Marcia Ranglin-Vassell
Marcia Ranglin-Vassell’s entire life has centered around service to her family and community. She began her work of servitude as a fourteen-year-old girl in her home country of Jamaica. She was advocating for clean running water. At eighteen years old, she quit her first year of college to knock on doors in some of the most violent neighborhoods in Kingston, Jamaica. Without much thought for her own safety, she helped the most vulnerable by providing family life education, youth development, and outreach services to children and their families.
Marcia’s fight to end global childhood hunger and poverty is inspired by her own experiences growing up and not always having enough food. Her parents worked very hard and did everything that they could to support their nine children but they simply could not make ends meet. Marcia recalls walking to school without shoes one or two times, She remembers going to school at times without having the money to purchase school lunches. She wows that she does not want kids to experience that fate. She insists that hunger and poverty are traumatic experiences and should just not be allowed to continue.
Marcia moved to the United States in 1990. Unable to secure a teaching job although she had earned a four-year teaching degree in Jamaica she turned to doing odd jobs. Marcia worked as a housekeeper, and a factory worker before securing a job at Mount Hope Neighborhood Association. She provided outreach, and education and worked in the emergency food closet. It was at the neighborhood association that she had an inside look into poverty in the United States. It was there that she realized the impact of childhood hunger and poverty on the children and families that lived in the neighborhood.
Marcia believes strongly that everyone should have access to the same opportunities in education and employment and overall quality of life regardless of zip code. As someone who understands deeply the impact of hunger and poverty in her own life as a child, she is unapologetic in her fight to feed hungry children.
A servant leader, Marcia volunteered at a homeless shelter helping to cook and serve meals to the homeless. She has been a tireless advocate for ensuring that all children have food that is: free, healthy, nutritious, and accessible. Through her work in the Rhode Island General Assembly, she has been the strongest voice in the push to end lunch shaming in Rhode Island. “ Every child who shows up in a school cafeteria is entitled to a free lunch, no questions asked.”
Marcia has organized walks in order to raise money for children in Rhode Island, Jamaica, and Haiti. Her work saw the opening of the first school pantry located directly in Veazie Street Elementary School in Providence, Rhode Island. It is her hope that a similar food pantry is located in every single public school in Rhode Island. I bet her tenacious spirit will make this a reality.
Marcia is a high school teacher. She sees up close the impact of childhood hunger and poverty on the children that she teaches. She knows that food is a basic human right. She also knows that hungry children cannot learn and that is why she is fighting to feed them.
