Harry Chapin with close friend, talk radio host Bill Ayres. In September 1975, the two founded World Hunger Year (WHY, now known as WhyHunger) as a charitable organisation that fosters grassroots campaigning and community action with an aim to providing long term solutions to poverty and hunger. In Bill's words:
"We made a sort of pledge to spend the rest of our lives dealing with hunger and poverty in some form or other. His form of course was doing these wonderful concerts and raising money. Half of all his concerts went to causes, mostly hunger. Then in ’75 we started this organization that we called WHY. I had suggested that because I had been influenced by the great Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, who said, ‘You really need to ask the why questions:’ Why is there poverty, and why is there hunger in a world that can feed itself, and why is there hunger in the United States, the richest country in the world? We figured that would be a great name except when you answered the phone, if you said ‘WHY’ it would sound like an Abbott and Costello routine. We needed an acronym. The first two parts were easy — World Hunger, and then what do you do with the Y? That became Year.
When people asked him what year is world hunger, he’d say, ‘Every year until we end hunger.’"










