Mickey Leland Hunger Fellow Ezell Battle during her six-month field placement in Portsmouth, VA.

1994 - 1995

1994 saw the Congressional the Congressional Hunger Center successfully compete for its first challenge grant from VISTA to establish a model anti-hunger leadership program, the Mickey Leland Hunger Fellows.

With this initial team of twenty young adults, the CHC began to refine its mission of hunger leadership by putting Fellows at direct service sites around the U.S. for six months and then for a second six months at policy sites in Washington, D.C. Meanwhile, Hall and colleagues traveled to sites of war and famine in Africa and Bosnia and designed the CHC's Comprehensive Campaign Plan for use in disasters worldwide. In 1994, the CHC went national with a hunger curriculum entitled "Inside Out" designed to energize students to action from lessons and exercises they learned in school.

1995 saw the CHC's second annual "Victory Against Hunger" competition in which Members of Congress nominated food banks and other hunger fighters from their districts for $1,000 cash prizes. In its second year of training Leland Fellows, the CHC expanded to a total of thirty hunger fighters through a second challenge grant from the Corporation for National Service. With the new "Beyond Food" team focused exclusively on hunger in the nation's capital, the CHC's vision of training national and community hunger leaders was well underway. Funding from World Vision, the Reebok Foundation, and the American Red Cross enabled CHC staff to conduct humanitarian assistance and human rights field training in Rwanda during the aftermath of the genocide there.