Bread for the City

>After nearly four years at Bread for the City, it’s time for me to say goodbye.

>Fresh off the internet from the Jewish-minded Sustainable Food Blog JCarrot is news of a great garden-to-pantry program, Ample Harvest. Ample Harvest seeks to connect overly fruitful gardeners with local food pantries.

What’s most exciting about Ample Harvest is that anyone can help connect their surplus produce to pantries, from community gardens, to ambitious backyard gardeners (or front-yard, in my own personal case), to apartment dwellers who use that crazy upside down tomato planter.

Ample Harvest founder Gary Oppenheimer explains the program on JCarrot:

Even people who don’t harvest can help. You can go on the site and see what pantries need. You can contribute by passing the word along to people with gardens or by signing up pantries. We really need help in getting pantries online. My biggest concern is that we’ll have a lot of gardeners with nowhere to donate.

There are some problems in society you can address without spending a lot of money. People are hungry—and food is in people’s backyards. The missing link was getting the food in backyards to the people who are hungry. There might be other problems that can be solved the same way.

[Ed note: We think this is a neat idea, and we’ll look into the registration process – thanks, J-Po!]

This is just one project in a veritable movement of fresh, nutritious food into urban areas that certainly need it. Bread for the City is launching a gleaning program, the Mid-Atlantic Gleaners are providing produce to the DC Central Kitchen (and others), Claggett Farm provides produce and grants to local non-profits, and DC Hunger Solutions is helping to get more produce into corner stores. And just today, the Washington Post reported that a couple of FreshFarm Markets will be matching the value of WIC coupons when used to purchase fresh produce.

It’s not too late to start your garden!

>President Obama’s selection of Sonia Sotomayor to be his nominee for the Supreme Court is, among other things, important testimony to the importance of continued funding for public housing projects. Sotomayor, as has been widely reported, grew up in a public housing project in the Bronx, and went on from there to Princeton and eventually the federal judiciary. Imagine, for a moment, what might have happened in the absence of public housing for Sotomayor’s family; where might she have ended up? We know that homelessness has an effect on how children learn and how they do in school, and despite the recent establishment of a few schools specifically for homeless children, the continued rise in the number of homeless school-age children suggests the need for a closer look at how public housing is provided.

>There’s a job opening up in Bread for the City’s development office!

Currently occupied for two more days by Valentine Breitbarth (who has just secured her master’s degree and is promptly moving on to the DC Department of Health Care Finance), this gig is a good one.

Valentine coordinates our special events, including the Good Hope Awards, Holiday Helpings, and Art with a Heart. Plus she blogs with insight and grace here at Beyond Bread. She will be missed, and hard to replace.

We’re looking for someone who has the drive to get stuff done quickly and smoothly, a commitment to social justice, a sense of humor, and a proclivity for chocolate.

See the full ad, pass it along to eligible candidates, and direct applications to humanresources@breadforthecity.org.

>We met Lady Souldja on Twitter, when she was talking about her food stamps right around the time we were also talking about food stamps, and together we talked about food stamps.

Then, she invited us to guest on her radio show — to talk about, like, whatever! So, this will be something new for us. Fortunately, we have just the right face for radio. (Heyo! These are the jokes.)

Anyway, tune in to Lady Souldja’s BlogTalkRadioOnTheInternet tomorrow at 7pm, or I think also whenever afterwards, since it’ll be there on the internet.

>~Sharon Gruber, our blogging Nutrition Consultant, has been on a spring holiday at the Sustainable Food blog at change.org, producing all sorts of discussions over the Series of Tubes. The subject of her posts are Bread for the City’s Nutrition Initiative–an ongoing effort to improve the health of our community.  One of our major efforts has been providing healthy food including fresh produce to all the low-income residents who utilize our food pantry. A series of cooking classes called Fit for Fun, a Health Peer Education Program, gleaning trips to local farms, and one-on-one nutrition consultations came out of this initiative as well.

>Bread for the City launched a new program yesterday: the Human Rights Clinic, a special after-hours medical clinic designed specifically for refugees.

America has a long history of receiving victims of persecution–be it political, religious, racial, ethnic or any of the other reasons why humans brutalize each other. In Washington DC, the collective need for refugee assistance and services is truly great, and for years, many have turned to Bread for the City for food and medical care.

“We see waves of different groups,” says our Medical Clinic Director Dr. Randi, who is a member of Physicians for Human Rights. “They come in phases. For a long time, we were seeing just so many Cameroonians. Recently, we’ve seen a wave of Ethiopians. But we’ve received people from all over the world.”

When such refugees arrive in America, they can seek asylum, a special legal status that enables refugees to become permanent legal residents, bring their immediate families to the U.S., and eventually become citizens.

“But refugees are often not allowed to have a job while they apply for asylum,” explains Laura Parcher, who is a partner at Jones Day, the director of their pro bono program, and a Bread for the City board member. She has worked with many refugees during the complicated legal process. “It can take a long time. They can’t afford an apartment or food, let alone a lawyer, doctor, or therapist. Pro bono assistance is critically important for them to be able to present a case to the court.”

To apply for asylum, refugees must essentially prove their claims of persecution – often times through the physical evidence present on their own bodies. This process can entail a lengthy and resource-intensive medical examination, requires extensive, legally-appropriate write-ups, and the doctors might even need to provide testimony in court. Furthermore, they must have the psychological capacity to engage with deep trauma.

“An exam can get extremely emotional,” says Dr. Randi. “People are unburdening their souls.”

As a result, it can be very difficult to find doctors who are willing to perform this work.

In the course of recent discussions with Drs Katalin Roth and Hope Ferdowsian, Dr. Randi devised the monthly Human Rights Clinic to offer these patients a quiet, safe space, removed from the daily bustle here at Bread for the City, while still connected to our array of integrated services.

“We hope that the clinic will raise awareness among service providers and the public at large about the harrowing experiences of refugees in our community,” says Dr. Roth, who also serves on Bread for the City’s Board of Directors. “It’s a way for medical professionals to donate their skills in support of human rights, right here in our community.”

Bread for the City now seeks additional physician volunteers, in hopes that we can expand the capacity of this program. To learn more about the Human Rights Clinic, contact Amy at medicalclinic@breadforthecity.org.

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>It is trite to observe that poverty, homelessness, and economic development are complex and multifaceted issues, and perhaps equally trite to claim that issues of such complexity require a wide variety of solutions. But even so, it is sometimes useful to remind ourselves that the world of politics and policy is not the sort of place where any single initiative — even something as welcome as a new consensus on fuel economy and emissions standards — is likely to address all of our challenges at once. Washington D.C. provides a good example of the local complexity: the impacts of poverty and unemployment in the city are persistently associated with particular wards and neighborhoods; foreclosures are clustered into particular areas of the city (and are even affecting renters in those areas); and ethnic and socioeconomic divisions persist among the users of the city’s different modes of public transportation (and it’s not particularly surprising that Metro riders are more affluent, given Metro’s basic design as a system for moving people from the suburbs in and out of the city). All of this local diversity suggests that we have to be extremely careful in forecasting how any given policy initiative will impact the daily lives of people in the area.

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DC was one of the first cities in the country to have a Chief Technology Officer, and CTO Vivek Kundra has displayed some remarkable leadership in his short period of time in office. Last year, he spearheaded a contest called “Apps for Democracy,” in which private citizens and public agencies alike created web applications that tapped into DC’s extensive public data trove to make some pretty neat web applications (things like a real-time ‘location-aware’ police alert tool, or a site that matches safe walking routes to popular bars). The contest was hailed as a major success, and they’re running it again now.

One proposed idea came to our attention (via Susie Cambria): a guide to public and private social services in DC. Basically, the proposed plan would provide a dynamic map of resources–much like the DC Food Finder–for all kinds of critical services like medical clinics, public agencies, emergency shelters, etc. In addition to all the salient information about how to access a particular site, user feedback could provide a fuller picture of the operational capacity of each site.

In fact, we’ve previously suggested something much like this here on this blog: think of a Yelp for social services.

Now, it seems like apps built for this particular contest are limited to public data (as opposed to info about non-governmental organizations like Bread for the City) — and I’m not sure if that is by rule or simply default due to limited participant capacity. But through the FoodFinder we’ve shown that it is possible to accumulate a city’s worth of data about a broad range of NGO services. By crowdsourcing the process, it becomes even more feasible.

I don’t want to get too nerdy about this, but it’s kind of a big deal. Here at Bread for the City, our staff possess an enormous (though still incomplete) amount of knowledge about how the city works; this is valuable information that, if it could be publicly combined with that of our partners in the field, would create a full view of how the city is working for residents in need. Not only would that help social workers and engaged citizens do their important work, but it would help us all hold our government agencies accountable. So go vote!

From the Sunlight Foundation‘s t-shirt (which I happen to be wearing today!). They host the Apps for America contest.