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A raft of newspaper articles highlighting the problem of homelessness followed the recent deaths of two homeless people at downtown encampments. Refugees from conflict in Syria and Mali beg from the TV screen for our attention. Candidates debate the shredding of the social safety net for people in need, and a seemingly endless barrage of appeals for help arrive in the mailbox and the inbox every day. Even big-hearted people can start to wonder if their efforts can make a difference.
If you find yourself in one of those moments when you start to question whether you can help change the world, Doug Anderson and Esther Zorn suggest that you try this: just take the first step, and then another, and then the next. Thousands of Central New Yorkers will be doing just that later this month as they take to the streets for the 36th time to raise funds for the hungry through CROP walks. Anderson, regional director for CROP, has been organizing the Syracuse CROP walk since 1977.
Zorn’s church, Plymouth Congregational, 232 E. Onondaga St., just south of Columbus Circle, has been part of the walk since that very first year. In the past 35 years, Central New Yorkers in dozens of communities have walked to raise more than $4 million for programs to alleviate hunger and poverty worldwide. Of that total, more than $1 million have come back to our area to help the hungry here at home, through food pantries and programs like Meals on Wheels.
According to Anderson, CROP walks, which began in 1969, help to make visible what a lot of people would otherwise prefer to ignore: hunger in our back yard. One in seven citizens nationwide now uses food stamps, and in Syracuse, 34 percent of residents and 42 percent of children live below the poverty line, giving us the highest poverty rate among Northeastern cities over 100,000 in population.
This year, thousands of people like Zorn will be walking in 25 communities all over a five-county area in what has become a fall regional tradition, an autumn antidote to apathy for Central New Yorkers. Most of the walks will be held on Sunday, Oct. 14, but several communities walk on Saturday, Oct. 13, or the previous weekend. The walks help fund Church World Service programs globally; CWS is a 66-year-old international non-governmental organization (churchworldservice.org).
For Zorn, a real estate broker who lives on the East Side, the CROP Walk is a family tradition. She recalled how her three children, now grown and moved away, participated when they were infants and toddlers. “As a mother whose kids grew up doing these things, walking that far gave our children the chance to walk their values,” she said. “They got tired. They wanted to do it but they didn’t want to do it for 10 miles. I reminded them that people have to walk that far for food or water. They had a sense of accomplishment and a sense of humility, even when they were very small.
“I remember my daughter Katie {now 28 and living in Santa Fe, N.M.), saying, ‘People really walk that far just to get water?’ It made something distant very real to them. I can still remember them as toddlers, one walking, one in the stroller and one on my husband’s shoulders. That was always the big thing to get to ride on Daddy’s shoulders. Lately I’ve now been talking to my kids on the phone about it. Now they’re much older and have fond memories of the CROP Walk and sense of community, and it gives them a sense of responsibility to give back to the community.”
While they were walking with their young children the Zorns never imagined that their own children would be the recipients of that community kindness. Since then Esther Zorn has had occasion to see how that caring comes back home, as one of her own children needed to rely on social services to get on their feet.
“As a parent it gives you a sense that the circle has been closed,” she said. “You don’t ever expect that you are going to need that sort of support from your community, but when you need it you are so grateful that it is there. Everyone talks in politics about the safety net, but the safety net is your community. It’s your neighbor, it’s the food pantry that you can go to when you absolutely have to. If there is no CROP Walk or people who will keep that pantry stocked, then there is no such thing as a safety net.”
For a full schedule of area CROP Walks, visit cropwalkonline.org or call 458-8535.
