Mike Huck of Naperville, Illinois, has a favorite technique to explain the politics of hunger. When addressing Catholic groups, he will place nine grocery bags on a table. Of those nine bags, he asks, how many represent the food distributed by church food pantries and other private agencies, and which represent the percentage of government aid for domestic food assistance?
Four or five—around half—is a common estimate of the role of private charities in distributing food.
Wrong. The reality is much different, notes Huck, who has been involved in galvanizing support for Bread for the World (BFW) initiatives since he was a seminary student in the late 1970s. Private sector support for food programs fills just one of the nine bags.
“There is no way to expect our food pantries to cover the other eight bags,” he says. If church people want to support food assistance, there is no alternative but to clamor for better government programs.
That’s where BFW comes in. The ecumenical group, founded in 1974, lobbies the U.S. government to fill up those eight other bags. A letter to a congressional representative often can mean the difference in securing aid across-the-board to those who need it. Everywhere Huck has gone in his faith journey—as a Franciscan seminarian, college student, and later as a parishioner in two Chicago-area parishes—he’s led letter-writing campaigns to remind elected officials that Christians align in support of food programs. Now retired from work with the Veterans Administration, Huck is focused on lobbying against hunger, thanks to BFW.
He’s spread the word at meetings of the Secular Franciscan community he’s part of, as well as at St. Raphael’s Church in Naperville and his current parish, Old St. Patrick’s in Chicago. At St. Raphael’s, just after 9/11, he organized a campaign that generated more than 1,000 letters in support of federal food programs. At the time, he was told that people were distracted and angry, and it might not be the best opportunity. He found the opposite. “People had seen a lot of evil, and they wanted to do some genuine good,” he says.
At Secular Franciscan meetings, his group will pray about the issues and then spring into action, contacting their legislators on vital issues around food programs, particularly as they apply to vulnerable mothers and their children. This year BFW is working on varied fronts: domestically, to support the SNAP program (formerly known as food stamps), and internationally in support of foreign aid programs.
Food assistance once garnered bipartisan support, from conservative Republican senators from farm states to urban liberal Democrats. Now it has never been more controversial: The Trump administration has slated most foreign aid for elimination while reverting the SNAP program to the states, with the expectation that this will result in benefit cutbacks as state governments race to the bottom to cut their costs. Another concern is programs for farmers, which in the past often directed surplus crops to relief programs.
Food issues remain a complicated mosaic, often difficult to follow. As a result, education is a strong component of the Washington, D.C.-based BFW, which is split into two sectors. One sector generates and promotes scores of studies describing the impact of food programs, information which is then shared with local volunteer organizers such as Huck. That part is educational and nonpolitical.
BFW’s other component is overtly political, encouraging campaigns and lobbying for food aid with congressional representatives. Huck tries to dramatize the information, regularly responding to pushback that SNAP recipients are gaming the system and are indulged by taxpayers. The average SNAP recipient in a family of four receives $143 to $174 per person each month. “They are not getting rich off of this,” he says.
He also responds to suggestions that the church should stay out of politics. For that, he cites the prophets in Hebrew scriptures who called upon rulers to be mindful of the needs of the poor. Jesus, he says, also had much to say about the obligation to help the poor.
Christians involved in political issues around food aid can make an impact. Huck notes that one representative he wrote to voted favorably on BFW-backed legislation after expressing reluctance.
Eventually, the representative said: “I received 400 letters from my constituents, I have to vote their way.” Congressional staffers, says Huck, note that BFW campaigns generate the kind of response rarely seen in efforts not sparked by self-interest.
BFW was founded by the late Art Simon, a Lutheran pastor working on New York’s Lower East Side, who wanted to bring church leaders together to fight hunger in his neighborhood and around the world. Simon, the brother of U.S. Senator Paul Simon, argued that involvement in politics was needed to make a dent in massive food needs both in the United States and around the world. The goal was to address needs before they evolved into crises.
“It’s better to build a fence at the top of the cliff than to have an ambulance at the bottom,” Simon, who died in 2023, said while building up an ecumenical anti-hunger coalition. The early BFW recruited 500 volunteers to organize local campaigns in churches. Many in that early group are still involved. They soon developed letter-writing campaigns, with as many as 100,000 letters written on specific issues through the years.
BFW is ecumenical with a strong Catholic component. Many of its concerns are backed by U.S. bishops’ statements and national groups such as Catholic Charities. A main speaker at the group’s annual dinner in 2026 was retired Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston, who described BFW as aligned with Pope Francis’ vision of a church aligned with the poor.
For Catholics involved with BFW, that vision is often sparked by being up close to hunger issues.
Jackie Thiry, 85, a member of St. Matthew’s Church in Green Bay, Wisconsin, became inspired to work on hunger issues through her service with her parish’s St. Vincent de Paul Society. There she saw how often families down on their luck are forced to choose between food, medicine, or a car to get to work.
“SNAP is important for the people we serve. I have seen my St. Vincent de Paul people we work with who don’t have enough money,” she says. She has led a parish letter-writing campaign to bolster SNAP.
Thiry tries to impress upon fellow parishioners that food needs are not just overseas or in big cities. SNAP, she says, is a help to their friends and neighbors in Green Bay, and it’s worth taking the time to communicate with their congressional representative and Wisconsin’s Republican and Democrat U.S. Senators.
“I try to bring it down to your neighbor, the family who lives next door,” she says. “In our community, no one should go to bed hungry.”
Bob Powers, director of government relations for BFW, says that BFW’s goal is to explain the details of food assistance programs to volunteers such as Huck and Thiry. Along with SNAP, issues such as the farm bill, foreign food assistance, and Women and Infant Children (WIC) benefits, which provide assistance to mothers and their children, are regular concerns. BFW provides a way for Christians to see the issue of hunger in a way that goes beyond what they can do in parish food pantries, he says.
“Every parish food pantry is about seeing hunger close up. It’s a broader issue they can’t handle alone,” he says.
For Huck, involvement in BFW is about living Catholic social teaching, even as it involves becoming conversant with politics—a world many prefer to back away from.
“We have the long tradition. We are supposed to take our faith into the world, to make things different,” he says.
Image: Unsplash/Bernard Hermant
