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Information about Food Policy Councils: http://docs.google.com/present/edit?id=0AfIUuBO4cR_aZGdxcDhmdHRfMTAxZmoyOWIzaGY&hl=en
Monday, November 28, 2011
Thursday, March 20, 2008
Nias Dorry to direct NAMA
March 20, 2008
Contact: Curt Rice, 207-829-3180
Rollie Barnaby, 603-823-5410
Niaz Dorry, 978-281-6934
Northwest Atlantic Marine Alliance Charts New Course
Dorry to Take the Helm as Coordinating Director
Saco, Maine - Following an extensive search for the new coordinating
director, the Board of Trustees of the Northwest Atlantic Marine Alliance
(NAMA) welcomes Niaz Dorry on board. In addition to hiring their new
director, the NAMA board itself is changing leadership with Curt Rice, a
commercial fisherman for 30 years, taking over the role of Board Chair.
"We are thrilled at what the future holds for NAMA with the addition of Niaz
and the new energy of our board," said Rollie Barnaby, outgoing board chair
and one of the original founders of NAMA. "Niaz brings a wide range of
skills, an international perspective and solid on the ground experience that
can help NAMA chart its new course for the future."
The selection of Dorry follows a search that began following the resignation
of Craig Pendleton, a founding member of NAMA and its director for the past
10 years.
"I have pretty big feet, but there is no way I can fill Craig's shoes," said
Dorry. "His work was essential to NAMA's development and the health of the
region's marine ecosystem and fishing communities. Now we have to determine
how best to build on that work in order to take NAMA into its next decade.
I'm excited to play a part in forming that vision and body of work."
Over the next three months, NAMA's new board and staff will work with Niaz
to focus on the organization's strategic direction.
"The need for NAMA is as critical today and our principles as strong as they
were ten years ago," said Curt Rice, the new board chair. "We have a very
solid foundation to build our future upon and our board is looking forward
to working with Niaz to design and implement our new plans."
Niaz took NAMA's helm on March 1, 2008. She is a veteran activist living in
Gloucester, Massachusetts who began working with small-scale, traditional,
and indigenous fishing communities in the U.S. and from around the globe as
a Greenpeace oceans and fisheries campaigner. After leaving Greenpeace in
2001 she continued her work in advancing the rights and ecological benefits
of the small-scale fishing communities as a means of protecting global
marine biodiversity.
In 2005, she founded Clean Catch which later became a project of NAMA. She
ran the project as a volunteer. The project's mission initially was to
investigate the impact of persistent bio-accumulative toxicants and fossil
fuels on the reproduction and overall health of marine species, particularly
species under local, state, federal, or international rebuilding programs
intended to revive stocks to biologically healthy levels. But the tragic
events of the 2004 tsunami drove NAMA and Clean Catch to work together in
supporting the lives and livelihoods of fishermen in Asia putting Clean
Catch's original mission on hold.
For the past two years, Dorry has been working with the Healthy Building
Network (HBN), an organization advocating for environmental health and
justice were we live, work and play. HBN's activities following Hurricane's
Katrina and Rita have focused on ensuring healthy and green rebuilding in
the Gulf of Mexico with a particular focus on providing healthy homes for
the region's working poor. The organization helped form Unity Homes, Inc.
the first non-profit, modular home factory whose mission is to produce
healthy, green, modular homes for the affordable housing market.
Since she began working on fisheries issues in 1994, Niaz' main objective
has been to bridge the gap between small-scale fishing communities, the
environmental movement and the larger progressive community. Time Magazine
named Niaz as a Hero For The Planet for her work with fishing communities.
She is also an accomplished writer whose articles have appeared regularly in
Fishermen's Voice, SAMUDRA (publication of the International Collective in
Support of Fishworkers) and a range of other publications. Niaz' work and
approach have been noted in a number of books including Against the Tide,
Deeper Shade of Green, The Spirit's Terrain, Vanishing Species, The Great
Gulf, The Doryman's Reflection and Swimming in Circles.
Niaz is a graduate of The Rockwood Leadership Program's Art of Leadership
and the year-long Leading From Inside Out programs. Her Rockwood trainings
and lessons learned by working with the Cooperative Development Institute,
Cooperative Development Services and the National Cooperative Grocers'
Association have given Niaz a wide range of organizational and board
development skills. She credits her interaction with Rockwood and the two
years she spent living on the banks of the Ohio River fighting along side
the community to stop the WTI incinerator in East Liverpool, Ohio with much
of her clarity, focus, drive, and insights.
###
Jennifer G. Plummer
Administrative Coordinator
Northwest Atlantic Marine Alliance
PO Box 360 (new address!)
Windham, ME 04062
office phone and fax: 207-284-5374
cell: 207-409-7844
Thursday, December 27, 2007
Barely Getting By and Facing a Cold Maine Winter
MILBRIDGE, Me. — They have worked since their teens in backbreaking seasonal jobs, extracting resources from the sea and the forest. Their yards are filled with peeling boats and broken lobster traps.
In sagging wood homes and aged trailers scattered across Washington County, many of Maine’s poorest and oldest shiver too much in the winter, eat far more biscuits and beans than meat and cannot afford the weekly bingo game at the V.F.W. hall.
In this long-depressed “down east” region, where the wild blueberry patches have turned a brilliant crimson, thousands of elderly residents live on crushingly meager incomes. This winter promises to be especially chilling, with fuel oil prices rising and fuel assistance expected to decline. But many assume that others are worse off than themselves and are too proud to ask for assistance, according to groups that run meal programs and provide aid for heating and weatherizing.
“One of our biggest problems is convincing people to take help,” said Eleanor West, director of services for the Washington Hancock Community Agency, a federally chartered nonprofit group. “I tell them, ‘You worked hard all your life and paid taxes and are getting back a little of what you paid in.’”
Over the last half century, Social Security, Medicare and private pensions have lifted most of the nation’s elderly. In 1960, one in three lived below the poverty line; now fewer than one in 10 do. But in Washington County, the poverty rate among those 65 and older is nearly one in five and many more live only a little above the federal subsistence standard in 2007 of $10,200 for a single person and $13,690 for two.
For thousands on fixed incomes, fuel assistance may decline while Social Security checks are scarcely rising.
Viola Brooks, 81, worked in fish and blueberry factories while her husband worked in textile and logging jobs. Now widowed, she gets $588 a month from Social Security, supplemented by $112 in food stamps and one-time fuel aid of more than $500 for the winter.
But this year, that fuel aid will not fill a single tank. The average house cost $1,800 to heat last year, and minimal comfort this winter may require closer to $3,000; trailers will require somewhat less. Electricity and rent already take up most of Ms. Brooks’s income.
“I’m broke every month, and the trailer needs storm windows,” she said. “I cook a lot of pea soup and baked beans and buy flour to make biscuits.”
“Some day I’d like to go to a hairdresser,” Ms. Brooks said of a dream deferred. Still she says she enjoys her lovebirds and cats, and points out that “some people have it worse.”
Jobs for the elderly, a growing trend nationwide, are virtually nonexistent in these hamlets. Many people survive with help from a range of programs including food stamps, Medicaid, disability and energy assistance; others suffer silently, long used to hardship and fiercely independent.
In a pattern still common, older people here often held a series of seasonal jobs, usually without benefits. They worked on lobster boats and dug clams or bloodworms (to sell for bait) from spring to fall, raked wild blueberries in August, harvested potatoes and then made Christmas wreaths for mail-order companies to mid-December. Wives often worked in sardine canneries or in blueberry processing.
“By their 50s, their bodies start breaking down,” said Tim King, director of the community agency at its headquarters in Milbridge, adding that high rates of smoking, obesity and diabetes also contributed to early aging. The aid programs define those as 60 and over as elderly.
Because of their irregular careers and payments into the system, many people get Social Security benefits far below the national average of more than $1,000 a month.
Velma L. Harmon, a 79-year-old widow, receives only $220 a month from Social Security and has a grand total of $85 to live on each month after she pays her subsidized rent and utilities at her apartment complex in Machias, one of a growing number of such federally aided facilities for the elderly.
She is grateful for free lunches provided by the Eastern Agency on Aging, another government-financed group, but too proud to apply for food stamps that would give her a bit more spending money. “Trying to buy Christmas presents, that’s the hardest thing,” said Ms. Harmon, who has a mangled finger from her years of snipping sardine heads in a canning factory.
The preoccupation right now is soaring fuel prices: cheaper natural gas is unavailable in this region, and wood heat is often impractical or insufficient. But because of limited federal money, average fuel assistance for the 46,000 low-income Maine families expected to apply will probably decline to $579 this year, from $688 last year, said Jo-Ann Choate of the Maine State Housing Agency.
“Low-income people aren’t even going to be able to fill up a single tank of fuel oil,” Ms. Choate said. “They already wrap themselves up in blankets during the winter. This year they’ll be colder.”
The disabled, and there are many, may have it hardest. Dolly Jordan of Milbridge has a history of two bad marriages, a bone-crushing auto accident and poor health, and looks and feels older than 61. With osteoporosis, arthritis, diabetes and obesity, she spends most of the day in a wheelchair and uses a combination of a gripper, a broom and a cane to make her bed or hang her laundry.
Come winter, she hangs a blanket over the front door of her little red wooden house, where she has lived alone the last 10 years and which sits on concrete blocks with no foundation. She turns the heat off at night to save fuel.
Her disability payment is $623 a month, plus she gets just $10 from the state and $74 in food stamps. After paying the housing tax and her utility bills, she said, she must watch every remaining penny. A daughter drives her to the distant town of Ellsworth for cheaper shopping.
Like many, she keeps a police scanner on as a diversion and, unable to afford cable, she watches the same videos over and over — her favorite is “On Golden Pond.”
“I wish for bedtime to come,” she said. “The days are so long.”
Easing down a ramp to her mailbox is a perilous 15-minute ordeal. Still, she said, “I wait for Fridays.”
“That’s junk-mail day, and I read all the ads. That’s my best day.”
She added, “There’s always older people out there who have it harder.”
Frederick and Kathleen Call, in Harrington, are in their 60s and live in a 1970s trailer with buckling walls. They live on his disability check — he has had six heart attacks — and food stamps and fuel assistance. Like many others in the region, they buy all their clothes at a church-run thrift shop. They spend their days playing board games and rummy and watching squirrels on their porch.
“We used to go to the food pantry for a free box,” Ms. Call said, “but I saw an old woman who looked like she really needed it. She was thin and cold. I gave her a blanket. We haven’t gone for free food for years.”
Some people here seem to have sunny outlooks no matter what. In the fishing village of Jonesport, Elizabeth Emerson, 87, is hard of hearing and has a titanium knee but is spry and irrepressively cheerful.
She lives in the tiny house her husband, a trucker, built in 1949, and has a view of the gravestone where her name is already etched next to his. Having a daughter nearby, and a total of 52 grand-, great-grand and great-great-grandchildren, whose pictures fill the walls and the refrigerator door, helps in ways practical and emotional.
Ms. Emerson said she “thoroughly enjoyed” the 25 years she spent working as an aide in a nursing home, and she demonstrated the yodeling she used to perform on command for one patient.
Each day she walks with her dog, Sabrina, down to the stony beach where her family once swam. “I saw moose tracks the other day,” she exulted. “Here is where I used to pick heather.”
With her Social Security payment of $683 a month, she refuses to feel impoverished.
“I was never a person to be extravagant,” Ms. Emerson said, adding, “I don’t play beano,” using the local term for bingo.
Besides, she said, she can still afford an indulgence here and there. “My greatest vice,” she added, “is Hershey bars.”
Junk Food County
Why many rural Americans can't get nutritious foods. The unhealthy truth about country living.
By Karen Springen
Newsweek Web Exclusive
Updated: 5:56 PM ET Dec 11, 2007
Fannie Charles, 46, lives six miles from the nearest grocery store in rural Orangeburg County, S.C. She doesn't own a car, so she pushes a cart along the side of the highway. (There are no sidewalks.) It's difficult, since she weighs 240 pounds and suffers from asthma and type 2 diabetes. That's why she usually goes only once a month. About once a week she supplements her grocery-store purchases with pricier, less healthy food from the convenience store, just a mile and a half away. At both places she forgoes fruits and leafy greens. "They're too expensive," she says. Skim milk is often unavailable. "I get the whole milk, or I'll get a little can of Carnation evaporated," she says. Though she often worries about going hungry, she is obese. "I'm stressed. That's why I'm eating a lot," she says. "And I've got to eat what I have."
This is the real world of eating and nutrition in the rural United States. Forget plucking an apple from a tree, or an egg from under a chicken. "The stereotype is everyone in rural America lives on a farm, which is far from the truth," says Jim Weill, president of the nonprofit Food Research and Action Center (FRAC). New research from the University of South Carolina's Arnold School of Public Health shows just how unhealthy the country life can be. The study, which examined food-shopping options in Orangeburg County (1,106 square miles, population 91,500), found a dearth of supermarkets and grocery stores. Of the 77 stores that sold food in Orangeburg County in 2004, when the study was done, 57—nearly 75 percent—were convenience stores. Grocery stores, which stock far more fruits and vegetables than convenience stores, are often too far away, says University of South Carolina epidemiologist Angela Liese, lead author of the study, which appeared in last month's Journal of the American Dietetic Association. "Oftentimes a nutritionist will just say, 'Buy more fruits and vegetables,' when, in fact, the buying part is not simple."
Like other rural areas (and some inner-city ones), Orangeburg County is an isolated "food desert." "You are pretty much at the mercy of what's in your neighborhood," says Adam Drewnowski, director of the center for obesity research at the University of Washington. Although only 28 percent of all the stores in Orangeburg County carried any of the fruits and vegetables—apples, cucumbers, oranges, tomatoes—that were part of the survey, Liese and her colleagues found plenty of healthy foods in the county's 20 supermarkets and grocery stores. The situation in the convenience stores was decidedly grimmer. Only 4 percent of them carried high-fiber bread, and only 2 percent carried low-fat or skim milk.
Poverty poses a big barrier to good nutrition in rural areas. "Eating healthier is more expensive," says Jodi Bates, who operates the Compassion in Action food bank in Orangeburg County, where the median household income is just $30,000 and 22 percent of the residents fall below the poverty line. Last year food stamps went to 10.3 percent of rural Americans, versus 7.3 percent of urban ones, and 31 percent of rural grade-schoolers got a free or reduced lunch, compared to 25 percent of urban grade-schoolers.
Rural Americans are at increased risk of what the government calls "low food security," better understood as fear of going hungry. According to new data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, more than 35.5 million Americans (not including the nation's 750,000 or so homeless people) fell into this category last year. The highest food insecurity rates were in states with large rural populations: Mississippi, New Mexico, Texas and South Carolina. Ironically, people with low food security are often hungry—and fat. The reason: they binge on cheap, high-calorie foods that fill them up. "People don't think of people who are obese as struggling with hunger, when of course many of them are," says Weill of FRAC. "Poverty and food insecurity and obesity are often linked not because poor people are getting too much food from programs but because they're not getting enough resources to obtain a healthy diet." And according to a study published this month in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association by the University of Washington, the cost of fresh fruits and vegetables is increasing faster than the cost of other foods.
Nutritionists and anti-hunger activists know what rural Americans should eat. In an ideal world, says Weill, more people would take advantage of nutrition and financial education programs, like those offered by the USDA, that teach consumers how to make a food budget and use recipes. The 2007 Farm Bill would increase food stamp access and benefits and allocate an additional $2.75 billion over 10 years to buy fruits and vegetables for the USDA's nutrition assistance programs, including the national school lunch and breakfast programs. (The USDA now runs a pilot program that gives kids in 25 schools in eight states fresh fruit during the day.) Jan Probst, director of the South Carolina Rural Health Research Center, has hopes that these new measures could help prevent what may be an oncoming health catastrophe in rural America: "If you start now, these people won't be having heart attacks at 40."
URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/76929
© 2007 Newsweek.com
