Bread Members Visit Albuquerque Congressional Offices

The cost of travel to Washington, D.C., makes it extremely difficult for Bread members in New Mexico to attend Bread for the World's Advocacy Summit and Lobby Day in June each year. So we did the next best thing. We held our own Lobby Day visits in Albuquerque in May.

We are very grateful to aides to Reps. Melanie Stansbury (DeChellie Gray) and Gabe Vasquez (Erika Huerta) and Sens. Martin Heinrich (Dahveed Torres-Avila) and Ben Ray Lujan (Desirae Shorter) for meeting with Bread for the World members in Albuquerque to receive our letters and listen to our appeal to restore funding for SNAP and WIC and for international nutrition and health programs. We also asked that the legislators support a strong and fair bipartisan Farm Bill. (Judy Crawford from First Presbyterian Church in Santa Fe brought letters from her congregation to the Santa Fe offices of Rep. Teresa Leger-Fernandez and Sens. Heinrich and Lujan back in March)

With DeChellie Gray at Rep. Stansbury's office

The churches and school represented at one or more of our meetings included All Saints Lutheran Church (Rozy Kalsbeek and Judy Messal), Albuquerque Mennonite Church (Jeanne Elmhorst and Tom Elmhorst), First Congregational Church (Margaret Leonard and Patty Ebner), La Mesa Presbyterian Church, (Holly Meyer) La Mesa Elementary School (Joseph Hernandez and Jeannie Baca), St. Andrew Presbyterian Church (Paula Mills), St. John XXIII Catholic Community (Carlos Navarro), Fernie Quiroz, Bread's regional organizer for Arizona and New Mexico, joined us for three of the meetings.

We also brought letters from First Presbyterian Church in Albuquerque and St. Paul Lutheran Church.

La Mesa Elementary School Principal Joseph Hernandez and Community School Impact Coordinator Jeannie Baca joined us for the Stansbury meeting. The students and faculty at the school contributed some of the 1,100 letters we delivered. Holly Meyer from La Mesa Presbyterian Church, who also worked on the project, is also pictured.

With Erika Huerta (Rep. Vasquez) at Lala Coffee Bean coffee shop

With Dahveed Torres-Avila at Sen. Heinrich's office

With Desirae Shorter at Sen. Lujan's office

Dahveed Torres-Avila told us about the process the senator's office uses to consider each letter that comes to Sen. Heinrich.