Photo: 'What We're Hungry For' - Facebook
'What We're Hungry For'
'What We're Hungry For'
Jim Winship took the long road to becoming a documentary film director. In many ways, his debut feature, What We’re Hungry For, about rural Wisconsin food pantries and the obstacles they faced during the COVID-19 pandemic, was 50 years in the making.
His social work career, specializing in poverty and food insecurity, started in the early ‘70s with the Peace Corp in El Salvador. Afterwards, he worked for a social service agency in Columbus, Ohio, where he met his wife, Rita. They moved to Athens, Georgia where he helped start a food pantry and earned his masters and doctorate at the University of Georgia.
Winship moved to Wisconsin in 1981, where for the next 40 years he taught social work at UW-Whitewater. On a part-time basis, he worked with homeless families and provided training to social workers. He was a founding board member of Bethel House in Whitewater, where he has been involved for the last 29 years.
Winship also returned to El Salvador whenever possible, including as a Fullbright Scholar and Advisor at Universidad Panamericana de El Salvador. His research produced multiple works, including the book, Coming of Age in El Salvador, about young adults growing up in a globalized world, and the video project, Difficult Dreams, a storytelling collaboration with his son, Parker. Winship retired from full time teaching in 2016.
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Out of Retirement
Photo: Sean Williamson
Jim Winship 'What We're Hungry For'
Jim Winship 'What We're Hungry For'
In March of 2020, Winship was enjoying the early years of semi-retirement. He was still active: teaching one online class at UW-Whitewater, traveling and taking art classes, but he was wondering what was next.
“I had been working for about 10 years, to help people develop digital stories, which are three-minute personal stories, with photos and videos and music,” Jim said in a recent phone interview. “I had been talking with the Hunger Task Force, and the Hunger Relief Federation that works with rural food pantries in Wisconsin. We were talking in January and February of 2020 about doing some training. Then the pandemic came and of course that went out the window.”
In the very early days of the pandemic, Natalie Czarkowski from the Hunger Task Force was holding weekly conference calls with food pantries around the state. Jim would join those calls and listen to how the pandemic was affecting food pantries and the people they served.
“I thought, ‘Oh my God’ there’s a story here.”
With Czarkowski’s recommendation, Winship started weekly phone conversations with the directors of five rural food pantries.
In May of 2020, Winship’s son, Parker, moved back to Wisconsin after a decade in Los Angeles. Parker is a narrative filmmaker and UWM Alumnus and the pandemic put him in the same frustrating position as other filmmakers: unable to collaborate and exercise their craft.
“My dad was talking about making this video project, about getting someone to do it. I think he didn't want to take for granted that I would work on it. But it made a lot of sense that I would do it. For one, I had the equipment and some skill set and we were in a bubble. We were living in the same house. We didn't have to worry about traveling together. It became a lot easier,” Parker said.
In a two-day span, Jim and Parker visited the five food pantries Jim had been in contact with. They traveled to Sheboygan, Kenosha, Wautoma, Oneida and Ashland to interview organizers about the unique challenges they faced. By the time they were driving back from Ashland, five hours north, they could see a bigger story. Two days of interviews turned into a storytelling odyssey that continues today.
What We’re Hungry For is about the history and politics of hunger in America, but much of the power and charm of the film comes from the featured organizers, including Marlon, manager of the Oneida Nation’s Emergency Food Pantry, whose resourceful work in food sovereignty has been internationally recognized; Sharon, who became executive director of a food pantry after struggling to feed her family as a single mother; and Marty, a retirement-age dynamo who turned a small pantry into a food access hub for a large region of the state.
The film premiered at Morehouse College Human Rights Film Festival in September of 2022 and screened this spring at Ethnografilm Paris and Milwaukee Film Festival. There have also been community screenings around Wisconsin that spark conversation about how hunger can be addressed within those communities.
The purpose is to show it to people in the community and then flip it to the issues in the community,” Winship said. “What the state legislator does has a tremendous impact on poverty and food insecurity. People aren't hungry because they don't have enough food in the closet. There are all these societal factors that come into play. And policy makers can make a huge difference. I think the documentary points that out. Only one in 20 people in Wisconsin had food insecurity in that brief window of time in 2021. So we can do better. It's just a matter of political will. And political will comes from public pressure.”
The next community screening is May 17, 6:30-8 p.m. at the CrossWay Community Church in Bristol, WI. You can find detailed information at thesharingcenter.net/event.
