I recently saw this post on AdFreak, and was a bit disturbed, and not just because I've never gotten that dressed up to eat soup or PB&J.

Why does giving to food banks have to be fashionable for people to do it?

I taught a course last Spring called "It's not easy being green: Fashions of Sustainability in American Culture." My students and I examined, in depth, evironmentalism and the burgeoning green movement--and why it seems everyone is in on it.  I'm teaching a version of the course this Spring, and while my focus will be still on the environment, it will also include the sustainable practices of urban spaces, my case studies being New Orleans and Philadelphia.  Rather than strictly focus on the environment, this semester I plan on opening up "sustainability" to include what we can do (or not do, as the case may be) for our communities.

I confess that refined focus comes from a very personal reaction to an artile in the Philadelphia Inquirer published on September 19, 2008.  Talking about how the economy is in a rough spot (putting it mildly), Philabundance, the largest hunger relief agency in the Deleware Valley, was planning on cutting its after-school milk program--a program which provided milk to over a thousand children.  What was inconceivable to me was the second line of the article, "In many cases, it is the only milk the children ever drink."

That sentence brought back what I regard now as a rather ridiculous moment of a five year old (me) who hadn't gotten her way one morning in kindergarden: We had a substitute teacher, who was a friend of my family's, and in taking down the day's milk order, she got mine wrong. Rather than chocolate milk, I got white milk and I thought my world was going to collapse. I cried and cried and was utterly inconsolable.

I was, in other words, completely ridiculous.

While I can forgive myself and chalk it up to a stupid thing I did as I kid, it hit a nerve to think that some kids only get milk at school or at an after-school program. Growing up, my family certainly wasn't rich but we weren't scraping by either. My mom was a stay-at-home mom to my brother and I and my father was, before having to retire because of a medical disability, a union electrician who sometimes was laid off for months if work was slow. There were times when we had to make sacrifices but my parents made sure that my brother and I were taken care of first.  When things got bad, we were completely clueless and never felt it--they did. Realizing all that they did for my brother and I then, and what they continue to do for me now, only makes my respect and admiration for my parents grow, and one day, when I'm a parent, I hope to be half as good as they are.

For many reasons, families all over the country are struggling to make ends meet and provide for their children. Once the story was printed, community reaction was fierce--eventually, Philabundance got the money it needed to keep the program, along with a sharp dose of criticism (often, people cited that staff cuts should come before program cuts, especially programs which affect children). Today, dollars and cents are on everyone's mind. But if we can each donate five or ten dollars to raise millions of dollars for a politician, can't we donate five or ten dollars, or five cans of food, or five hours a month of volunteer time, to a foodbank or other community agency?

This story has stuck with me since I picked up that copy of the Inquirer, as has my five year old foolishness. And it begs an important question: Do we feel any responsibility to our communities?  We often see outpouring of support when disaster strikes--one need look no further than the events of September 11, 2001 or the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to see evidence that people care when destruction abounds.  But what happens when that destruction is, if not invisible, often intangible, like an economic recession--are we still willing to think of others in addition to ourselves and our families?  And are we willing to think about them and help not because it's a fashionable thing to do, but because it's a decent, very human and humane thing to do?