'Good chance of ending hunger': Holy Cross student White House hunger conference panelist

WORCESTER — The next time Phoebe Wong, 19, is asked to share a fun fact about herself, she will only have to think back to September when she was given the opportunity to speak at the White House to politicians, activists and business and nonprofit leaders about ending hunger.

Unsure of how her name was thrown into the mix, Wong was invited to speak as a panelist alongside U.S. Rep. James P. McGovern at the White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health.

“The people that I met, they all did such different things and they all just came together and they were all like supporting this one cause — to end hunger,” Wong, a first-year student at College of the Holy Cross, said. “I've never really seen that before.”

It was not necessarily an experience she could have anticipated for herself, not only because she does not know who submitted her name for the experience but also because she had different plans for herself entirely throughout her life.

Desire to protect and help

Born and raised in Brooklyn in the foster care system, Wong grew up wanting to protect and help people, particularly her siblings, who were also in the foster care system.

In order to achieve that goal, she said, she planned on entering the Naval Academy and becoming a pilot after graduating from high school.

“I changed my mind last minute,” Wong said. “I definitely just wanted to do something where I could protect someone and I ended up figuring out that those someone's were my siblings. I just wanted to do anything I could to protect them.”

But by the time her senior year rolled around, she said, she saw her siblings were doing OK and had other people supporting them and that she didn’t necessarily need to only focus on protecting them.

While she applied for some colleges and even received full-ride scholarship offers from a few of the schools, she made the difficult decision, she said, to take a gap year instead.

“I realized that I always wanted to do something like my mom,” Wong said. “I've always wanted to start a nonprofit, so I was like, ‘You know, working for a nonprofit is a good way to spend a year.’ “

Focus on food access and hunger

Food access and hunger became her focus, she said, not only because her foster mom worked for FoodCorps but also from seeing kids go hungry while living in New York, as well as an eating disorder she developed while on the wrestling team in high school.

“I was in a really low weight class, so I got really caught up in the weight thing and I feel like many wrestlers do,” Wong said. “My coach was definitely not very supportive about it at all and I developed an eating disorder from that.”

She ultimately decided to spend her gap year as an AmeriCorps member in East Hartford at FoodCorps.

“Information around food and nutrition, that is something I was never taught,” Wong said. “I felt like if I could save kids from going through some of the trauma that I went through, I would love to do that.”

At 18, Wong lived by herself for the first time in Connecticut, creating lesson plans and educational tools for elementary school students and also conducting outreach about food access and healthy eating in the community for the year.

“I taught at least three classes every day. I tried to cover the entire school,” she said. “I built a garden at the school, I taught, I maintained three other school gardens, did after school programs and then did a lot of community outreach programs.”

The experience kept her busy and forced her to grow up quickly, she said, realizing the different ways she needed to take care of herself.

She developed key skills as well, such as time management and learning to say "no" to people when she has too many things going on at once.

The experience also helped better prepare for her college after the service was completed.

College of the Holy Cross

Wong had several options for schools after FoodCorps including the College of William and Mary — her foster parents’ alma mater — or Barnard College in her native New York City, but ultimately decided on College of the Holy Cross.

“I felt like it was a good school that fit what I wanted in the school, and it was really pretty,” Wong said. “I got my response back first (from Holy Cross) and I was like, ‘You know what? This is it.’ “

Wong intends to double major in international studies and photojournalism, as she also enjoys photography, taking photos for the Holy Cross athletic department when she has free time.

Despite the brevity of her time at Holy Cross thus far, Wong has already had the unique opportunity to get involved in activism around food and hunger not just in Worcester, but the country as well.

When her adviser learned that she would be speaking as a panelist at the White House, he invited her to speak at a forum covering similar topics alongside McGovern just a few days before they were scheduled to travel to Washington, D.C., to give them the opportunity to meet beforehand.

White House conference

By the time they got to the conference, Wong said she was shocked by the experiences and conversations she had, including one with U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro from Connecticut.

“I always thought she was really cool because she spearheaded so many of the initiatives that benefited students in Connecticut," Wong said. "Getting to meet her and always hearing her name during my gap year, and then her giving me a hug, I was like, ‘Oh, my God.’ "

The experience was a “whirlwind,” she said, as she went from listening to President Joe Biden and Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack give opening remarks to immediately going to her panel room to give her speech.

Following her speech, she was able to visit other panel rooms to listen to other discussions and meet other people. The experience left her feeling optimistic about hunger eventually coming to an end.

“The amount of organizations that really gave their plans and how everyone made connections, the amount of money that was pledged towards this is insane,” Wong said. “There's a really good chance of ending hunger.”

She said that FoodCorps pledged millions of dollars to the cause and the White House pledged billions of dollars, leaving her feeling as though there is a sincere commitment from all parties involved to end the issue.

She said the opportunity was also special because she got to share it with her mom, who was able to listen to her speech and “took so many photos.”

Healing experience

Additionally, Wong said she found the experience, as well as her time in FoodCorps, healing after her struggle with her eating disorder.

“Knowing that food education ties into ending world hunger, and hunger in the U.S., my gap year, I learned you put things into your body that make your body feel good. I learned that with the kids and that was so healing for me,” she said.

Since stressful situations tend to cause people to fall into “old habits,” Wong said she doesn’t think anyone ever truly recovers from an eating disorder, although she is doing “well.”

Although still only in her first year at Holy Cross, Wong is already thinking about the future.

One of her long-term goals, she said, is to eventually start a nonprofit that focuses on helping kids in foster care.

“Help(ing) kids in foster care have better access to all different types of things like health care and just change policy around all of the different things that foster kids have to go through,” she said.

She not only saw her brother and friends struggle with different aspects of the foster care system but also saw issues up close herself.

At one point, Wong said she was living in a transitional housing situation in New York where she had to go through a security check involving metal detectors, bag searches and confiscations of electronics and outside food.

She said it was a traumatic experience and that she didn’t feel safe there.

Her hope is to not only provide foster kids a safer space for those periods of transition, offering them resources and support but also work with an organization that advocates for policy changes.

But until then, Wong said her current plan is to attend law school and intern at the United Nations to focus on world hunger.

As she has learned before, plans change, but for now she feels certain she is on the right path and where she is supposed to be.

“I feel like I've definitely found my people here,” Wong said. “The support that I get from my people here and the connections that I've made are just something I know that I will remember for a lifetime.”

This article originally appeared on Telegram & Gazette: Holy Cross student joins McGovern at White House hunger conference