Dear John,

Over the last five weeks Powered by People volunteers have devoted
themselves to feeding our fellow Texans in the midst of the greatest
health and economic crisis we’ve ever known. To put the challenge in
perspective, twice as many Texans filed for unemployment in the last month
as did in all of 2019.

With millions out of work and no real expansion of the SNAP nutrition
program, this has produced extraordinary demand on our food banks. El
Paso, for example, has seen an increase of more than 400%.

In response, thousands of everyday Texans from all walks of life,
including our Powered by People volunteers, jumped into the breach.
They’ve helped pack food in the warehouses, distribute it on the line,
stand up food pantries and even deliver food to those who can’t leave
their homes.

To date, our in-person volunteers have worked over 12,000 hours at Texas
food banks and our remote volunteers have made 15,000 phone calls to try
to recruit new volunteers for the effort. We’ve reached out to you and
other email subscribers to raise $196,435 from over 35,000 individual
donors, all of which has been distributed to the 21 food banks in Texas
(THANK YOU!!). 

But we’ve also been listening to our volunteers and the Texans they’ve
been serving to think through the bigger picture and advocate for clear
policy changes based on our experiences and what we’ve learned. [ [link removed] ]I
co-wrote a piece in The New York Times this week that lays out how to
improve access to food without overwhelming our food banks, taking what
I’ve learned from volunteering at the food bank in El Paso and listening
to farmers, public health experts, food security champions like José
Andrés and the common sense of my fellow Texans.

Perhaps most importantly, we’ve been paying attention to what this crisis
has laid bare in this country: the stark disparity in economic
opportunity, healthcare access and co-morbidities that put some of our
neighbors at far greater risk of sickness and death. We know that Black,
Latino and Native Americans are dying at greater levels than white
Americans. They are more likely to work lower-wage jobs, less likely to
have health insurance, and all too often live on front lines of
environmental injustice that increases the likelihood of asthma, heart
disease and hypertension. 

Which brings me to this point. While I am grateful that we have the chance
to help feed our fellow Texans through our work with Texas food banks, if
we do not use what we’ve learned from this crisis to address the systemic
inequity and inequality that is now so glaringly obvious then ultimately
we will have failed.

While we will continue to help food banks by volunteering and raising
money for them, we must also begin to focus more of our attention and
efforts on ensuring that we elect those into positions of power and public
trust who will address the underlying causes and conditions that have made
this such a challenging time for so many.

When you have a Lieutenant Governor who claims that “there are more
important things than living” and a Governor who prematurely re-opens the
state — even though that means that those who will die will
disproportionately be people of color, and older and sicker — then you
understand we need a change in leadership in Texas. When our state is one
of the last in the country in COVID-19 testing per capita, it’s clear that
we’ve got to act. And when you think about the fact that even before this
pandemic we were DEAD LAST in America in access to healthcare, you
understand that we can’t wait and hope that things will get better on
their own.

So, in the coming weeks we will begin to ask more from our Powered by
People volunteers in an effort to change our government in Texas and
produce a new Democratic majority in the State House.

We will begin with an aggressive voter registration effort, pursuing
hundreds of thousands of known Democrats who are not yet registered in
this state. We will follow that up with voter contact efforts in targeted
State House districts, using phone banks and relational organizing tools
(until we are able to knock on doors again). And we will conclude with an
all-out push to turn out every Democratic voter in Texas — to win the
State House and do everything within our power to deny Trump one of the
biggest electoral college prizes in the country.

That’s how we do our part to make things better for the long term. It will
only be possible if thousands of people are willing to put in the effort
to help.

[ [link removed] ]Can you make a contribution to help Powered By People organize all
across the state? Whether you give five or fifty dollars, everything
really helps.

Thank you for supporting our work. I am grateful and excited to be in this
with you.

Beto



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