Bill Shore’s Letters
Letter From Albuquerque
Originally published: February 2000
Dear Friend,
New Mexico has the soft southwestern light and pastel colors that landscape painters love, but that light glares more harshly when focused on the poverty that ranks New Mexico as the state with the worst rates of hunger in the nation. According to the latest Department of Agriculture study, 15.1 percent of New Mexico's households have residents who are hungry or near hungry. The U.S. average is 9.7 percent, and a state like Massachusetts, the second best in the country (to North Dakota) is only 6.3 percent.
I wanted to know what that kind of hunger looked like, so when I was invited to keynote a national conference of affordable housing organizations in Albuquerque, I accepted the opportunity to take a first-hand look. On the Denver to Albuquerque leg of my air travel, a woman walking down the aisle to find her seat balanced a copy of The Cathedral Within in arms full with purse, suitcase and papers. It's what I'd long wanted to see and it gave me a start, but then I realized of course that she was going to the same conference I was, had been sent a book by the organizers who purchased 150, and that this won't count for bragging rights with Zach and Mollie.
Hunger in New Mexico isn't necessarily more severe than in other places, (in fact we've had enormous success in ensuring that there are now emergency food assistance programs in place so that at everyone has at least somewhere to go) there's just more of it. What it looked like during a too-short visit was endless trailer homes, $5.15 an hour jobs, a large Native American population, and a lot of single-parent families. Against this backdrop, an expensive illness, a divorce, an increase in rent, can take a family just above the poverty line and plunge them below it and keep them there.
One of the best things Share Our Strength is doing in New Mexico is helping to fund the micro-lending programs of Accion. Through Taste of the Nation we've invested more than $1 million in the organization nationally and internationally. Accion makes small loans to entrepreneurs on whom the banks won't take a chance. You would have liked the two I met. Terry Brahs is a just divorced mother of three young boys who has opened a gourmet candy store with her start-up loan. Her day care is a small patch of floor behind the counter where all three boys lay with coloring books, squealing and occasionally skirmishing with each other. She has real struggle ahead but she is young and personable, and optimistic about the street traffic she enjoys in her new location. She just delivered 55 lollipops to the Kiwanis Club and she is counting this a good day.
Out past Interstate 25, on the flat and dusty plains, Javier Villegas, a large man with the face of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, has used five loans and a line of credit to open a series of businesses: a restaurant, attached to a rent-to-own appliance story, attached to a TV and refrigerator repair shop, attached to a used furniture shop, attached to who-knows-what. He literally just keeps attaching one ramshackle building and business to the next. They employ about 30 people. From inside, his overworked son tells us about the inspectors who just left having found more code violations than they could count. He shrugs and says "we can fix those." He points through the buildings, all the way to the back, and adds with a mixture of weariness and: "Every archway you see represents one of my fathers' new ideas."
Both Terry and Javier are scrappers. They'll make it. 97 percent of Accion's loan recipients do. Bad breaks won't throw them because they've lived their lives at the intersection of many of them and are expecting more. Both told me that Accion's (and Share Our Strength's) money was important but not as important as just knowing that someone believed in them. They are the real social entrepreneurs. The next time Harvard Business School gives someone a forum to whine about how tough it is to be a social entrepreneur, let's buy 'em a plane ticket to New Mexico. I doubt they could even imagine Terry's or Javier's existence. I'm proud Share Our Strength could, and did.
Let's make Taste of the Nation bigger and better than ever this year. There are a few kids on the dusty floor of a candy shop out on the open New Mexico plains who will know it when we do!
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