President and CEO Bob Moore covers the area's top stories including a new study on food insecurity in the region, how colleges and universities still have pandemic-era funds to use (or lose), and the next book for the El Paso Book Club is "Educating the Enemy" by Dr. Jonna Perrillo.
Here is a transcript of their conversation:
KC Counts:
Well, Bob, let's begin with some reporting you're doing on hunger in the region, and I must say, some pretty shocking numbers.
Bob Moore:
Yeah, this week the El Pasoans fighting Hunger Food Bank released a study that was done by a couple of UTEP professors that looked at food insecurity in El Paso County and then also food insecurity among UTEP students and the numbers were pretty high. Previous estimates had said that about 15% of El Pasoans suffered food insecurity, but this most recent study indicated that it's actually 35%. And among UTEP students, that number jumps up to to 61%. I think it's important to understand what food insecurity means. It's not necessarily the same thing as hunger or starvation, but it generally means that sometime during the year you or your family ran into a situation where you don't have access to enough food to feed everybody and that could be financial reasons, it could be not having food nearby, but it's a it's a really stark reminder that even after the pandemic, when we thought a lot of those issues had settled down, we’re still seeing really significant issues with food insecurity in El Paso.
KC Counts:
Recently, some federal benefits associated with the pandemic went away. Would these numbers be after that change or before that?
Bob Moore:
It's before that, which is worrisome. For example, everybody who was on SNAP got boosted benefits during the pandemic - that ended a couple of months ago. So that's something we have to watch out for. The one thing I really want to stress, too, is that this is not a cause for despair. I think it's an opportunity to begin to talk about how to address some of these issues and obviously El Paso is fighting hunger, which in full disclosure, I’m on the board; You know, that's one solution - having food banks to have emergency access to food, but addressing food insecurity requires a more systemic approach beyond just making sure people have an emergency food supply. So, it's doing the work, but it's not going to be easy, and it's going to require a community-wide approach.
KC Counts:
We'll stay on the topic of emergency funds and how UTEP and EPCC are planning to use some of those.
Bob Moore:
So you mentioned one batch of Pandemic-era benefits that expired. One of the other things that happened during the pandemic is Congress invested a lot of money in higher education institutions to try to protect them and their students from the fallout from the pandemic. And so the two biggest institutions in El Paso, UTEP and El Paso Community College both got tens of millions of dollars. Again, it ranged from providing them with employment in some cases, another thing we touched on was a student who got a car so that they could make sure to have transportation to and from school. Most of the money went into direct student benefits, and it helped keep some people in college, helped keep, you know, a lot of faculty and staff employed through that, even though particularly at the Community College level, we saw huge drops in enrollment throughout the pandemic. These were investments that really helped protect a lot of people. But the colleges and universities just have a month or so to spend down that money, and both UtEP and the Community College still have a few million left to spend to benefit students and their institutions without having to give the money back. But it creates some problems going forward. You know, what's going to replace a lot of those benefits that really provided a lot of stability? The colleges and universities may have to move some of their own institutional funds into that. So, it's going to be something definitely worth watching.
KC Counts:
Alright and sometime back, “Educating the Enemy” was published and we talked a little bit about that and the book’s author, and now we can get a lot more in-depth.
Bob Moore:
Yeah, so this is the second book for our El Paso Book Club and I encourage everybody who's interested in literature to sign up for it. “Educating the Enemy” is a book written by Jonna Perrillo, who's a UTEP professor that looks at the immediate post World War Two era when the United States brought scientists over from Germany - Nazi scientists, and then eventually brought their families with them and placed them at Fort Bliss. El Paso schools had to educate these children, and the real beauty of Doctor Perrillo’s book, I think, is that she compares the education of those German children to the education of the Mexican-American children who were already here. Perrillo and I will sit down for a conversation about the book and about that era. You'll have a chance to ask questions too, but it's a little-understood, but fascinating part of El Paso's history, and that should be a good conversation.
KC Counts:
Alright, you can read more about it at elpasomatters.org. Bob, thanks so much for the update and have a great weekend.
Bob Moore:
You too. Thanks so much.
