Ending Hunger by 2030

• Facilitating coordination of key policy initiatives and recommendations outlined in Maine’s Roadmap to End Hunger by 2030.
• Spearheading collaboration and coordination of anti-hunger and anti-poverty strategies and policies across state agencies and with external stakeholders.
• Convening the statewide EH2030 Advisory Committee charged with guiding the implementation of Maine’s Roadmap.
• Tracking data to inform anti-hunger strategies, measure progress, and monitoring the impact of key anti-hunger policies and programs. 

Everyone at the Table: Maine’s Roadmap to End Hunger by 2030

We envision a Maine free from hunger. That is a Maine where everyone has the economic resources to secure consistent, easy access to enough healthy, culturally appropriate food for an active and healthy life. 
Maine’s Roadmap to End Hunger by 2030 proposes two overlapping strategy areas—strengthening our response to food insecurity today and preventing food insecurity tomorrow by addressing the root causes of hunger and food insecurity in our state. The plan has five inter-connected goals to advance this dual approach:

• Capacity Building: Build the infrastructure and capacity to coordinate the implementation of Maine’s Roadmap to End Hunger.
• Food Access: Ensure consistent, easy, and equitable access to healthy and culturally appropriate food.
• Economic Security and Opportunity: Promote, bolster, and ensure economic security and opportunity. 
• Narrative Change: Change the narrative of food insecurity to focus on collective responsibility and amplify the voices of impacted people.
• Equity: Close the equity gap in household food security by addressing underlying structural inequities in all Ending Hunger 2030 goals. 
   

To understand this roadmap and its recommendations, it’s critical to grasp a seeming paradox: food security in Maine has little to do with food. More accurately, the causes of food insecurity have little to do with a scarcity of food. Food insecurity is most often a function of economic insecurity; hunger is a symptom of poverty. 

“Everyone at the Table” unequivocally affirms the role that food and food distribution play in responding to hunger today. Community-level solutions like compassionate, user-centered charitable food initiatives, opportunities that empower people to grow their own food, and programs that make local foods accessible to food-insecure people are enriching the lives of Maine people in untold ways. As the pandemic has underscored, a healthy, localized food system is essential to our community's resilience. That is why the plan recommends investing in Maine’s food infrastructure and food businesses as ways to simultaneously safeguard our food supply as we grow jobs in Maine’s important natural resource sectors.
That said, the aim of this plan ultimately is to end hunger and to do so by foregrounding root-cause strategies that prevent the problem from happening in the first place. That’s why the plan’s overwhelming focus is on income and resources—and the forces that hold income and resource inequality in place. For those who pick up this plan and ask, “What do affordable childcare or the Maine Jobs and Recovery Plan have to do with hunger?” The answer is “Everything.” When we create a robust and equitable economy for those who can work and a user-centered and adequate social safety net for everyone, we will end hunger.
 

For more information about Governor Mills’ End Hunger 2030 plan, please contact Sydney Brown, Senior Anti-Hunger Policy Advisor, at sydney.c.brown@maine.gov

History of Maine's Ending Hunger by 2030 Initiative

In 2019, citing the significant social and economic threats that household food insecurity poses to Maine today and to Maine’s future tomorrow, the State of Maine made a historic commitment to act with the passage of LD 1159 Resolve to End Hunger by 2030. This bi-partisan legislation, authored by then-Rep. Craig Hickman and signed by Governor Mills, directed the Maine Department of Agriculture, Conservation & Forestry to coordinate a cross-sector effort to develop a strategic plan to achieve this bold goal. 

Over two-hundred Mainers were engaged across a two-year, multi-phase process to inform the final product, beginning with the development of the Interim Report, delivered to Maine’s 129th Legislature in 2020, followed by the Impacted Community Recommendations & Review on the Interim Report on Ending Hunger in Maine by 2030, submitted to the Maine Department of Agriculture, Conservation & Forestry in 2021. The result is Everyone at the Table: Maine's Roadmap to End Hunger 2030, a plan which is rooted in evidence-based solutions to hunger, the unique nature of the problem in Maine, and the priorities of Maine people.

Maine’s Roadmap was greatly improved by Mainers who contributed lived expertise of poverty and hunger – a process, which was difficult and, at times, trauma-inducing. The State of Maine is grateful to Resources for Organizing & Social Change (ROSC) for their leadership coordinating and elevating these voices and for the resulting Impacted Community Report and dynamic Roadmap.

In 2022, Maine’s 130th State Legislature endorsed the recommendations of the strategic plan, with the passage of LD 174 An Act to Implement Maine’s Roadmap to End Hunger by 2030. That legislation directed the Governor’s Office of Policy Innovation and the Future (GOPIF) to provide staffing and coordinate implementation of Maine’s Roadmap with guidance from an advisory committee composed of members with lived expertise and content expertise relevant to the goals and strategies included in the plan.