Bread for the City

>DC is a few days away from a new fee on grocery bags. At five cents, this fee won’t be noticed by many. And it applies only to vendors — not places like food pantries — so it doesn’t impact Bread for the City’s bottom line.

But that’s not the case for our clients. For people with an average annual income of less than $7,000, these fees will certainly add up.

Since the bill was introduced, we’ve been speaking with city officials about serving as a key distribution center for a supply of reusable bags. So far we’ve received some small sets of bags, and we’re scheduled to receive more supplies from the city in the coming weeks.

That said, reports are coming in that there are going to be far fewer bags than originally promised. See this news feature filed by Tom Sherwood (featuring your humble blog editor):

http://www.nbcwashington.com/syndication?id=80299147&path=%2Fnews%2Flocal-beatWe support efforts to reduce waste and clean up our community’s environment — but it is also critically important at this point in time to reduce the impact of such efforts on those who can least afford it!

In the meantime, private donors have begun to rise to the occasion — like Michael Wagner of Promo-Vision, who saw the above television report and promptly donated a large supply of sturdy bags. Many thanks to Promo-Vision for their generosity!

If you have a supply of reusable bags, you can donate them to either center during standard business hours. Thank you!

>A recent Washington Post editorial described the challenges District residents face in finding legal help on a variety of issues, including securing food stamps. The editorial quotes a report by the DC Access to Justice Coalition that finds the recession to be severely impacting the civil legal services sector: “Programs report losing more than 25% in revenue and have shed approximately 12.5% of their lawyers and nearly 40% of non-lawyer staff, including paralegals, social workers, case managers and administrative support.”

While there is definitely a scarcity of legal service providers for low-income Washingtonians, Bread for the City would like to note that we have recently expanded our capacity to provide legal assistance with public benefits.

For instance: Stacy Braverman joined our legal clinic in September, through an Equal Justice Works fellowship funded by the Sutherland law firm. She has been helping clients receive the appropriate level of food stamps and other public benefits, such as Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), medical assistance, Interim Disability Assistance, and child care subsidies. Alongside Su Sie Ju and Allison Miles-Lee, Bread for the City staff attorneys who also work on these types of public benefits cases, Stacy has reviewed clients’ case files, represented clients at fair hearings, accompanied them on visits to Income Maintenance Administration (IMA) service centers, and recovered thousands of dollars in benefits to which our clients are entitled.

To give you a sense of how this all works and why it’s important, we asked Stacy to share a couple of stories:

After being homeless, Mr. L had found an apartment, was being treated for his disability, and was helping raise and support his son. The $16 a month in food stamps he received did not go far. Mr. L had money withheld from his disability check each month, and the IMA’s rules on food stamp calculations did not cover his specific situation. In addition, IMA was not factoring the child support Mr. L paid into their determination of his food stamp benefit. We worked with IMA’s policy analysts and with staff at Mr. L’s service center to make sure they calculated his benefits properly, and now he will receive $84 each month. In the week before Christmas, Mr. L also received several hundred dollars in food stamps he had been entitled to but had never received.

Also:

After Ms. S lost her job, she was told, incorrectly, that she didn’t qualify for TANF because one of her two children received disability benefits. Bread for the City’s food program provided groceries, its social services program gave referrals for children’s clothing, and our legal clinic spoke with several IMA supervisors and helped Ms. S advocate for herself at the service center. Her household now receives $270 a month in TANF, which provides a crucial safety net while she searches for employment.

Stacy is reaching out to BFC’s other program areas, and to other service providers throughout D.C., in search of more people who may need advice or assistance on public benefits matters. She can be reached at (202) 386-7077 or sbraverman@breadforthecity.org.

Thanks to Stacy and Allison Miles-Lee for assistance with this post.

>As we enjoy this holiday with our families, let’s also take a moment to highlight some of the remarkable supporters in the Bread for the City community.

For instance, the Washington Post’s Steven Pearlstein — in his annual column about the year’s best corporate philanthropy — gave special recognition to WilmerHale for the law firm’s fantastic support of Bread for the City, as well as to DLA Piper!. Thanks to Steven, and a huge thanks to WilmerHale and DLA Piper! (Read more coverage of WilmerHale’s work with us here and DLA Piper’s work here.)

Also prominent: Cokie Roberts came to visit us during Holiday Helpings, took a tour of our facility and asked some great questions about how it all works, and then wrote a thoughtful column about hunger in America. See pictures of her visit here.

I’d also like to take a moment to acknowledge some remarkable contributions from individuals you haven’t heard of before:

Nick L. Bennett, for instance, has made a generous contribution to Bread for the City for the past ten years. It’s always a different number, always in uneven amounts. Here’s how he calculates his giving: while riding his bike to work each day, he would stop to pick up any coins he saw on the roadway. At the end of the year, he would multiply the sum of those coins by 100, and write a check for that amount to Bread for the City. He said he did this in recognition of what a lucky man he was.

A few years ago Mr. Bennett had a brain aneurysm, and ceased biking. But still today he finds coins while walking, and at the end of the year still makes a check out to Bread for the City for 100 times the amount. Thank you for this remarkable gesture, Mr. Bennett.

[Thanks to Colonel Joel Gardner for this story.]

And finally, Frederick Scott came to Bread for the City while on a field trip to DC with his church group. Fred helped us out in the food pantry for an afternoon, and apparently we impressed him, because he subsequently made a video about us, hosted a bake sale at his school to raise money, and then brought his mother with him for a second volunteer session. Here’s the kicker: Rick is from Massachusetts! He and his mom took a special train trip all the way down to DC just to volunteer at Bread for the City, because he was so taken with our work.

Says Rick:

The small gestures and acts of kindness from my school’s community back home made this trip possible. They showed me how a “community” can gather and achieve something great. I see it at home, I see at Bread for the City, and someday I imagine seeing it all over the world.”

Rick made another lovely video after his second trip:

Thank you, Rick and all of our supporters. Your support makes such a difference! Happy holidays to all.

>During our holiday photo shoot (see the first two installments here and here) we encouraged staff and volunteers to join in for some peppermint glamour shots. After a long day of work, some staff were more excited than others about posing for the camera – but all the photos came out beautifully! [See more at our Flickr feed here.]

Wendy & Jo work in our Social Services department. Wendy is a Licensed Graduate Social Worker and Jo is a Case Manager for our Representative Payee clients. Jo came to us originally through a year of service with Lutheran Volunteer Corps but has recently accepted a salaried staff position!

Dr. Joan E Myles is one of Bread for the City’s two physicians. She is a big fan of family portraits – this is her family’s second year in a row (this time with a guest!). She and her husband, Seiji, made a generous donation that is funding the prints from this photo shoot that we sent to our clients. Thank you, Joan E!

Stacey Smith, seen here with his son Solace, is a Case Manager in our Social Services department and coordinator of our Pre-Employment Program. Read his story here.

Susanne with her partner Monica and son, Danny, manages our Representative Payee Program for both centers. Just days later, Susanne welcomed her newborn, Ben, into the world!

Tony coordinates our Southeast food pantry, where 100+ people come to pick up food every day. Thanks, T!

Mrs. Ford manages our clothing bank in Southeast — entirely as a volunteer! This year, Mrs. Ford got married and we are thrilled for her.

Again, huge thanks to Steve Goldenberg for the ace photography. (See his full sets here and here.)

And thanks to Julia Eddy for co-authoring this post.

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Susan Berger: “I was misdiagnosed so many times before they discovered that I had MS. It was giving me such trouble at work, where I was a technical training manager at Cablevision. So of course I lost job and my insurance — and came here. That was almost 17 years ago!

Since then, this has been where I go first to get help. I’ve seen the best and I’ve seen the worst – and Bread for the City is better than any hospital. Bread for the City helped me even get my Social Security Disability Insurance, after I’d been denied. Could you believe they’d deny someone with MS? Well you helped fix that.

Now I’m a full-time student at the Art Institute in Rosslyn. I look forward to working with you all.”

Gloria Berger (Susan’s sister): “I received legal assistance from you all during my divorce. I was trying to keep my house and I didn’t know what legal rights I had — I was hearing all kinds of things and didn’t know what to do. Bread for the City lawyers helped me figure out what I needed to get started. Recently, I’ve come back here for information about job training programs.”

Gerald Clark uses our resource center to find employment leads, and receives referrals from our medical clinic. In the past, he’s worked as a medical correspondent at Walter Reed, a cook, and a laborer with Clark Construction.

We provided Jeremiah Clark with assistance in attaining Medicaid.

Mary Hampton has volunteered for Bread for the City for about six years. Before we had the pleasure of her assistance in our clothing room, she worked at Hecht’s (later Macy’s) until her retirement. Mary says: “You can always come to Bread for the City, if you have any problem.”

See the full portrait sets here and here. And tune in tomorrow for another installment!

Thanks to Julia Eddy and Amy Johnson for helping make this all happen!

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Free printed portraits are currently making their way through the mail to our participating clients – a great way to give these families some special holiday cheer. See the full sets here and here. (Many thanks to our good friend Steve Goldenberg for making it all happen!)

Here some of our favorites below:

Mr. Rivers, pictured here with his wife and two children, was a Metro driver for many years, and now receives disability assistance. Bread for the City helps his family with food and things like utility bills. Natasha (on left) is enrolled in a local technical college.

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Monique and her daughters are regulars at our clothing room, and appear here in two sets of wardrobes assembled entirely from the “BFC Boutique,” as it’s known.

The ladies agree: the most useful things they find in our clothing bank are shoes. That said, Monique’s favorite items are this pink suit (below), and a black velour gown that she wore to an official Inaugural Ball during the Presidential Inauguration earlier this year.

“Not only was it incredible to see Barack Obama become our President, but I never thought that a single mother of 4 would ever be right there, part of the celebration. Yet there I was, and I felt right in place, right at home.” Monique and her case manager were interviewed by the BBC during the Inauguration (listen here).

Maya:

Reggie:

Monique received Temporary Assistance for Needy Families for around a year, before moving on to self-sufficiency. About that transition, she says simply: “you must be motivated to make it happen.” To that end, she credits Bread for the City for supporting her: “It’s my resource base. If I need to get something to happen, I can always start here.”

Bread for the City helped her find resources to enroll in school and finance her education. Today, she is studying for her Licensed Practical Nurse degree. (Her school wardrobe has come almost entirely from our clothing room.)

“When I walk out of Bread for the City, I feel like I’m in control.”

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Hattie says “the economy brought me here.” Bread for the City helps supplement her medical expenses.

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Thelma, pictured here with Shanise, one of her four grandchildren: “I live just down the street been here forever. I was here when y’all were building this place! It’s a great help to the community. I used to donate clothes here. Now I sometimes need to come by for food and clothing myself. Ah, don’t worry about Shanise – she makes that face at everyone.”

See the full portrait sets here and here. And tune in tomorrow for another installment!

>With just one week to go in our 2009 Holiday Helpings campaign, we’re on pace to meet our goal — distributing a celebratory holiday meal to 8,000 of our DC friends and neighbors who need it most.

Of course, we couldn’t have made it this far without the generous support from our community through food drives, corporate sponsorships, and individual giving. In fact, one recent partnership was with Caron Butler of the Washington Wizards.

For a second straight year, Bread for the City was asked to be a part of Caron Butler’s annual 3D Holiday Basketball Classic Tournament. The canned food drive that was a part of this event brought in not only some much-needed items for our Holiday Helpings food bags, but some nifty photo ops too!

Check out Caron Butler with one of our youngest volunteers, DJ (left) and Antawn Jamison and Bread for the City’s truck driver, George (right)!

Obviously, you don’t have to be a 7-foot-tall professional basketball player to make the holidays brighter for our neighbors who struggle daily with poverty. Just $28 can provide a family of four with a holiday meal — a turkey and all the trimmings. Give today!

> On Monday, December 14, we kicked off a new cooking class at Bread For the City’s Southeast Office. The Northwest cooking class has been well underway, and now we’ve taken the maiden voyage to start one up on Good Hope Road. We had a grand time making delicious, healthy, and easy Mediterranean food. Sharon Gruber, our Nutrition Consultant, taught us how to make Greek salad, Syrian rice and lentil mujadara, and carrots in orange sauce.

Before we started cooking, Sharon taught us a bit about whole grain versus white products. In the process of turning whole grains to white grains, a vast majority of the nutrients, vitamins, and minerals are lost. For instance, 75 percent of the iron in wheat is in the germ and bran, both of which are removed in the process of making whole grains into “white” products. And this is why Sharon made sure that the rice we cooked was whole grain, so we can get what our body needs. A common complaint about cooking brown rice is that it takes too long, but Sharon suggested that you can submerge the rice in water the night or morning before you plan to cook it, and by the time you’re ready to start dinner, it’ll only take 20 minutes.

Throughout the class, we all learned a number of helpful tidbits about various foods, such as grating a little lemon zest onto your salad, which helps the liver with its detoxification process. We were reminded not to peel off the cucumber skin as we chop it up for the salad, because the skin is full of nutrients. Even each of the spices and garnishes we added to the carrots had an important health component: cinnamon slows the release of sugar in the blood (great for diabetes), cumin is good for the heart, and parsley—and anything green—is good for the blood.

As we sat down to the meal, we devoured the delicious food and had enough to share with staff at the Southeast Office, enjoying a delicious family dinner. Sharon reminded us to listen to when we feel satisfied, not full. It’s all too easy to go over the threshold that our body needs, especially when the food is so good. Needless to say, we all had seconds on the carrots and salad, which disappeared quite quickly!

Each of the participants was delighted with the meal. “The carrots would be a good holiday dish. I can take them to a potluck,” mentioned Linda H. Diane stated, “I like to learn about good ways to fix foods I can eat that are good for me, because I eat a lot of foods that aren’t so good.” We’re hopeful that the class can be a learning experience for all of us as we continue to improve our eating habits. Every time I attend a class, I surely learn an abundance of new health information! We look forward to continuing the program as we begin to become stronger advocates for healthy living within the communities we serve.

Here’s the ingredient list if you’re interested in trying these delicious recipes for yourself!

Greek Salad
-Romaine lettuce
-Feta Cheese
-Tomato
-Cucumber
-Onion
-Lemon (juice squeezed for dressing, grated zest/peel for garnish)
-Olive oil (dressing)

Syrian Mujadara
-Brown rice (twice as much rice as lentils)
-Cinnamon
-Lentils
-Onions

Carrots in Orange Sauce
-Baby carrots
-Orange juice
-Cinnamon
-Paprika
-Cumin
-Fresh parsley (chopped in at the end for flavor/garnish)

>I bring great news: Bread for the City’s longtime Food & Clothing Director Ted Pringle has received the Linowes Leadership award (presented by the Community Foundation of the National Capital Area) for his many years of service to our community.

When Ted received the award last week, he had this to say to the crowd: “It’s just amazing to me to get an award for doing the work you love to do.”

Ted Pringle (second from right) with Community Foundation President Terri Lee Freeman; the other three Linowes Award winners; and Calvin Cafritz (center), accepting the 2009 Civic Spirit award on behalf of The Morris & Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation. Presenter Earl A. Powell, Director of the National Gallery of Art, is at far right. Photo credit: Daniel B. McNeill

For 17 years now Ted has been working behind the scenes, quietly building the food program from serving 300-400 clients per month to nearly 10,000 each month. While those numbers are impressive, I don’t think they truly convey Ted’s impact on the community.

When I reflect on all that Ted has accomplished, I cannot help but think of Brian, a developmentally delayed, nearly mute adult in his 40s who volunteers every day in our Southeast Center food pantry. Choking back tears, Brian’s father recently gave thanks for Ted when sharing just how much working in the food pantry means to his son.

Despite a hectic schedule that includes placing food orders, coordinating deliveries, and managing staff and volunteers at two locations, Ted exhibits the utmost patience and compassion with Brian and his fellow volunteers from St. John’s Community Services, making sure they feel at home and giving them meaningful jobs to do each day. With this simple gesture, Ted gives Brian and others like him a sense of responsibility when so many others might not. By entrusting Brian with the task of filling food bags and breaking down boxes, Ted gave Brian a role within our organization.

As part of his award Ted received $3,000 to donate to the charity of his choice. Naturally, Ted has chosen Bread for the City — but he makes this choice with a request to our donors: will you help match Ted’s award, dollar for dollar?

Let’s join with the Community Foundation in showing Ted how much he means to us: make a gift to Bread for the City today in his honor, and in honor of the incredible growth of our pantry.

You are also encouraged to leave a note to Ted in the comment box, or to send him your own personal message at TPringle@BreadfortheCity.org.

>[Cross-posted from the DC Food For All.]

I have a view on fresh produce that might not shock you: Everyone should be able to buy it.

But for many low-income folks, that option doesn’t exist. The cost is simply too high. As Bread for the City’s nutrition consultant, many of my patients tell me that money is the leading reason they don’t make healthier choices. They’re happy to receive the fresh produce that Bread for the City now includes in every bag. But that only covers a few days out of the month. When they have to shop for the rest, they find ready-to-eat meals, fast food, soda, snacks, and corn- and grain-fed beef and pork to be downright cheap when compared to fruits and vegetables.

Does it have to be this way?

Consider that the government already plays a role in making some crops plentiful and cheap; wheat, soy, and corn are all heavily subsidized. And since those subsidies are substantial, some farmers are encouraged to plant more of them and less fruits and vegetables. This is part of why fresh produce seems out of reach at the market for many, and grocery carts are instead stuffed with the cheap products derived from wheat, soy, and corn. These days it truly takes a vigilant consumer to avoid the omnipresent high-fructose corn syrup, partially hydrogenated soy and corn oil, and additional fat from cattle and pigs that survive on inexpensive corn and grain-based feed.

Flickr credit: frederikvanroest/ / CC BY 2.0

Why not level the playing field a bit more? What about subsidizing produce like broccoli, watermelon, and garlic? Or what about bulk government purchasing of these foods, an approach many farmers prefer? Imagine if fresh peaches were a true price-point alternative to peach Fruit Roll-Ups. It would cost money, for sure, but it could also have a significant impact on the dignity, health (and health-care costs) of lower-income folks who otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford it.

Claggett Farm – http://www.flickr.com/photos/galant/ / CC BY 2.0

Now check this out: The agricultural subsidies are passed by Congress in the same bill as food stamp funding. Some experts say that the farm lobby pushes hard to keep the two connected, as politicians are less likely to cut subsidies if almost 34 million people in need are depending on the bill’s passage.

So essentially, the current distribution method of agricultural subsidies affects the health issues of our country’s low-income citizens. Yet subsidy funding persists, in part, because of the needs of those same low-income citizens. Ouch.

Agriculture subsidies are a pretty controversial topic in public health and agriculture policy circles. I won’t pretend to get it all right in this post, but I do intend to invite more discussion.

What do you think?