Fighting Hunger and Isolation as a Community

Hunger is a challenge for communities across our state. In Georgia, 1 in 8 people are food insecure. Often hunger occurs in homes with unemployed parents, or in families trapped in generational poverty. But hunger is not just a problem for individuals or individual families. Food insecurity involves facets of our communal life as well.

A Communal Challenge

Food insecurity is not just a situational challenge. Hunger also results from climate change and environmental factors, economic influences on prices at the grocery store, and lack of access due to urban planning and transportation issues. Solving hunger is not as simple as a family member finding employment or getting an education (though these factors can contribute to ending food insecurity). Individuals can’t change the environmental, economic, or geographic conditions of their communities through their own hard work and willpower.

The health of the community is critical to the health of the individuals in that community. Hunger isn’t an individual problem – it’s a community problem. And we have to work together as a community to solve this problem. In fact, we are called to this specific task when Jesus commands us to love our neighbors. Christ calls us to be in community.

Different Types of Hunger

Food insecurity is not the only kind of hunger our communities are challenged by. In our churches, we acknowledge that we hunger for spiritual nourishment. We feed this hunger at God’s table when we partake in the Eucharistic feast. God nourishes our souls at His table. And, at the end of the meal, we are sent out into the community “to love and serve the Lord.” We are fed and then charged to take our nourishment into the community to be a part of feeding God’s people. Our hunger is sated not just through bread and wine, but through connection and service.

This kind of hunger is rampantly spreading in our communities. An estimated 52 million U.S. adults struggle with loneliness. We hunger for connection. We crave support. We’ve been fed a steady diet of isolation and loneliness. And community can help alleviate this hunger too. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services acknowledges that “people with strong perceptions of community belongingness are 2.6 times more likely to report good or excellent health than people with a low sense of belongingness.”

Ending Hunger and Isolation

It is striking that to end the physical hunger in our communities, we must work together – and working together will end the hunger created by lack of connection and isolation. We are fed at God’s table, then sent to go and feed God’s people in the world. Our spiritual nourishment is intertwined with providing physical nourishment.

Each year, the Episcopal Community Foundation participates in a powerful example of this connected solution. The 2025 Hunger Walk Run is where we, as a community, are working together to end hunger. Our community comes together for a spiritual meal with our youth-led Eucharist, then feasts on connection and play through the event’s festivities and 5K. Finally, the funds that are raised through our communal efforts go to support hunger-related grants which provide much needed relief for people experiencing physical hunger in communities throughout the Diocese of Atlanta. Join us on March 9 as we fight hunger as a community.