Massachusetts is home to world-renowned colleges and universities such as Harvard and MIT. It also hosts universally respected medical centers such as Massachusetts General Hospital and thriving biotechnology companies such as Moderna. Those assets have attracted many high earners to the Bay State, contributing to its median household income reaching nearly $100,000.
Despite such wealth, hunger in the Bay State persists. Nearly 2 million adults, or 34 percent of households in Massachusetts experienced food insecurity in 2023 according to the Greater Boston Food Bank’s 2024 statewide report.
The Greater Boston Food Bank, or GBFB, is the leading hunger-relief nonprofit in New England. It sources and distributes meals to those who are food-insecure across 190 municipalities.
One Lexington woman, Kim Goldinger, who is a longtime advocate of ending hunger, joined GBFB’s board of directors with plans to help the nonprofit fight food insecurity across Massachusetts.
“You don’t have to walk very far around the corner or down the street to find people who are struggling,” Goldinger, who joined the board in December, told LexObserver.
There are local, state and federal programs, such as food pantries, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, or WIC, that aim to mitigate hunger. But responses to the GBFB’s survey reflect that those programs aren’t enough — 75 percent of respondents who participate in two or more food assistance programs continue to experience food insecurity.
One in three households with children experienced child-level food insecurity in 2023, GBFB’s survey reports. Children from households where the adult who completed the survey identified as LGBTQ+ experienced the highest rates of childhood food insecurity compared to other groups.
GBFB’s report attributes persistent hunger to many pandemic-era benefits ending and the cost of food and housing remaining high.
“Inflation, the cost of living, and wages all combine to make this a real pervasive problem in our area for people that you wouldn’t even expect,” Goldinger said.
Joining the board is far from Goldinger’s introduction to GBFB. She served as Chair of the organization’s Board of Advisors, was an inaugural member of its Innovative Development Council, and has been a donor since 2001.
Goldinger also hosted GBFB’s first farm-to-table dinner in 2017 at her farm in Lexington, Silk Fields Farm. She opened Silk Fields Farm in 2011 when her children were young, she said, to expose them to where food comes from and the importance of living sustainably. Today, Goldinger and her family breed and raise goats and alpacas, and keep hens, rabbits, sheep, and beehives on their farm. Silk Fields Farm has teamed up with several Massachusetts-based organizations such as Kids Cooking Green and The Home for Little Wanderers to teach children about the food system.
As a new member of GBFB’s board, Goldinger will use her knowledge and experience to work with subcommittees and support the larger organization toward its goal of ending hunger in the Bay State.
“It’s easy to become immune and think that food is such a basic human need and that in a well-off country like America, and a well-off state like Massachusetts, and in a rich city like Boston, it wouldn’t be a problem,” Goldinger said. “That’s just not true.”
Impressive! And two other Lexington residents (that I know of, one of whom is me) serve on the GBFB research advisory council.