Skip to content

ELCA Blogs

Global Farm Challenge Podcast

Welcome to “More than Food,” the podcast of ELCA World Hunger’s Global Farm Challenge!

Find out more information below about the Global Farm Challenge and how you and your group can become involved. Links to the podcast episodes are also below.

What is the Global Farm Challenge?

The Global Farm Challenge is a youth-centered, whole-church effort to raise awareness and gifts to support the work of ELCA World Hunger with farming communities around the world. ELCA World Hunger works through congregations, companion churches and partners to accompany smallholder farmers around the world. This work includes adapting to climate change and sustainable farming practices. But it also includes helping farmers learn new techniques for increasing yields and decreasing costs, build collectives for shared power and gain access to land, seeds and tools. By joining the Global Farm Challenge, you can be an important part of supporting this work!

Why the Global Farm Challenge?

We know that the world produces more than enough food to feed everyone person. But hunger is on the rise, and the very people who produce the world’s food – farmers and farmworkers – face higher levels of hunger and poverty. They are vulnerable to climate change-related disasters, health risks and laws and policies that lock them out of access to land or financing they need to expand their farms.

With the war in Ukraine causing global food shortages and rising prices making it harder for vulnerable families to feed themselves, meeting immediate needs now and building resilience for the future are critical steps. The Global Farm Challenge, by empowering ELCA World Hunger to accompany farmers around the world, is a key way we can all be part of God’s work toward a just world where all are fed.

What is “More than Food”?

“More than Food” is a podcast designed to go along with the “Global Farm Challenge To-Go Card Game,” a game your group can play anywhere – even on the road! In the game, players follow stories of smallholder farmers and farmworkers and learn about the challenges and opportunities farmers face. Each of the stories in the game is based on real stories of neighbors involved in the projects supported by ELCA World Hunger and the Global Farm Challenge. In the podcast, we will dive into these stories and learn more about the projects and the communities involved.

You can share this podcast on your congregation’s website or social media, listen to episodes as part of a group study or play episodes in the car while you travel to a service site this summer.

Play the game, talk about your experiences and hear about our neighbors’ experiences as you consider supporting ELCA World Hunger’s Global Farm Challenge!

Join us in learning more about the many ways God is at work through us and our neighbors!

 

Episode 1 – In this episode, learn more about the Global Farm Challenge and how to get involved.

Transcript: Ep 1 Introducing More than Food Transcript

Episode 2 – In this episode, Brooke and Ryan talk about why justice is at the very foundation of faith and why it is so important to think about ending hunger as “more than food.”
Episode 3 – In this episode, Ryan talks with Franklin Ishida, the director for the Asia and Pacific regions for the ELCA, about growing pumpkins – and a whole lot more – through a project in Cambodia. This project is one of the stories featured in the Global Farm Challenge To-Go Card Game.

Transcript: Episode 3 – Pumpkins and Cambodia Transcript

Episode 4 – In this episode, we hear from Giovana Oaxaca, the ELCA’s program director for migration policy, who shares some of the ways ELCA World Hunger supports farm workers in the US. This work part of the story of citrus fruit in the Global Farm Challenge To-Go Card Game.

Transcript: More than Food Episode 4 – US Farmworkers Transcript

Share

Migration Policy: Hunger Policy Podcast December 2021

 

Saturday, December 18, is International Migrants Day, a day set aside by the United Nations to raise awareness and focus attention on the 281 million people around the world where are on the move, in search of peace, stability, security and an opportunity for new life. In 2020, more than 3.6% of people around the world were migrants.

 

Hunger Policy Podcast-Migration (Audio Only)

 

In the US, the latest data we have on hunger and poverty confirms what we had guessed. Hunger is on the rise, poverty is on the rise, and yet neither is quite as high nationally as we thought they would be, due largely to the unprecedented federal legislation that expanded the safety net in the United States. While that is true nationally, that’s not the case for every community and every family here in the US or around the world, however. Immigrant and non-citizens in the US saw a steeper decline in income in 2020. Internationally, migrants are more vulnerable to hunger and poverty than native residents, and migrants experience unique risks when it comes to COVID-19. All this, coupled with the large numbers of people forced to flee their homes worldwide, makes immigration a key conversation we need to be having.

In this podcast, Giovana Oaxaca, the ELCA’s program director for migration policy, joins Ryan Cumming of ELCA World Hunger to talk about the realities of migration and immigration policy. As they describe in this conversation, “immigration policy” refers to more than just who is able to enter the United States, but also to questions about who has access to public benefits, what it means to be a “non-citizen” and how policy changes can impact individuals and communities. Ryan and Giovana also discuss how the COVID-19 pandemic specifically impacted immigration and immigrants in the United States and confront some of the prevailing myths about immigrants and migration.

Prefer to read the interview? Follow this link to access a transcript of the conversation.

Immigration and Migration Links from the Podcast

Newsletters

Social Media

AMMPARO Resources

  • Bible Studies
  • Sanctuary
  • Videos
  • Words Create Worlds

ELCA and Peace Not Walls: Advocacy Summer School

Interested in other podcasts? Visit the ELCA World Hunger blog and click “subscribe.”

Share

Child Tax Credit: Hunger Policy Podcast June 2021

 

We know that hunger is not just a matter of food but a matter of policy. Public policies impact where our food comes from, the kinds of food we eat, how we acquire food – and what our options are when we don’t have enough. In this conversation for the ELCA World Hunger blog, John Johnson, director of domestic policy for the ELCA, joins Ryan Cumming, program director for hunger education with ELCA World Hunger, to talk about the expanded Child Tax Credit, a huge step forward in addressing child poverty in the US this year.

Links that were shared during the recording:

Correction: In the recording, a July webinar on the Child Tax Credit is mentioned. This updated date for this is July 7. Join partners of the ELCA and White House officials, including Mr. Gene Sperling, for this national webinar to learn about the tax credit’s historic expansion and to hear from experts on the need to make the expansion permanent. Registration information will be available soon. Follow the social media links below to get updates.

Follow the ELCA’s Witness in Society team on social media for updates about the Child Tax Credit and other important public policy issues:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ELCAAdvocacy/

Twitter: @ELCAAdvocacy

Instagram: @ELCAAdvocacy

And follow ELCA World Hunger for up-to-date information on hunger and poverty in the US and around the world, including the creative ways our church is responding by walking with neighbors, partners and companions toward a just world where all are fed:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ELCAworldhunger/

Twitter: @ELCAWorldHunger

Instagram: @ELCAWorldHunger

Interested in more conversations like this about hunger and policy? Are there specific public policy issues you’d like to hear about? Let us know! Email Ryan.Cumming@elca.org to share your feedback and ideas.

Subscribe to the ELCA World Hunger blog, and sign up to join the ELCA’s network of advocates.

(If you are one of our regular subscribers to the ELCA World Hunger blog and reading this via email, the audio and video files may not show up. Just click on the title of the post to head over to the main blog webpage to listen in.)

Share

Hunger Policy Podcast: May 18, 2021

 

We know that hunger is not just a matter of food but a matter of policy. Public policies impact where our food comes from, the kinds of food we eat, how we acquire food – and what our options are when we don’t have enough. In this new kind of post for the ELCA World Hunger blog, John Johnson, director of domestic policy for the ELCA, joins Ryan Cumming, program director for hunger education with ELCA World Hunger, for a conversation about hunger and policy, including important public policies that could impact people experiencing hunger and poverty in the United States. Links to both the audio and the video are below.

Interested in more conversations like this about hunger and policy? Are there specific public policy issues you’d like to hear about? Let us know! Email Ryan.Cumming@elca.org to share your feedback and ideas.

Subscribe to the ELCA World Hunger blog, and sign up to join the ELCA’s network of advocates.

(If you are one of our regular subscribers to the ELCA World Hunger blog and reading this via email, the audio and video files may not show up. Just click on the title of the post to head over to the main blog webpage to listen in.)

Share