2009 World Hunger Education Service letter to contributors

                                                                                         November 28, 2009

Dear Friends and Colleagues:

There is increasing awareness of the growing need to address hunger, food scarcity and longer term food security. This awareness has resulted in some major new initiatives to restore and improve agriculture systems and devote greater attention to related health and nutrition requirements.

Thanks to your support, World Hunger Education Service has contributed to this growing understanding of the importance of addressing hunger and its relationships to worldwide security and well being. Our website, Hunger Notes (www.worldhunger.org), has grown considerably in terms of attention and influence. It continues to be ranked number one in the world for searches on “world hunger” on Google and almost all other search engines and we will end 2009 with nearly 700,000 visitors!

The “Hunger Quiz” that we initiated last year as a major educational tool is a prime attraction, together with our articles, editorials and links to other informative materials. Our key objective - to reach high school and college students to help them understand world hunger and poverty, continues as our highest priority. Over 60 percent of Hunger Notes readers are in this group.

As you may recall, our Hunger Quiz asks visitors questions about world hunger, and in response to their participation, we make a contribution to an organization working to alleviate hunger.  The quiz serves the dual purposes of increasing our readers’ knowledge and providing support to organizations working to alleviate hunger. Your contributions make this possible!

We are encouraged by the response to our efforts and we are planning increased activities next year. We have also been fortunate to attract new, committed, and very able Board members. But to continue our work and build upon our success, we need your help. While we operate on a very small budget, and while our Board members and Hunger Notes writers and editors are unpaid volunteers, we have expenses for website costs, equipment and publication costs, as well as the Hunger Quiz.

Please make a tax-deductible contribution WHES at this time. Even a modest donation goes a long way! Thanks again to both first and continuing donors!

Sincerely,

Daniel E. Shaughnessy

Chairman, World Hunger Education Service