Tapping Empathy and the Power of the Indian Community to Wipe-Out Hunger

80 million meals and counting… That’s the number of meals donated by HungerMitao to the Feeding America network since 2017. Now this donation effort has expanded to Kansas City and Harvesters.

HungerMitao (pronounced MEE-tah-oh) is a Hindi word meaning “wipe-out” hunger. The grassroots, all-volunteer movement was created to help raise hunger awareness and support among the 5.2 million Indian immigrants living and working in the United States.

The movement’s mantra: “Give where you live.”

Local HungerMitao organizers, Pratibha and Kamlesh Trivedi of Shawnee, Kansas, are spearheading efforts to educate and involve the 13,000 Indian Americans who call Johnson County, Kansas home.

“Johnson County is rich, especially the east area, but I saw a lot of poverty. The kids would come to school and say we are so hungry, there’s nothing to eat at home,” said Pratibha, who worked in the Olathe School District for 25 years.

Raj and Aradhana “Anna” Asava co-founded the HungerMitao movement in Texas and have spread it to eight other communities, including Kansas City. The couple was raising their children in an affluent suburb with a highly rated public school system of Plano, Texas, when they first became aware there were children in their community who were going hungry.

“I was having lunch with our local mayor, and that’s when he asked me to support his backpack program,” Raj said. “I thought it was some kind of a marketing gimmick, only to be corrected when he started talking about how the backpacks were filled with enough food for a child to last for the weekend.”

“There was a sense of guilt,” Anna said. “How did we not know?”

“Most of the world, not just the Indian community, looks at the United States as the land of milk and honey, a rich country,” Raj said. “The (same) disbelief that we had when we first heard (about hunger) goes across the entire Indian diaspora. So, we said why don’t we make it our mission to raise awareness and then show the multiple ways to which they can make an impact?'”

And, this is what’s been happening in Kansas City with HungerMitao for the last few months. Since late September’s first meeting at Harvesters, Kansas City’s Indian American community, which is made up of a variety of languages and religions, has come together to raise more than $25,000.

“HungerMitao brings us all together: It’s not assimilating everybody,” Raj said. “Each of us maintain our own identities or uniqueness, but we are all coming together to make an impact against hunger in this country that we call home.”