As we greet the new year, we celebrate the surprising successes that we, as people of faith, have achieved in the last 12 months.

Your personal letters, your personalized emails, your phone calls, and your visits to your members of Congress resulted in huge successes in a year when we faced unprecedented attacks on programs vital to hungry and poor people.

For these successes, we thank God:

• In December 2011, Congress granted a two-month extension of unemployment benefits and did not raise payroll taxes. If this had not happened, nearly 2 million Americans would have lost unemployment benefits this month alone. Many of them would have been pushed into poverty.
• In August 2011, Congress and the president agreed on the Budget Control Act, which mandates over $2 trillion in deficit reduction over the next decade. Remarkably, it exempts many programs critical to poor people in the United States from across-the-board cuts.
• For Fiscal Year 2012, we advocated successfully for the passage of a budget that ensured funding for the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) and for a program that provides food assistance to poor senior citizens. In addition, there were no significant cuts to international aid programs that save lives and help reduce poverty, like emergency food aid and school feeding programs in developing countries.

In 2012, we will face intense and uncompromising political pressures to cut spending, especially spending that helps poor people. But we thank God that Congress and the President made decisions in 2011 to reduce federal deficits, yet avoided deep cuts in programs that help families struggling to feed their children. This is a remarkable achievement, especially for the faith groups that rallied to form a circle of protection around programs that help hungry and poor people.

As we launch our 2012 Offering of Letters, I look forward to your continued support. Thank you.

Grace and peace,

David Beckmann
President, Bread for the World