This article is part of Times Opinion’s 2025 Giving Guide.
Billy Shore always seemed too sweet to be in politics.
I met him way back when pols and officials had the decency to creep away if they were caught doing something shameful.
Shore was an aide to Gary Hart in the Senate and in his presidential campaigns in 1984 and 1988. Hart dropped out in 1987 after a sex scandal but later got back in the race, pursuing a lonely quest with his wife, Lee, and a handful of reporters (including me). Shore was also Bob Kerrey’s chief of staff in the Senate and helped with his losing presidential run in 1992.
But even before his two candidates came a cropper, Shore had another passion: eradicating hunger. In 1984, when a brutal famine in Ethiopia was killing hundreds of thousands, he founded Share Our Strength, a hunger relief organization, with his sister, Debbie Shore.
“Knowing that I was going to spend another four years on the road doing campaign stuff, I also wanted to have a more immediate, direct, hands-on way of trying to make a difference,” Shore, now 70, told me Wednesday at his D.C. office.
He realized he’d rather help hungry children than politicians hungry for the White House. He used to wrangle reporters on the campaign trail. But he decided he would rather spend an afternoon, as he once did, wrangling 101 children, including 20 from a homeless shelter, dressing them up in black-and-white spotted costumes and taking them to see the movie “101 Dalmatians.”
But this week, Shore is more focused on striped rodents than spotted dogs. The actor and Share Our Strength patron Jeff Bridges had put him in touch with the producer of the Alvin and the Chipmunks movies who was producing a Chipettes cover of “Golden,” the hit from “KPop Demon Hunters,” and wanted all proceeds to go to the organization.
The organization, which began in the basement of a rowhouse on Capitol Hill, is now an intrinsic part of the fight against hunger across the United States, waged at the local, state and national levels. In 2010 it started its “No Kid Hungry” campaign. That is a mission that everyone agrees with, and yet one we somehow fail to achieve in an America larded with billionaires cavorting in a new tech-driven Gilded Age. Billionaires who are, Shore said, only “giving away a very small percentage of their revenue.”
Hunger, Shore added, “is a solvable problem, relative to so many other things we care about. You don’t even need facts or figures. People know it intuitively.”
But here’s a shocking figure anyhow: According to the latest data, from 2023, nearly 50 million Americans, including one in five children, are food insecure.
The Trump administration’s Dickensian gutting of SNAP benefits during the government shutdown this fall showed how easy it is for millions of Americans to slip back into choosing between heating their house and feeding their families.
Shore said that there is no ideological bent to his operation. “I think both parties are almost equally to blame,” he said. “I think people at the bottom of the economic ladder are just politically invisible. They’re voiceless. And even a lot of my favorite politicians don’t pay attention to them the way I wish they would.”
Given President Trump’s flickering interest in affordability and attacks on food assistance programs, Shore said “the saving grace” is that a lot of his work is done at the state and local levels. He said about the Trump White House press secretary-turned-Arkansas governor: “Sarah Huckabee Sanders is one of our biggest champions.”
Shore splits his time between Washington and the rocky shores of Kennebunkport, Maine, where he joined the all-volunteer fire department seven years ago at the urging of his son because, he said wryly, the fire chief wanted to “lower the average age of the department.” That inspired him to start writing a book framed around the question: “What if we responded to a child trapped in poverty the way the fire department responds to a child trapped in a burning building?”
Shore said “one of the things that’s really impressed me since I’ve been a firefighter is this mentality of ‘Do whatever it takes,’ rather than ‘Let’s study it for six months.’”
Please help support Share Our Strength’s fight. When you’re talking about hungry kids, by all means, let’s do whatever it takes.
This article is part of Times Opinion’s Giving Guide 2025. The author has no direct connection to the organizations mentioned. If you are interested in any organization mentioned in the guide, please go directly to its website. Neither the authors nor The Times will be able to address queries about the groups or facilitate donations.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.
The post Leaving Hungry Pols to Help Hungry Kids appeared first on New York Times.
