Ellen Messer
On 7 September 2024 the world lost a champion hunger fighter and passionate promoter of education incentivizing kindness and community service.
Alan Shawn Feinstein (ASF), founding and named donor of the Brown University ASF World Hunger Program, Tufts University Feinstein International Famine Center, University of Rhode Island Feinstein Center for a Hunger Free America, and dozens of additional educational programs at multiple levels, was an extraordinarily talented and original Rhode Island-based entrepreneur and philanthropist. A former teacher and children’s book author, he found his business and creative calling in an engaging and highly successful investment newsletter and in sales of unusual collectibles (sports cards, autographs, rare stamps, discontinued international currencies) that he guaranteed would satisfy and increase in value over time–or your money back.
His philanthropic activities to fight hunger extend back to the 1980s when he responded generously to requests for assistance from multiple local food pantries in his vicinity. But his contributions to constructing his vision of a world without hunger and poverty soon evolved to include a partnership with Brown University (The Alan Shawn Feinstein World Hunger Program), then with the Tufts and University of Rhode Island programs that respectively addressed global and local hunger issues through path-breaking combinations of research, training, and networking that challenged narrower definitions of university roles. These and dozens of other Feinstein educational initiatives at all levels, always funded and formulated in partnership with the individual educational institutions, were never merely academic. They always involved service and outreach components that promised to develop the skills and moral sensibilities of all participants and also benefit society for the present and future.
Over his lifetime (through personal contributions, then through Feinstein Foundation and Alan Shawn Feinstein Foundation gifts), Feinstein distributed tens of millions of dollars to academic institutions and additional organizations that fought hunger in local communities, the nation, and the world. Some examples, with which readers of this blog may be familiar, were the Feinstein annual hunger challenge, a matching grants program ($1 million/year) that for fifteen years helped hundreds of hunger-relief organizations raise hunger-awareness and money during the “slow” giving season after the winter holidays. Closer to home, he also provided incentives for multiple institutions of higher education to launch combined research, educational, and outreach programs that expanded their impacts into communities that benefited from and contributed to program partnerships, building relationships that influenced the lives of the participating students far beyond their college and university years of dedicated classes and internships. He successfully leveraged his philanthropic dollars to incentivize others to contribute as well. Through his Feinstein (later Alan Shawn Feinstein) Foundation, he repeatedly invested in schools—taking great joy in encouraging Feinstein Junior Scholars to reach out, “to do good deeds and be kind whenever possible” and so “make our world a better place!”
In the mid-1980s, I was a food-and-nutrition anthropologist in search of a context where I would be able to use all my food-systems research, training, and networking capabilities for maximal impact against hunger. Multi-year famines in Africa and increasing food insecurity accompanied by the growth of the emergency food-bank movement in the United States were immediate hunger concerns much in the news. Fortuitously, in 1985-1986, Brown University had entered into this extraordinary partnership and launched the Alan Shawn Feinstein World Hunger Program, a model philanthropic-university alliance dedicated to reducing hunger and eliminating its causes. The founding director, geographer Robert W. Kates, advancing a three-part “research, resources, recognition” agenda, hired me as one of a small but energetic faculty core, who helped design and implement an innovative “hunger” curriculum and multiple interdisciplinary seminars with dozens of Brown faculty from across all the university’s schools. Together we defined “hunger” as an academic field, produced a major multi-authored volume on the history of hunger, a multi-authored text —Who’s Hungry? And How Do We Know? Food Shortage, Poverty, and Deprivation (United Nations University Press, 1998), and multiple scientific and policy papers connecting hunger to poverty, environmental change, technological transformations, evolving institutions and values, and scenarios for the future.
In this pre-internet age, we assembled a substantial library (“Hunger Collection”), organized a research communications network, and also planned and implemented annual Hunger Research Briefing(s) and Exchange(s) (HRBE) that brought together researchers, policy-makers, and practitioners to identify and fill gaps. Despite the proliferation of official international food-policy agencies, we issued synthesizing Hunger Reports based on official hunger numbers, as interpreted by our research and supplemented by the HRBE findings. In 1989 we also launched a multi-year applied policy-research agenda, ambitiously titled “Overcoming Hunger in the 1990s: Half Way There,” with the WHP serving as Secretariat for a bold international program that encouraged developing country research institutions (Mahidol University (Thailand) to lead these efforts.
ASF was most involved in the final WHP component, the annual Feinstein Hunger Awards, presented at a media-star (human-rights hero) hosted ceremony that recognized outstanding figures from the non-government world who had made substantial contributions to ending hunger. Awardees included leading academic and policy researchers such as nutritionist Nevin Scrimshaw, development-economist and philosopher Amartya Sen, and “father of hybrid rice” Yuan Long-Ping, but also some better and lesser known organizations fighting hunger and poverty, including BRAC (Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee), the International Institute for Rural Reconstruction (Philippines), and the World Food Programme.
The vagaries of Brown academic politics and funding and ASF’s shift toward educational ventures resulted in WHP’s term-limitation after twelve years. Yet ASF’s legacy lives on in the research themes faculty continue to update, in my particular case, foodwars (breaking the links between conflict and hunger), food and human rights, and impacts of modern biotechnologies on hunger. We also trained many Brown students, who continue to work to solve hunger-related (international science, human-rights) problems in the world. An important and less acknowledged legacy of the HRBE programs are the contacts a broad spectrum of dedicated nutritionists and humanitarians made there, who include some of the principal researchers in the Tufts Feinstein center who first met at an HRBE humanitarian hunger session.
Although ASF said in an interview in 2017, at age 86, that about five years earlier he had moved from funding hunger programs to educating caring citizens, his name was still associated with food-related charities. His name also continues to be associated with ending hunger through the institutions he funded, the still-cited ideas and materials they produced, and the humanitarian work they do. In sum, ASF’s name endures as a recognized “change agent” for catalyzing actions against hunger, a role he actualized many decades before the UN Food-System Summit made “change agent” a buzzword. I am grateful to have been able to work in the settings he helped establish, to take this opportunity to pay tribute to the continuing and often unacknowledged impacts his model partnerships against hunger made possible, and to celebrate his life and legacy.