Bread for the City

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>BREAKING: SOS EMERGENCY! SOS

At 10:05AM, a horde of little monsters escaped from the nearby Kennedy Rec Center daycare coop. They stormed up 7th street to Bread for the City, stomping and eating everything in their path.At 10:12AM, the horde breached Bread for the City’s facility, carting one (1) red wagon full of donated foods, while delivering terror and delight unto all.

Reports are uneven amidst the chaos, but some suggest that as many as 19 ankles have been bitten.

As this dispatch goes to print, supplies of lollipops are running low.

Please send help. More pictures here.

>We are in the final stretch for the Tom’s of Maine 50 States for Good contest to win $20,000 for Glean for the City. The voting ends this Saturday, October 31st, and the top 5 vote-getters win. We are currently in 3rd place — which means if we keep it up, we’ll win! So we need your votes now more than ever.

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Stalking Broccoli

As the harvest season winds down, Bread for the City’s Glean for the City program is reaching its final stretch, and it’s been a great success. Altogether, with the help of hundreds of volunteers, we’ve brought in roughly 35,000 pounds of fresh produce. And now we’re in the lead for a major grant from Tom’s of Maine in their 50 States for Good contest! Please vote for us now (shortcut: click Ctrl-F and type ‘bread’ to find us) and make yourself a note to vote each day between now and October 31st!

During this last stretch, we will be gleaning broccoli from Parker Farms. We started off the season gleaning 5,000 lbs. of sweet corn there, and Rod Parker is generously allowing us to return for the brocc. Over the coming months, we expect to harvest several tons of broccoli for our pantry — all from just this one farm.

(We were going to do a big glean in tandem with the launch of the DC Food For All, but we got rained out! There will be more opportunities for Glean for the City to collaborate with the DC Food For All, I’m sure.)

Broccoli will be a new and challenging harvest for us. Apple picking, for instance, is as easy as it is fun. When we picked up cucumbers, they’d already been harvested and sorted and were just waiting for our truck. Broccoli, on the other hand, will have to be removed from its stalk, right out of the ground.

This is a relatively labor intensive harvest. You need a knife to strip the leaves and cut the stalk. Large leaves protrude from the sides of the stalk and cover the edible heads of broccoli — which means it’s easy to miss.

There’s also a lot that deliberately gets left behind: the farmers pay harvesters to make just one pass through the field. In that pass, they look for the best pieces. Variations in soil and sunlight cause some plants to reach maturity later, and a lot of broccoli gets left behind because it’s insufficiently ripe.

It’s a sad reality of today’s market that stores will only accept broccoli of a certain size, because they cater to shoppers’ picky demand for full crops. In the meantime, farms can’t afford to take another pass when the broccoli reaches maturity. Most of these plants reach the perfect size days later — but they are left to rot in the field. Unless of course Glean for the City is on the scene.

Thanks to all the volunteers, farmers and market managers who’ve made Glean for the City such a success so far. Check out this great recent New York Times article about a sophisticated gleaning network in California – I think we could get to that level very soon!

And last but not least, please vote for us in the Tom’s of Maine contest. With your help, we’ll ensure that all the food that’s fit to eat gets to the people who need it.

>There’s an opportunity right now to make volunteer service at a place like Bread for the City just a little more feasible.

A good chunk of Bread for the City’s staff comes to us through various Volunteer Corps programs, like the AmeriCorps Health Corps or the Lutheran Volunteer Corps. These are mostly young people, recent college grads, working for Bread for the City under a year-long contract.

Currently, nine of these full time volunteers fill important roles at Bread, like Medical Clinic Coordinators, Social Service Case Workers, and the Volunteer Coordinator (that’s me!). Volunteers receive a stipend that is only designed to meet very basic needs. Jesuit Volunteers, for instance, receive $75/month for personal expenses after rent and food costs.

One benefit of performing this year of service is the Segal AmeriCorps Education Award, a $4725 grant from the government to help pay for tuition or student loans (next year it will be $5350). Like Jo has written here before, “this funding is not a primary motivating factor in driving someone to service. It’s the “youthful idealism,” rather than the funding, that makes these slots so competitive.” But for those of us with new student loans, or saving up to attend graduate school, it does make a real difference.

The way policy is currently written, however, this grant is taxed as income by at least 15%. Since the Award isn’t given in cash—you can think of it as a type of credit that is exchanged between the government and a loan agency—paying the tax comes out of pocket, not out of the Award. This means that some former Corpsmembers end up paying upwards of $500 after using their award. That’s as much as the recent increase yielded by the Kennedy Service Act, about which we’ve already posted. Also, if a Volunteer Corps worker enters into a full-time position after a year of service, the Education Award can easily bump them up into a higher tax bracket than their payroll, resulting in an often unforeseen tax burden.

A bill is currently before the House Ways and Means Committee, H.R. 1596, the Segal AmeriCorps Education Awards Tax Relief Act, which would exempt the Award from taxes and give volunteers more opportunity to use their dollars in pursuit of educating and bettering themselves. You can take a few minutes out of your day to help ensure the passage of this bill by letting your representatives know that you support the tax relief of AmeriCorps volunteers and that such relief will help supply our communities with educated, economically stable service-minded individuals. (Of course, if you don’t happen to live in DC, then you can take additional comfort in the knowledge that your representative happens to have a vote in Congress.)

>Glean for the City currently stands in third place in the Tom’s of Maine 50 States for Good contest. This is great news, as the top five projects will receive $20,000!

Remember, you can vote every day until October 30th. So vote today – and tomorrow, and the day after that, and the — then tell your friends to do the same. Glean for the City needs this cash … and our clients need the veggies.

>[Today's post was contributed by Bread for the City's Medical Director, Dr. Randi Abramson — ed]

Most evenings around 5 pm, the staff at Bread for the City begins to wrap up their work for the day. But for the past 2 years, the end of our business day has marked the beginning of another program: a special, after-hours session at our medical clinic run by a very energetic and unique group of medical students.

Three years ago, when they were just first-year medical students at George Washington University, Rani Nandiwada, Deb Bear, Jay Chelluri, Irina Fox, and Patrick Lowerre approached Bread for the City and asked if they could run an evening health clinic. They were new to DC and even new to health care. But (along with the help of Lisa Alexander, the Assistant Dean for Community-Based Partnership at the GWU Medical Center) they had a vision in which they would practice medicine as part of their community.

We were thrilled with the idea and the HEALing (Health Education And Learning) clinic was born.

Since the HEALing clinic launched two years ago, a steady flow of enthusiastic GWU medical students have volunteered each week. The students see patients, work in the lab, provide health education, and help out wherever we need them — all in an environment of learning. It was a joy to see the students teach each other, to see the fourth-year students take on leadership roles, and to see the newer students jump right in and share ownership of the clinic.

Given that our community is in a major healthcare crisis in large part because there aren’t enough doctors practicing community healthcare, we are proud to say that Bread for the City is a training ground for tomorrow’s primary care physicians.

The HEALing clinic is also criticaly important to our client community. Many Bread for the City patients can’t come to see a doctor during the day, due to tough work schedules. The HEALing clinic provides yeat another much-needed medical alternative.

Although the original founders of the clinic are graduating this year, they have made certain that the clinic they began can continue long after they have moved on. And so, it was with tremendous gratitude, that we awarded Rani Nandiwada, Deb Bear, Jay Chelluri, Irina Fox, Patrick Lowerre, and Lisa Alexandar a Good Hope Award for their Beyond Bread Community Reformation at our 4th Annual GHA breakfast.

>I am constantly inspired by all of Bread for the City’s volunteers. But in the past year especially, I have been struck by how inspirational—even heroic—corporate tax assistance can be.

Two years ago, I phoned DLA Piper partner, David Krohn, to discuss Bread for the City’s longtime plan of expanding our Northwest Center. (At 9500 square feet, it can just barely accommodate the 2,500 families who come each month to our Northwest Center seeking food, medical, legal, and social services.) I shared with David our vision of an expanded center — more than twice our current size, with modernized facilities and improved common spaces. I explained that we had already secured a $5,000,000 grant from the DC Primary Care Association. However, the project would cost $6,800,000 altogether. We still needed additional capital.

David began exploring. Through his diligent work, we discovered that a new kind of federal tax credits, the so-called New Market Tax Credits, could be the answer to that $1.8 million gap. The New Markets Tax Credit Program is a federal program that provides tax credits for private investment in economically distressed communities.

Given that Bread for the City’s expansion will nearly triple our capacity to provide medical care to the uninsured and underinsured of our community, this project qualified for the program. And with tremendously generous effort on David’s part, that has made all the difference in securing the additional funding that we required.

I am thrilled that construction on our building is only weeks away. Our vision is finally coming to fruition. It is with tremendous pride and gratitude that I say it would not have been possible without the assistance and generosity of David Krohn and DLA Piper.

>We’re helping to launch a new project: a collaborative community food blog called The DC Food For All, about all things related to DC’s food infrastructure and food culture, looking towards a healthier future for all of the city’s residents.

Umm, the site’s not live yet! But you can already start to make plans to celebrate it, as we’ll be hosting a launch party at the Big Bear Cafe on October 24th, at 5pm.

RSVP here on Facebook, or by emailing DCFoodForAll@gmail.com.

Event details are broken down below.

The DC Food For All presents:
“The Great Harvest”
A launch party for DCFoodForAll.com

Big Bear Cafe, 1st and R street NW

Saturday October 24th, 5pm to 9pm
$15 suggested donation*
Plentiful food and drink! Lots of music! Some speakers!

RSVP on Facebook or by emailing dcfoodforall@gmail.com

*Proceeds will go to support the DC Food Finder, an interactive map of food resources in DC. But we mean the “suggested” part – all are welcome, regardless of ability to donate!

>Democracy is good, right? Well you can help make democracy great: by voting for Bread for the City’s Glean for the City program in the Tom’s of Maine 50 States for Good contest.

All it takes is a few clicks (every day!), and you can help us win $20,000 — money that will ensure that we have the staff capacity to coordinate this program in the years ahead. If you really want to help us bring in tons of fresh, free produce each week for the poorest of our neighbors, take this pledge on Facebook to vote every day between today and October 30th, and invite your friends to do the same.

This post isn’t just another reminder of this contest. Bread for the City’s staff took a field trip last week to Crooked Run Orchard, to do some gleaning ourselves. And dang there were tons of apples just waiting to be picked up – we collected 1800 lbs in just an hour and a half! Check out the photos in our Flickr set here, or on our Facebook page.

http://www.flickr.com/apps/slideshow/show.swf?v=71649