor Collaborative community leader in Nacogdoches and participated in the Washington trip. He said the group was able to meet with Congressman Pete Sessions and a representative from Senator Ted Cruz’s office to “create a space for dialogue” concerning food insecurity legislation.

“We were able to sit down ourselves with Representative Sessions and it was really encouraging that he would not only sit down with us … but as our elected representative, he received us and heard us out,” Morris said. “We really wanted to make the impression that this was something that we care about here in East Texas, and that these are developments that are going on in his district that he ought to be aware of.”

In addition to legislators, the Baylor Collaborative was able to meet with other relevant organizations like Brookings Institution and Bread for the World, Morris said.

“We were able to see the successes and the struggles of other people who are walking a similar path as we are,” Morris said. “That was perhaps the most important aspect of the trip — the human connection with other dedicated, talented and concerned people who also do this type of work.”

With funding from Baylor as well as external grants, Baylor Collaborative constructs various teams that conduct research and public service in local Texas communities, Everett said. Alongside over 28,000 organizational partners, these teams train community leaders and strategize resources such as food pantries and school lunch initiatives. Everett emphasized that food insecurity is a fight that involves everyone.

“The only way to solve the problem of hunger is by working in a collaborative capacity,” Everett said. “Which is ironic, that at a time of political division like we’re in right now, our only plausible pathway forward to end hunger is to work together.”

Everett encouraged students to get involved in the fight against hunger through on-campus initiatives like The Store and the Student Food Security Council, and faculty to “utilize their respective disciplines” to further food insecurity research.

“We believe that everybody should have access to the food that they need to live as God intended for them to live, and to flourish as God intended for them to flourish,” Everett said.