The 2023 Walk for Hunger takes place on May 7! I have been participating in the Walk for over a decade and collected approximately $300,000 of donations to support Project Bread’s anti-hunger work. Project Bread is the largest anti-hunger nonprofit in Massachusetts and the Walk for Hunger is Project Bread’s main fundraising event. I participate every year in memory of my older sister who took her own life in 2012.

Shaira was a wonderful person. She was creative, smart, hilarious, considerate, and kind. She made a sign that read Cuteness Office and hung it in my closet since I spent a lot of time in there. Her sweet voice and guitar strums floated up from the basement where she jammed with her friends. She wrote me poems, drew me cartoons, and asked me over and over to hold still while she sketched my portrait.

The decade between her death and the present have been filled with new developments, places, and things. Lessons and grades. Jobs and direct deposits. These things wash over me. What takes hold in my mind and heart are the people that I know and have known along the way. My sister’s life and death taught me that nothing in this world compares to a meaningful connection with another person.

I have come to believe that improving the human experience is the end for which all classes, jobs, and other details constitute the means. I focus on hunger because malnutrition presents an obstacle to every other endeavor. Food fuels us to study, work, love, play, and create. Hungry people have lower levels of educational attainment and worse health outcomes…

Project Bread is the lead nonprofit working to end food insecurity in Massachusetts. The organization emphasizes that the opposite of hungry isn’t full—it’s healthy. When people are well-fed, they are fueled and empowered to learn at school, engage at work, and care about each other at home.

Please consider supporting Project Bread’s essential work by making a donation or sharing the message. Thank you!

“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”  Virginia Woolf