Feeding America CEO Channels Martin Luther King, Jr. In Impassioned Speech for Cleveland Clinic

Cleveland Clinic marked Martin Luther King, Jr., Day with a special message from Claire Babineaux-Fontenot, CEO of Feeding America—and some words from Dr. King himself.

Their virtual celebration opened with a snippet of Dr. King’s 1964 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, in which he addressed hunger and nutritional inequality.

Dr. Tom Mihaljevic, MD, Cleveland Clinic CEO and president and Morton L. Mandel CEO chair, and Vickie Eaton Johnson, executive vice president and chief community officer, followed Dr. King’s words with stark statistics about food insecurity today: More than 9 million Black Americans don’t have access to the enough food for a healthy lifestyle, and one in four Black children live in homes without reliable access to food—double that of white children.

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Cleveland Clinic has been working to change that in their local and regional community. Among their initiatives to fight hunger and improve nutrition in underprivileged communities, Cleveland Clinic opened their Fairfax Market in partnership with Meijer, ending the county’s designation as a food desert. Cleveland Clinic has also pledged $10 million over the next five year years, with their investments feeding an additional 13,000 children in the greater Cleveland area.

Their programs include nutritious cooking demonstrations, the Healthy Moms and Babies initiative for pregnant and nursing women in food deserts, grocery delivery for patients and their families and more.

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Babineaux-Fontenot began her speech by saying Dr. King was “like family” to her own family growing up, with his portrait hanging alongside their own family photos in her childhood home.

She shared one of her favorite quotes from Dr. King that resonated with her family: “Everybody can be great because everybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace, a soul generated by love.”

Babineaux-Fontenot said that while her parents and grandparents weren’t educated, they ably and dutifully served their communities in other ways, including through adopting and fostering many children throughout their lives—her parents raised a total of 108 children, including their biological, adopted and foster kids in the mix.

“We learned what hunger looks like,” Babineaux-Fontenot said. “There’s not one child in our family who ever had to be chided to eat our broccoli because there were hungry children on some distant shore—because we all knew there were hungry children right here, and most of us had experienced hunger ourselves. I am the face of hunger, and so are your neighbors, and so are many of you.”

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She bolstered that statement with some harrowing numbers: In the United States, nearly 50 million people experience hunger today, nearly 14 million of whom are children.

Babineaux-Fontenot then explained the links between nutrition and illness.

“We know that food can be medicine. So many people who struggle with chronic diseases also struggle with hunger,” she said. “We know that access to nutrition can be the answer for both. We also know that at moments like this where we gather together and put the work in to help with hunger, we’re contributing to thriving communities all across the country. Every single element that Dr. King aspired to in that last quote can be made more likely when people get access to nutrition that they need.”

Quoting Dr. King once more, Babineaux-Fontenot urged viewers to not stop believing in their power to create change and afford their fellow man basic needs to not just survive, but to achieve the American dream: “I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits.”

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