Building Bridges to End Childhood Hunger: AltaMed and Share Our Strength
Amanda Rodriguez, Senior Manager of Psychosocial and Complex Care at AltaMed Health Services, traveled to Washington, D.C., for the 2026 Bridge Builders Summit hosted by Share Our Strength. Through her experience, she reflects on the complex realities of childhood hunger and food insecurity, the power of trusted community partnerships, and how organizations like AltaMed and Share Our Strength are working together to ensure more children and families have access to healthy food and the support they need to thrive.
It’s 7 p.m. on a warm June evening, and Amanda Rodriguez has her hands in the soil. She’s harvesting tomatoes, collard greens, and herbs — not in her own garden, but at the Temperance Alley Community Garden in Washington, D.C. Together with a dozen other volunteers, Amanda is participating in a midweek harvest benefiting a local organization that provides healthy food for children and families.
Temperance Alley Garden – an outdoor classroom and urban farm that hosts midweek harvests.
Beds of arugula, chard, and various herbs that will be harvested and donated to provide meals for local families.
An Indigenous Pasifika diasporic leader born and raised in Los Angeles, Amanda is in Washington, D.C., for a summit on ending childhood hunger hosted by Share Our Strength. The harvest, however, is an activity she sought out on her own.
“I wanted to get reconnected with nature, so I went and got my hands dirty and helped with the harvest as my form of self and community care.”
Community care is Amanda’s specialty.
Understanding the Complex Reality of Food Insecurity
As Senior Manager of Psychosocial and Complex Care with the Health Education and Wellness Department at AltaMed Health Services, Amanda understands how nutritious food affects health and well-being better than most. Her team, comprised of Community Health Workers, a social worker, and a Registered Nurse, work to connect families and people living with chronic conditions to care and resources. One of the most common issues they deal with is food insecurity.
In simple terms, food insecurity means not having enough to eat or not knowing where the next meal is coming from. In 2024, 47.9 million people, including 14.1 million children, lived in food-insecure households in the United States.
For Amanda, understanding how families become food insecure requires looking at the bigger picture.
“People do not live single-issue lives,” says Amanda. “The challenges families face are not isolated in a vacuum — they’re typically compounded. I think about a single mother working multiple part-time jobs because that’s the only way to get the flexibility she needs to care for her children. Then one child gets sick and has to stay home, and Mom has to miss a shift to take care of them. When payday comes and the check is smaller than usual, there are some really tough decisions about where to allocate the money — whether it’s paying the rent, keeping the lights on, or having enough to feed their children.”
It is precisely this complex issue that Share Our Strength and their No Kid Hungry campaign sets out to address. Their promise is simple: no child should go hungry in the United States. By partnering with schools and community organizations like AltaMed, No Kid Hungry helps ensure more children have access to healthy meals year-round.
A Partnership Rooted in Trust
Share Our Strength first partnered with AltaMed in January 2025 after the Eaton Fire devastated large portions of Pasadena and Altadena, affecting thousands of AltaMed patients and community members. Their support was instrumental in helping provide immediate financial relief to families experiencing food insecurity in the aftermath of the fires.
AltaMed Foundation Vice President Sharlene Risdon-Jackson, left, with Share Our Strength President Anne Filipic, right, at a 2025 site visit at AltaMed supply distribution center where fire survivors could receive food, clothing, and other essentials.
In 2026, the partnership expanded to continue supporting individuals and families as they recover and rebuild. Through Share Our Strength’s support, AltaMed has been able to provide grocery gift cards to community members experiencing food insecurity in wildfire-impacted areas, helping families put healthy food on the table while easing some of the financial pressures that often accompany disaster recovery.
Share Our Strength views AltaMed as having something essential to effective, community-centered support: trust. At the summit, Amanda heard that message repeatedly.
“Something that came up in conversations with our Share our Strength partners was that they’re so impressed with the trust that our communities have in us because of how we respond to challenges in health care access.”
Bringing Community Voices to the Table
The 2026 Bridge Builders Summit brought together philanthropists and leaders from across the country to answer a bold question: What does a mom-driven, mom-centered movement look like in 2026 and beyond — and what becomes possible for the rest of the country when we have an economy that works as hard for moms as they work for us?
Over the course of two days, Amanda and dozens of other attendees were challenged to use radical imagination as a framework for systems change. Together, they envisioned a future where moms, especially single mothers, have a seat at the table where the decisions that impact their lives are made. The work culminated in a Bill of Rights for Moms, illustrated by artist Rio Holaday, shown below.
Summit attendees collaborated on this over the course of two days. Attendees were split into groups and assigned a category to redesign.
“The work is tough” says Amanda. “As a leader, either within your organization or community, sometimes you can feel alone in the work and maybe in your vision. It was really affirming to be in a space where everyone shared the same vision, the same mindset, the same goals and aspirations.”
Planting Seeds for Future Generations
Ending childhood hunger is an ambitious goal. It will require significant investment in infrastructure and a reimagining of many of the systems that shape food access in our country. Systems change is neither easy nor quick.AltaMed, Share Our Strength, Amanda, and the attendees at the Bridge Builders Summit understand that.
“There’s power in acknowledging that the change we are working towards may not happen in our lifetimes,” says Amanda. “But this work is so important because we’re setting it up for our children and for future generations to come.”
Planting the seeds and trusting that the right people will help tend the vision along the way? That must be how the people who started the Temperance Alley Community Garden felt.
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