Tony Hall, executive director of the Alliance to End Hunger and a three-time Nobel Peace Prize nominee, will discuss issues and efforts in the fight against hunger at 8 p.m. Wednesday, March 28, in Bluffton University's Founders Hall.
Free and open to the public, Hall's speech, "Changing the Face of Hunger," is the keynote address culminating Bluffton's annual Civic Engagement Day. The day will cap academic year-long exploration of the university's 2011-12 civic engagement theme, "Public Health: Promoting Wellness for Self and Community."
A schedule of the day's events is available at www.bluffton.edu/academiclife/civictheme/day/
In his address, Hall, a former congressman and past U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Agencies for Food and Agriculture, will touch on pressing issues for anti-hunger activists, whether governments, other organizations, companies or individuals.
He will also talk about the Alliance to End Hunger's commitment to the cause by building coalitions in the U.S. and abroad. The alliance has more than 75 corporate, nonprofit, educational, individual and religious-group members.
Hall was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1998, 1999 and 2001 for his humanitarian and hunger-related work. He has visited poverty-stricken and war-torn regions in more than 100 countries, including Ethiopia during its mid-1980s famine, North Korea and, in 2000, Iraq.
A congressman from Ohio's Dayton-area Third District from 1979-2002, he was a founding member of the House Select Committee on Hunger, which he chaired from 1989-93. Among his work during that time was initiation of legislation-which became law-to fight hunger-related diseases in developing nations.
When the committee was abolished in April 1993, he fasted for 22 days to draw attention to the needs of the hungry.
Also during his tenure in the House of Representatives, the Denison University graduate founded the Congressional Friends of Human Rights Monitors, chaired the Democratic Caucus Task Force on Hunger, and both founded and chaired the Congressional Hunger Center, a nongovernmental organization committed to ending hunger through training and educational programs for emerging leaders.
Hall left the House in 2002, after President George W. Bush asked him to serve as U.S. ambassador to the U.N. food and agriculture agencies-a position he held until 2005. His book, "Changing the Face of Hunger," was published the following year.
