End Hunger Network

Who We Are

Founded in 1983, the End Hunger Network is a national, nonpartisan initiative focused on how hunger in the United States is understood, discussed, and kept visible. We work to strengthen public support for ending hunger as a national priority.

We operate at the intersection of public understanding and public expectation, recognizing that progress on hunger depends not only on programs and policies, but on whether people believe hunger is solvable, unacceptable, and worthy of sustained attention.


The Network exists to strengthen the conditions in which accurate information, human-centered stories, and shared understanding can shape lasting change.


By working alongside professional communicators and others who influence public narratives, the Network helps ensure that what people hear about hunger reflects reality, not assumption, stigma, or silence.


What We’ve Done

For more than four decades, the End Hunger Network has helped shape how the United States understands hunger and what it believes is possible to change. Over the years, the Network has built on a simple but transformational insight: stories shape public understanding, and public understanding shapes national action.


Long before digital platforms democratized storytelling, the Network recognized culture as one of the most powerful tools for advancing hunger solutions. It has worked creatively across media, entertainment, education, and civic institutions to make hunger visible, dignified, and solvable in the national imagination.


Shaping national awareness through media and culture

  • End Hunger Televent (1983): One of the first major televised events to address hunger with accuracy and dignity rather than stigma. It reached national audiences and earned a Silver Medal at the New York International Film and TV Festival.
  • Live Aid (1985): The Network helped shape the educational and messaging components of the U.S. telecast of this global concert, briefing broadcasters and performers to ensure the worldwide audience understood the crisis and the pathways to action. Live Aid reached an estimated 1.9 billion viewers worldwide and raised the equivalent of $450 million in today’s dollars.
  • Prime Time to End Hunger (1989): A coordinated effort across all three major U.S. broadcast networks that integrated hunger and homelessness into special episodes of top-rated television programs during the same week, demonstrating the power of entertainment to drive civic understanding and engagement.


Elevating leadership and local action

  • Presidential End Hunger Awards: Created in collaboration with the White House and USAID to recognize leaders, scientists, educators, journalists, and organizations advancing hunger solutions. These awards established hunger as a cause worthy of national recognition at the highest levels.
  • Mayors’ End Hunger Awards: Conducted with the U.S. Conference of Mayors, engaging more than 75 cities to highlight innovative local solutions and strengthen civic commitment to ending hunger.


Changing narratives through storytelling

  • Hidden in America (Showtime): A feature-length film portraying domestic hunger through character-driven storytelling. It was widely used as an educational tool and credited with helping normalize the understanding that hunger exists in every community.
  • Fast Forward to End Hunger: A nationwide partnership with thousands of video stores and entertainment companies that raised millions for local food banks while engaging audiences through unexpected cultural channels.
  • Hunger Free America: A major early-2000s initiative elevating childhood hunger as a national priority by engaging celebrities, governors, school systems, faith communities, nonprofits, and corporations around long-term solutions.


Mobilizing digital culture at scale

  • The Greatest Day on Social Media: A national, digital-first initiative designed to demonstrate the collective power of everyday communicators and creators to shape public attention. By coordinating thousands of individual voices across platforms on a single day (Thanksgiving Day), the initiative made hunger visible at scale. It did so not through centralized messaging, but through distributed storytelling grounded in accuracy, dignity, and shared purpose.


This effort reflected a core principle that continues to guide the End Hunger Network today: when communicators show up together, even without scripts or hierarchy, they can shift what the public notices and expects. “The Greatest Day on Social Media” illustrated how modern communications ecosystems, including social platforms, creators, journalists, and organizations, can align around a shared moment of visibility to reinforce understanding and urgency.


This initiative marked a natural evolution of the Network’s work: applying decades of experience in mass media and cultural storytelling to the realities of a digital, decentralized communications landscape.


A legacy that informs the present

The End Hunger Network has demonstrated that culture is not peripheral to hunger work. It is central to it. Progress has followed when:

  • Stigma was replaced with understanding
  • Myths were replaced with solutions
  • Resignation was replaced with possibility
  • Isolation was replaced with shared responsibility


That legacy shapes the Network’s work today. The current chapter builds on this history by focusing directly on the people who now shape public narratives at scale: communicators themselves. In an era where millions of professionals influence what the public sees, hears, and remembers every day, the End Hunger Network is organizing those voices into a national collaborative, applying decades of cultural insight to the realities of the digital age.