Meet Your Lobby Day Participants: Ellen and Al Fisher

Ellen and Al Fisher from Cedar Rapids, IA, are attending Bread for the World's 2012 Lobby Day.

Q: What brought you to Lobby Day?

Al Fisher (AF): This is our fourth Lobby Day. We came to Lobby Day in 2007, 2009, 2011, and now 2012.

Q: Why do you commit your time and resources to come to Lobby Day?

Ellen Fisher (EF): We both feel strongly that this is a vital part of our faith. I hope to persuade the government to adopt programs to end hunger, and we hope to influence the political process and encourage greater generosity towards the poor.

Q: Are you seeing signs of poverty of hunger in your community in Cedar Rapids?

EF: Our church provides free Sunday night meals and we meet people who come back for four or five servings, and they look to me as people who live on the fringes. 

AF: The unemployment rate is lower than the national average, but there is still a lot of hunger and poverty there. 

Q: What do you hope to tell your members of Congress when you meet with them today?

AF: That they shouldn't cut federal nutrition programs and cut the budget on the backs of the poor. We met with a staffer last year who said that times are tough and everybody's gotta have skin in the game, but it seems unfair that 60 percent of the cuts are coming from programs for the poor.

EF: Right, saying you have to have skin in the game is one thing, but 60 percent of the cuts isn't having skin in the game, it's getting amputated!

Q: Why is hunger an important issue for you?

AF: When we adopted our two kids from South Korea, our son came into the care of the adoption agency and a very nice caring foster family the day after he was born, and then we adopted him. But our daughter had a difficult first 14 months before we adopted her, during which she was very sick and hungry. When we adopted her, at meals, she would eat with food in one hand and food in another hand. She had known hunger, so this is a personal issue for us.

Photo caption: Al Fisher and Ellen Fisher at Bread for the World's Lobby Day on June 12, 2012.