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Hunger in the US: How Disasters Disrupt Access to Food
May 15, 2025 @ 10:00 am – 11:00 am PDT
This webinar is hosted by The Center for Disaster Philanthropy and co-sponsored by Alliance Magazine, Council on Foundations, Giving Compass, National Voluntary Organizations Active in a Disaster, PEAK Grantmaking, Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems Funders, and The Funders Network.
Hunger, or periods of severe food insecurity when people may go for days without eating because of lack of money, access to food or other resources, affects 14% of households and about 1 in 5 children in the U.S.
As food prices increase year after year while funding cuts continue to hit programs across the country, working families struggle to afford food daily. When a natural hazard or severe weather occurs, it exacerbates hunger by disrupting supply chains, reducing access to food from stores or restaurants, increasing pressures on support systems like food banks, and causing power outages that may prevent people from making their own food.
Join us for a webinar to discuss the systemic causes of hunger and why it is a preventable disaster.
By the end of this webinar, donors will:
- Understand the systemic causes of hunger and how to address them.
- Recognize the repercussions of funding cuts.
- Explore how funders can reduce hunger in the U.S.
Who should attend?
- Anyone interested in learning about hunger in the U.S.
- Philanthropic organizations, individual donors and funders
- Philanthropic advisors
- Disaster response and recovery professionals
- Community leaders and policymakers
Panelists:
Salaam Bhatti, Esq., SNAP Director, Food Research and Action Center
Salaam Bhatti joined FRAC in November 2023 as the SNAP Director. In this role, he works to strengthen SNAP access and benefit adequacy. Salaam works closely with the Interim President to develop, lead, and track annual work plans; set and meet unit goals; collaborate with other unit Directors to assist in achieving FRAC’s strategic plan goals; and expand the unit’s innovation and work.
Salaam joins FRAC after working at the Virginia Poverty Law Center (VPLC). While at VPLC, he successfully lobbied to fully repeal the drug felon ban for SNAP and TANF, twice achieved record increases to TANF cash benefits, subsidized reduced-priced school meals, repealed the TANF family cap, ended lunch shaming policies in schools, and received a unanimous vote to expand SNAP for over 20,000 families. Salaam also helped develop a mobile-friendly, SNAP screening tool which is used by tens of thousands of people & multiple non-profits and has been rolled out to be available for all states and D.C. He received the Young Alumni Achievement Award from Albright College for his work in alleviating poverty and promoting Muslim-Jewish relations. Salaam also received the inaugural Stuart A. Freudberg Award for Regional Partnership for his work with Maryland and DC Hunger Solutions to address food insecurity across the metropolitan Washington area from the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments.
Salaam has a J.D. from Touro Law School, is barred in New York and Virginia, and received his Bachelors in Political Science and International Relations from Albright College (with a year abroad in the University of Aberdeen).
Vincent Davis, Senior Director of Disaster Services, Feeding America
Vincent B. Davis is the Founder of Preparedness Matters Consulting and serves as Director of Disaster Services for Feeding America. Prior to joining Feeding America in January 2020, he served as workplace resiliency manager at Amazon, where he developed disaster frameworks to support the company’s 175 corporate offices. Before joining Amazon, Vince was senior preparedness manager for Sony PlayStation in San Diego, and manager of preparedness and response at Walgreens Co., where he developed disaster programs for their 8,600 U.S. stores and distribution facilities. Following a distinguished 23-year career in the U.S. Air Force and Illinois National Guard, Vince served as external affairs and community relations officer at FEMA, managing field teams for 11 Presidential disasters. After leaving FEMA Vince served as regional preparedness manager for the American Red Cross of Greater Chicago, where he led research and development of the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning Go To 2040 Report on Emergency Preparedness, a 30-year planning effort to improve community disaster resilience.
Vince was principal developer of the FEMA Regional Catastrophic Incident Coordination Plan for Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin, a plan for mass care of a million residents of the Chicagoland region. Vince is a Certified Emergency Manager (CEM). In 2019, he completed the FEMA National Emergency Management Advanced Academy (NEMAA) for senior leaders. A passionate advocate for disaster literacy and underserved community preparedness, Vince has authored three books, Lost and Turned Out, A Guide to Preparing Underserved Communities for Disasters (Amazon 2012), and The Native Family Disaster Preparedness Handbook (Heritage Publishing 2017), and the Emergency Guidebook for Broadcasters Serving Indian Country in collaboration with Native Public Media. Vince is a lifetime member of the Black Emergency Managers Association International (BEMA), an Advisory Board Member for the Institute for Diversity and Inclusion in Emergency Management (I-DIEM), Honorary Chair for the International Council for Women’s Leadership in Emergency Management and Business Continuity (ICWL), and Advisory Board member for the Homeland Security Center of Excellence, Pierce College, Washington.
Kavita Koppa, Co-Executive Director, Rural Advancement Foundation International (RAFI)
Kavita (Kuh-vee-thuh) serves as the Co-Executive Director of RAFI-USA, where she worked 2013 to 2016 and then returned in 2023 as Land Access Director. She brings more than a decade of experience in agriculture across nonprofit, for-profit, and cooperative sectors. She is especially passionate about making financing more accessible and equitable for farmers — particularly those historically excluded from traditional financial systems.
In addition to her work at RAFI-USA, Kavita served as co-owner at Money Positive, a worker-owned financial planning firm focused on helping those who are often excluded from the conventional financial industry. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in geography and biology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a dual MBA/MA in Public Affairs from the University of Texas at Austin. Kavita can usually be found frolicking through the woods of North Carolina and getting overly-excited about plants.
Moderator:
Tanya Gulliver-Garcia, Director of Advisory and Education Services, The Center for Disaster Philanthropy
Tanya Gulliver-Garcia (she/they) brings practical, lived, academic and philanthropic understandings of disasters to her work as the Center for Disaster Philanthropy’s director of advisory and education services. In this role, Tanya oversees the development of educational content and CDP’s educational webinar series. Tanya also directs CDP’s expert advisory services, which help funders determine, manage and improve their disaster-giving strategies.
Tanya is a self-described “disaster junkie” who is passionate about ensuring the most marginalized and oppressed in our communities can recover and build resilience. Their work is grounded in principles of equity and an understanding of how the intersections of race, gender, sexual orientation, age, disability, class and other identities affect the lives of individuals and their families/communities.
Prior to CDP, Tanya worked as the associate director of programs and planning at Foundation for Louisiana (FFL). Her duties included helping FFL strengthen its capacity to manage various programmatic initiatives while building an effective evaluation practice. They led FFL’s Equitable Disaster Resilience Framework, the associated Strategic Response Fund and the foundation’s LGBTQ+ Fund.
Tanya lived and worked most of her life in or around Toronto, Canada. Their work there includes serving as the research coordinator for the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness/Homeless Hub (COH), which works to mobilize research results to have a greater impact on the elimination of homelessness in Canada.
Tanya regularly speaks and presents on issues related to disaster equity, the numbers behind disaster giving, and building relationships between funders and nongovernmental organizations. They have appeared in keynotes and conferences, such as PEAK grantmaking, Res/Con, We Give Summit and National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disasters.
Tanya also worked as a freelance writer and editor for a couple of decades and served for eight years on the Professional Writers Association of Canada board, including three terms as president. Tanya is a frequent writer for CDP’s blog and has authored analyses and commentaries in publications such as Giving Compass, Nonprofit Quarterly and Reader’s Digest Canada. They are #TeamNoOxfordComma!
Tanya’s academic background is in sociology, particularly disaster and environmental sociology. Their master’s degree developed a risk-based heat registry to protect low-income and marginally-housed communities from extreme heat. Tanya has responded to several major disasters across the United States and in her adopted state of Louisiana with American Red Cross.
Tanya lives and works remotely in the Broadmoor neighborhood of New Orleans.
