It's a riff on the Got Milk campaign. Hudgins, the former longtime director of the Durham County Department of Social Services, is a newspaper fan. Gets up at 4:45 to go running with his buddies, and usually has read it by the time they jog off at 5:30.

Hudgins' new job, teaching graduate students at UNC's School of Social Work has freed his activist side, though if you ask, he says he always had "a lot of freedom" to speak his mind in the 27 years he ran the county's one-time Department of Public Welfare.

He's still energized this morning from the Durham CAN meeting the evening before. Hundreds of blacks, whites and Latinos asked elected leaders and would-be leaders to promise to take action on blight around NCCU's campus and other pressing needs.

"I think Durham CAN is just an exciting, dynamic group," Hudgins says. "We would not have had the living wage without them."

In fact, some of his graduate students who work on public policy are interns with Durham CAN and with the Inter-Faith Council for Social Service, the Orange County agency trying to move its men's homeless shelter from downtown Chapel Hill to a suburban location a few miles north. Neighbors there have rallied against the move.

The thing is, services for the homeless and those on the margin are more important now than ever, Hudgins says.

Next semester he will teach a class on poverty. His students will learn the United States has the highest rate of poverty of any Western nation. One in four children under 6 lives in a family whose income fails to meet basic needs.

Even the definition of poverty is misleading, he adds.

It's based on a 1963 formula that assumed the average household spent a third of its income on food, then tripled it.

Now food costs more like 20 percent of a family's income. Housing has become much more expensive. So tripling the food budget falls far short of what a typical family needs to eat and keep a roof over its head.

But don't count on the government redefining poverty any time soon.

"If they redefined it they would have to increase benefits," Hudgins says.

Durham has made progress. Thanks to Smart Start, more children in subsidized daycare are in high-quality centers. The schools are reducing dropouts. Health care reform - "if we can do that" - will further improve many local families' lots.

But it will take continued activism, says the son of a small-town lawyer father and schoolteacher mother.

Hudgins was headed toward an MBA when "The Other America," a groundbreaking 1962 study of poverty, and a summer in the hollers of Polk County sent him instead to the School of Social Work at the University of Georgia.

"I wanted to do something that would make a difference," he says.

More than 30 years later he still does.