2008 World Hunger Education Service letter to contributors

                                                                                         November 24, 2008

Dear Friends of the World Hunger Education Service:

Thanks to help from people like you, this is our 32^st year of educating our readers about hunger issues here in the United States and abroad.  

While we started with printed newsletters, our main activity now is Hunger Notes (www.worldhunger.org), a very successful website that is ranked number one for searches on “world hunger” on Google and almost all other search engines. As always, our key objective is to reach a new generation of high school and college students to help them understand world hunger and poverty. Nearly 50 percent of Hunger Notes readers are in this group.

This year we initiated “The Hunger Quiz”, which has become an instant success, with 80,000 people taking the quiz thus far this year. We ask visitors to Hunger Notes questions about a world hunger topic and in response to their participation, we make a contribution to an organization working to alleviate hunger. The quiz is at http://www.worldhunger.org/contributefood.htm . The quiz serves the dual purposes of increasing our readers’ knowledge and, at the same time, increasing financial contributions to organizations working to help the poorest people. Your contributions make this possible!

Hunger Notes also ran many articles on the increasing international food and hunger crisis, dedicating a specific page to the crisis with special links to these articles. That page and these articles are extremely popular.

As a result of these and other efforts, Hunger Notes readership increased by 25 percent over last year—more than 100,000 new visitors to the web site!

We are very cost effective and accomplish all of this on an extremely limited budget. Our WHES board members and Hunger Notes writers and editors are unpaid volunteers who contribute their time and skills.  But we do have expenses for computer equipment, software and related publication costs.

I urge you to contribute to WHES at this time. As we expand Hunger Notes and WHES activities, we are also planning for the future.  Your tax-deductible donation of any amount will help to cover the program and operating expenses of the organization and will permit us to continue WHES into its fourth decade. Thanks again to both first and long time donors!

Sincerely,

Daniel E. Shaughnessy

Chairman, World Hunger Education Service