GREENFIELD — When Kirsten Levitt, executive director and chef at Stone Soup Cafe, traveled to Washington D.C. for the National Anti-Hunger Policy Conference, she was reminded of the power of collaboration in pursuit of a common goal, and returned to Greenfield determined to put it into practice.
Stone Soup Cafe, which operates out of All Souls Church, offers pay-what-you-can community meals, a community store where people in need can access free groceries and produce, and a Culinary Institute training program. In D.C., Levitt brought her “on-the-ground” experience fighting hunger at Stone Soup Cafe to discussions with lawmakers and other nonprofit leaders working to eliminate hunger.
“In this little pond of Franklin County, I feel like my voice is important because of the work we do here at Stone Soup Cafe, but in Washington D.C., I felt like maybe I was Yertle the Turtle,” Levitt confessed during a debrief of the April conference inside Stone Soup Cafe on Thursday. “I decided to go to this conference even though I didn’t feel worthy, and by the end of the day on Tuesday, I felt not just worthy, but justified that [I] had been there.”
According to the Food Research & Action Center, the organization behind the conference, participants at the annual event “share information and learn how to strengthen the quality and reach of federal nutrition programs, learn best outreach and program practices from other states and localities, fill in the gaps in food service for millions of low-income children, and identify creative ideas for new and innovative approaches to ending hunger.”
During Thursday’s talk, which Levitt described as a “fireside chat,” she walked the roughly 15 attendees through her few days in D.C.
At one of the conference’s sessions, Levitt said she learned about a study out of the University of Colorado analyzing health care workers’ biases toward patients facing food insecurity. The study found that 55% of the 347 participants believed “some” people exploit food assistance programs by enrolling when unnecessary. Another session about “partnership and collaboration across all sectors to end hunger” turned Levitt and many other attendees away due to its limited space.
For Levitt, the program’s popularity came as no surprise, “because collaboration and partnership is the only way forward, and everybody’s starting to recognize that,” she said, “and we’re ahead of the game.”
According to Levitt, Franklin County organizations and indviduals are already joining forces to end hunger.
“Everybody needs to be in on the conversation in each of the towns in Franklin County,” she added. “If we did this, we would end hunger in Franklin County from edge to edge.”
While she celebrated the seeds of collaboration already sprouting, she stressed the need to continue this collaboration in the face of potential further cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). After passage by the U.S. House of Representatives, the Senate is considering the Farm, Food and National Security Act, which would solidify the One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s $187 billion cuts to SNAP.
An attendee at Stone Soup Cafe shared their experience losing SNAP benefits, and noted that their experience was not rare. Levitt shared stories of others enrolled in SNAP who have stayed on the line for several hours waiting to speak to someone to renew their benefits, only for the call to be disconnected.
Levitt claimed that cuts to SNAP not only endanger the health and well-being of those enrolled, but also slash the profits of local grocery stores, dooming many to closure. Without these local economic engines, the economy will collapse, Levitt said.
“If you memorialize SNAP cuts, you’re killing our economy nationwide,” Levitt claimed. “We can paint the town black like the picture’s terrible, but the reality is that people want to help people in every kind of way, and the question is, how do we get all the networks talking to each other?”
She returned to the importance of organizations reaching across town and industry lines to dampen the shock of these cuts.
“When the SNAP cut came at the end of October, the entire community stepped up in a way I’ve never seen before. Literally $30,000 came flooding in the door from all kinds of different places,” Levitt said. “It was amazing to see that when pushed to the extreme, the community will rise.”
Reflecting on the conference, she told the room of Stone Soup Cafe employees, volunteers and partners, “The biggest takeaway for me is that we have to fight to make sure that people get what they need.”
