Hunger relief: Hinckley woman leads regional CROP Walk effort

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Julia Jones walked in her first CROP Hunger Walk when she was in high school. Since then, she’s walked in the shoes of people who have benefited from the steps that she and millions of others have taken.

Jones is an assistant regional director of Church World Service, the main beneficiary of CROP Walks. Her job is to organize 45 different walks in northern Illinois each year, along with educating people about hunger.

This Sunday marks one of the largest days for CROP Walks. DeKalb-area walkers are stepping off at Westminster Presbyterian Church at 3 p.m.

When Jones, 34, and her husband moved to Hinckley after he was appointed pastor at Hinckley First United Methodist Church, she was looking for a new job. She found it at the Chicago office of Church World Service, which covers CROP Walks throughout Illinois and in parts of Missouri. Thirty-five Christian denominations make up Church World Service to support sustainable development, disaster relief and refugee assistance.

“There’s a lot of need in the world,” Jones said. “As a person of faith, I’ve always felt called to respond to that need.”

And she soon found that a perk of her job was travel. Church World Service employees travel to see firsthand how their work affects people. Those experiences are brought back to educate on hunger issues and promote the CROP Walk.

Jones spent two weeks in January 2008 in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. In Haiti, she watched as women baked what Jones described as mud cookies – mixed with salt and water – on the tin roofs of their homes.

“It was not nutritious, but it filled the kids’ stomachs,” Jones said.

But she also saw a lot of good – all due to fundraising efforts from CROP Walks.

Church World Service doesn’t give handouts, Jones emphasized, but education and tools. For example, she met with farmers who enthusiastically shared with her new techniques they had learned, like raised-bed farming and natural pesticide use.

She met with families who have learned proper care of livestock and have seen the results multiply. This is essential because wealth is tied up in animals for many families, so much that they refer to it as a “goat bank,” Jones said. Banks are either too far away from small, rural villages, or it can be difficult to find a willing lender.

One family started with a dozen goats. Two years later, they were raising 72.

“It was just a couple of goats and some training,” Jones said. “It completely changed this family’s life.”

Another Church World Service program Jones saw in action was a training program for women.

“When women have resources, they invest them in their families,” whereas men often don’t, Jones said.

So women learned how to create a small business plan and were given a microloan. One woman used this loan to travel about eight hours to Port-au-Prince to buy snack foods, and another similarly bought cookware. They each sold items in their villages at a profit.

In this way, women were learning how to track inventory and how to meet supply and demand – and most importantly, they were doing this independently, Jones said.

“Hunger is very simple,” she said. “Everyone needs food. The solutions can be very simple, but they can also be very complex.”

Natural disasters and corrupt governments can hinder communities from achieving freedom from hunger. And what works in one community may not in another part of the world, so Church World Service’s programs are specific to the group’s needs.

Both Church World Service and CROP began after World War II to rebuild war-torn Europe. Church World Service formed in 1946 when different Christian denominations came together to donate food, clothes and medical supplies.

CROP – originally Christian Rural Overseas Program – began a year later with Midwest farmers who donated their harvest to European countries. Today CROP stands for Communities Responding to Overcome Poverty, and is most well-known for the communitywide, interfaith CROP Hunger Walks.

Besides this Sunday’s walk in DeKalb, walks were held in Somonauk and Genoa earlier this year, with 25 percent of the money raised staying in the local community.

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If you go

Sondra King Memorial CROP Hunger Walk

When: 3 p.m. Sunday; registration begins at 2 p.m.

Where: Westminster Presbyterian Church, 830 Annie Glidden Road in DeKalb

Information: To participate or make a donation, call co-chairwomen Martha O’Gorman at 815-761-4280 or Cindy Dugan at 815-758-1563, or visit www.cropwalk.org.