CFPA is pleased to announce the addition of three new members to our Board of Directors, effective immediately. These members each bring valuable skills and experience to the organization:

Phyllis Bramson, MPAA. Phyllis has been a leader in nutrition and health for several decades. Most recently, she was the Director of Nutrition Services for California's Department of Education.

Jasmine Marrow, MPP. Jasmine Marrow is a Manager of Philanthropedia Research at GuideStar. Among the many skills she brings to the Board are non-profit evaluation and community engagement.

Dr. Hilary Seligman, MD, MAS. Dr. Seligman is a general internist at San Francisco General Hospital. She is an expert on food insecurity and is also affiliated with the UCSF Center for Obesity Assessment, Study, and Treatment.

For more information on our Board or to inquire about Board service,
contact george@cfpa.net.

Full list of Board members. link

Our colleagues at the Food Research and Action Center detailed the legacy of George McGovern earlier this week. link

CPFA alert subscriber and former McGovern staffer, Nancy Amidei, offers these comments on Senator McGovern's many contributions:

In June of 1967, five pediatricians testified before a U.S. Senate Committee after examining several thousand poor children across the South.

They said in part:
"...we saw children who were hungry and sick, children for whom hunger is a daily fact of life, and sickness in many forms, an inevitability. The children we saw were more than just malnourished. They were hungry, weak, apathetic. Their lives being shortened...they are suffering from hunger and disease, and directly or indirectly, they are dying from them -- which is exactly what 'starvation' means."

That testimony shocked the Congress and the nation, and led directly to the creation of a U.S. Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, which George McGovern then Chaired. The Committee drew from two standing Committees: Labor and Public Welfare, and the Agriculture Committee - so, that meant, it included urban liberals as well as rural conservatives. Under McGovern, the Committee was able to find common ground. It left the fight in the Senate to change the federal response from handing out surplus tins of margarine and blocks of surplus cheese, to one in which a full range of federal food programs was in place to help alleviate hunger. These are programs we now take for granted (e.g. WIC, School Lunch and Breakfast, Senior Nutrition, SNAP...) but in those days they either didn't exist, or existed just as pilot projects.

George McGovern turned out to be the perfect Committee Chair. Because he'd grown up poor, surrounded by hard-working people, he didn't judge the families he met during 'hunger field hearings'...didn't talk down to anyone. He treated everyone with courtesy, was always polite...and then back in the Senate he was politically savvy in making the case to his (often resistant, often judgmental) colleagues.

Nothing in Congress is the result of just one person, but George McGovern came close. Without his careful, thoughtful, principled leadership, millions of people would very likely go hungry today.

He was a fine, thoughtful, smart, good man. RIP.