Our Approach

The Baylor Collaborative on Hunger and Poverty—originally founded as the Texas Hunger Initiative in 2009—began as a partnership between the Baylor School of Social Work and the Christian Life Commission that sought to develop and implement strategies to end hunger in Texas through policy, education, community organizing, and community development. The Hunger Collaborative convened federal, state, and local government stakeholders with non-governmental organizations, churches, and local providers to develop a system for efficient use and delivery of resources to individuals and families facing food insecurity.  With 50 affiliated research fellows, 28,000 organizational partners, and approximately 25 staff, students, and interns, the Baylor Hunger Collaborative team has become a leader in innovation among both faith-based and secular organizations across the nation.

Over the next ten years, the Baylor Hunger Collaborative worked in regions across Texas to build a collective impact approach to hunger. Its work included expanding access to and participation in child nutrition programs and, in partnership with USDA and the Texas Department of Agriculture, led to markedly increased participation in school breakfast and summer meal sites by children in Texas.

Multi-Sectoral Collaboration in Action

In 2020, the landscape of food security research and programmatic efforts took a significant turn with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Millions of individuals throughout the country fell into situational food insecurity, and large food security institutions, including the Baylor Hunger Collaborative, were tapped to take on new programmatic interventions to circumvent programs that were less relevant in a lockdown.

As part of this shift, the Baylor Hunger Collaborative was tasked with administering an experimental food delivery program being trialed by USDA, Meals to You, that shipped roughly 40 million shelf-stable meals to 270,000 low-income households with children across 43 states and Puerto Rico. This program was a resounding success and incorporated into a permanent program through the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2023.

Since 2023, the Baylor Hunger Collaborative continues to train and equip stakeholders across the United States in collective impact solutions. Housed within Baylor University, the oldest continuously operating university in Texas and a uniquely Baptist, nationally ranked liberal arts and top-tier research institution, the Hunger Collaborative has developed tools to scale its collective impact model across the nation. Relying on over sixteen years of experience, the Hunger Collaborative helps communities leverage existing federal nutrition programs, innovate and test new solutions to alleviate hunger, educate and inform policymakers to ensure every person has access to the food they need, and train the next generation of leaders committed to ending hunger in Texas, across the nation, and around the globe.

As an organization animated by faith, the Hunger Collaborative passionately seeks to attend to Jesus’ call to feed the hungry. In passages like Matthew 25, Jesus is unmistakably clear: ‘Whatever you did for one of the least of these, so you also did for me.’ Feeding the hungry is not a partisan issue – it is a gospel issue, and the Hunger Collaborative faithfully lives out this conviction through working across denominational and party lines and sectors to develop effective, sustainable solutions to end hunger.

Foundational Principles

We firmly believe a world without hunger is possible by utilizing the distinct but overlapping principles of Multi-Sectoral Collaboration, Shared Power, and Collective Impact.

• Multi-Sectoral Collaboration: Diverse sectors working together for a common cause.
• Shared Power: Locates power within the lowest appropriate entities both across and within organizations and creates the environment for this shared power to be used to develop effective and legitimate solutions.
• Collective Impact: The commitment of a group representing different sectors to a common agenda, with the purpose of solving a specific social problem.