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