Bread for the City

>One of Bread for the City’s clients, Ms. H, is a TANF recipient and the mother of three children. Recently, she was unemployed but very interested in going back to school and in finding a job. Mrs. H had found an on-line college program in which she was interested, but she could not couldn’t participate because she did not own a computer and could not afford to buy one. Many of our clients — who have an average annual income of under $7,000 — simply cannot afford to spend money on a computer, let alone internet service.

We’ve touched on the implications of the digital divide here before: without access to the internet, it becomes harder for low-income people to find a job, access important information, do their homework and the countless other things that wired folk take for granted.

It’s a knotty problem, but as with most problems we have to start with small steps.

One of our favorite small steps is Project Reboot, a non-profit branch of the Capital PC User Group. Project Reboot is a volunteer project that recycles and refurbishes donated computers, and provides them to low-income DC and Maryland residents at a price that is manageable even for most of our clients: ten dollars.

Project Reboot provides about 250 computers per month to low-income clients, non-profits, charities, religious and education groups. Bread for the City refers a few clients each month to Project Reboot. These clients usually need computers for finding and applying to jobs, for job training, or for their children’s or their own schoolwork.

Mrs. H came to Bread for the City for assistance with her situation, and one week later she called her case manager back and thanked her, saying she had not only received a computer for herself, but that she was also eligible for an additional computer from Project Reboot for her children. Ms. H also reported that she had set up Internet service so that she would be able to start on-line college classes. She is now well on her way to earning her Associate’s Degree in Medical Billing and Coding.

This is a success story, but, of course, demand for services like Project Reboot far outweighs their ability to supply. There is also the need for basic computer skill training, provided in part by organizations like Byte Back. Bread for the City is about to announce some exciting details about our very own new computer training course, but these initial efforts can only just begin to bridge the digital divide. Expect more on the topic here in the future.

>Ben Olsen (of DC United fame) is partnering with Bread for the City in an exciting new event! The Ben Olsen and Friends Art Exhibition and Reception is just around the corner, this Thursday January 28th. This event will feature local and regional artists Judy Cox, Ben Ferry, Peter Loge, Hannah Robinett, Michael Weber, and Stacy Zarin. An artist himself, Ben Olsen will be premiering new work as well.

Come out and join us on Thursday, January 28 from 7:00 to 9:00 pm at The Fridge, Rear Alley, 516 8th Street, SE. There will be drinks, light appetizers, and an exciting silent auction for original artwork. Advance tickets are $20. RSVP at www.BreadfortheCity.org/Olsen today!

All proceeds from the event benefit Bread for the City.

In addition the generosity of the artists who have donated their work, sponsors for the event include Occasions Catering and The Fridge.

For any additional information visit www.BreadfortheCity.org/Olsen or email RSVP@BreadfortheCity.org. We’ll see you at The Fridge.

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

In celebration of their 30th Anniversary, the Capital Area Food Bank hosted a Hunger Policy Forum last Friday, January 15 at the offices of The Washington Post. Entitled, “Ideas & Inspirations for the Future,” the forum centered on a discussion by local and national experts about hunger in our nation and in the nation’s capital.

A few central themes emerged from the discussion. First and foremost among them was the notion that hunger is a problem that we can solve. Jim Weill, president of the Food Research and Action Center (FRAC), noted that “the recession is the worst since the 30’s, but we’re rich enough to end hunger overnight. It’s a political problem.”

In other words, as a society we are capable of ending hunger. But do we have the will? And what roles do food pantries play in the problem?

“The time has come to maximize our impact in the political arena,” added Janet Poppendieck, professor at City University in New York and author of several books on poverty, but this mandate has a double edge: if we fail in that, Poppendieck said, then we “allow the marginally concerned to feel much better about hunger, and we are in danger of functioning as a moral safety valve.”

The other theme I noticed was that this potential political willpower for the pursuit of policy change can only be realized through the development of community. John Cook of the Boston Medical Center noted that we are infringing upon a “great awakening in the United States about our community.” He spoke hopefully about the opportunity that could come with a dawning awareness that “we are not individuals pursuing our own needs, but rather we are all connected.”

From my brief time studying hunger in America, I’ve seen a little bit of both sides of this issue. In college, I interviewed 15 administrators at small food pantries in Salem, OR, and what I found was, honestly, a little disheartening: many viewed the food pantries solely as a place to receive emergency food and had little interest in moving beyond charity and towards the community-building that would make social change possible. To a number of administrators, hunger was viewed as a personal problem that individuals needed to deal with. The role of these pantries, then, was just to help needy individuals, instead of working collaboratively with others to identify and change the greater societal issues that perpetuate of hunger.

Yet in just a few months here in DC, I have seen something different. I’ve seen the ways that Bread For the City takes its role as a charitable distribution center as just a starting point, from which it works to identify the needs of the community it serves. As George Jones, Executive Director of Bread For the City, mentioned on the Food Bank’s panel, the Save Our Safety Net was launched here; we’ve also supported the efforts of groups like DC Hunger Solutions to expand food stamp eligibility. We are not alone. Many locally-based organizations (like Miriam’s Kitchen, and the Food Bank itself) are working to empower making structural changes in our society. And in just a few months, this blog itself has brought people together from different parts of our still-fragmented community landscape, opening up new possibilities for partnership and action.

Thirty years after the founding of the Capital Area Food Bank, people need help more than ever before. Given the overlapping arrival of the Great Recession alongside an era of powerful new tools of sharing and community building, perhaps this really is the dawn of a new chapter.

Amy Johnson is an Emerson Hunger Fellow. Photos courtesy of Kevin Allen.

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

Imagine lining up at dawn to enter a room where you are not allowed to eat or drink anything. If you leave to go to the bathroom, you risk being sent to the back of the line. Imagine waiting for eight hours, only to be told that you cannot be helped and need to return for more of the same tomorrow.

As described in today’s Washington Post, this situation is common at the District’s Income Maintenance Administration (IMA) service centers, where people go to apply for and resolve problems with benefits like Food Stamps, medical insurance, and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. Two of the seven service centers were closed last spring, and the remaining five are struggling with reduced staff and increasing caseloads.

The impact of this situation goes far beyond inconvenience.

Take for example a woman who called Bread for the City last month for help applying for benefits. She is disabled, and sitting or standing for long periods of time is very painful. During her long wait at the service center, she said she frequently asked IMA employees if she could submit her application and come back another day for an interview, or if she could be moved up in the line. Hours later she gave up; she told us she’d become so ill from waiting that she had to go straight to the emergency room. Her application was ultimately accepted – but at the cost of her health, her time, and the expensive medical care she received.

I’ve also seen it with my own eyes. I recently accompanied Mr. E to an IMA service center, because he had been unsuccessful in previous attempts to apply for medical assistance and food stamps. As a result, Mr. E’s painful toothache kept him from sleeping, his one-year-old son missed checkups, and they relied on relatives to help pay for food and transportation to Mr. E’s job and his son’s day care. I learned all this during the six hours that Mr. E and I waited to be seen. Our meeting was largely successful, although Mr. E had to return the following week and waited several hours to hand in one document he had forgotten. Mr. E and his son should soon get the benefits for which they qualify, plus back benefits for the months in which his application was improperly rejected. However, spending multiple days at the IMA service center required Mr. E to lose wages—and lose favor in the eyes of his boss.

This is an aspect that I think is especially worth highlighting: many people seeking food stamps and other public benefits are employed, or searching for employment, or in school. Waiting for hours or days to apply for benefits, or even just to update their documents, seriously interferes with their ability to keep a job or obtain one.

To be clear, the responsibility doesn’t lie entirely at the feet of the IMA service centers. Even as food stamp enrollment has increased by 22%, the city has cut IMA’s eligibility staff by 99 employees in the last two years. The Washington Post article quotes an anonymous staffer saying: “The community is suffering, the staff is overwhelmed and the people are getting angry. We have staff who have to go upstairs and cry. . . . We do the best we can.”

Bread for the City is advocating for the city to increase funding for IMA, to hire more staff members and better train and supervise the ones they currently employ (among other needed improvements). Our clients cannot prepare for, seek, and maintain employment when it is a full-time job just to get the assistance they need to survive.

>What date, you ask? That’d be Thursday, March 18. What’s so special about Thursday, March 18? It’s Bread for the City’s annual gala, Art with a Heart! And not just any Art with a Heart – this year is Art with a Heart’s 20th year!

To celebrate, we’ve put together a better-than-ever live auction including items such as a week-long stay in a private villa in Florence, a week in a flat in London, a Miami getaway including a two-night stay at the Mandarin Oriental, original artwork from local artists, and much, much more including our silent auction and exciting raffles (can you say “Kindle“?).

Our snazzy invitations (designed by Jay Groff of Groff Creative, Inc.) are in the mail. Can’t wait for the invitation? Visit www.BreadfortheCity.org/art for more details and to purchase your tickets today!

>A message from George A. Jones, Executive Director.

With a very challenging year behind us, I am pleased to report some great news. Construction is well underway on the long-planned major expansion of Bread for the City’s Northwest Center facility. This expanded facility will be more than two times the current size of our Northwest Center, providing much needed space to all of our programs—each of which have grown at a remarkable rate in recent years.

Above all other things, this expansion will be a great step forward for our Medical program. The new building will feature twice as many exam rooms, enabling us to triple the amount of care that we can provide to our community. This growth can’t come at a more critical time. For years, our hallways have been crowded and our workspaces have been cramped. This month, for the first time in our 35-year history, we had to close our medical clinic to all new patients— because we simply didn’t have the room.

This shortage of health care is a matter with which our nation is all too familiar. For a year (well, for a lifetime, really) we’ve been embroiled in a debate about national health care reform that only gets more confusing and dire as the legislation piles up and the expenditures skyrocket. I fear that even if our leaders are successful at getting reform underway, we will still be far from a just and equitable health care system.

It really shouldn’t be this complicated. I believe that access to health care is a basic human right. That was the formative principle behind the founding of Bread for the City, back when our medical clinic was known as the Zacchaeus Free Clinic. And it’s the formative principle now behind our expansion.

For this, too, I am proud of the community we serve, our nation’s capital. Thanks to smart leadership from our political leaders and community groups like the DC Primary Care Association, DC has one of the best health care infrastructure systems in the country. In 2001, DC created the DC Health Care Alliance, which is like our very own public option. With the Alliance, DC is the rare city that can say that more than 90% of its residents have insurance. With the support of the Alliance, and transformative funding from the city, the District features a strong network of community clinics that are available to low income individuals who—in other parts of the country—would have no options whatsoever.

However, even with the Alliance, many of our neighbors lack sufficient access to health care. Bread for the City is not the only clinic at capacity. But we can see progress—right in our very own lot, where construction proceeds apace. We are so proud to be a part of that progress.
Stand with us in this exciting, challenging year ahead: join our Capital Campaign.

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

Last week, a woman came to Bread’s Southeast Legal Clinic for help getting food stamps. She had multiple sclerosis, which made cooking a difficult task. On top of that, she was also living on a fixed income of Social Security Disability Insurance — and after paying for rent, utilities, and other costs, food of any kind was tough to fit into the budget. She attempted to apply for food stamps, but she was denied.

That same week, I saw another woman in a strikingly similar situation: in clear need, but denied food stamps. When I calculated the amount of benefits to which the two women were entitled, I came to the same unfortunate conclusion: under the District’s current policies, both clients were “over income;” their incomes were each slightly more than 130% of the Federal Poverty Guidelines (FPG), which is a threshold in qualifying for food stamps.

However, I was able to provide some signs of good news to these clients. Last year, DC passed legislation that expands the qualifications for food stamps. (We blogged extensively about this new change, back when Councilmember Michael Brown pushed the bill through to a unanimous vote in City Council.) This rule change means that households like those of the two women I met with – with incomes under 200% of FPG – will be eligible for assistance. They will no longer face hurdles like caps on assets, gross income, and net income.

200% of FPG doesn’t go far, especially in places like DC, where housing costs are high. For reference, it’s $21,600 a year for a one-person household, and $44,100 for four people. The change will be especially important for households with incomes close to 200% of FPG who have high housing costs, or who pay a significant amount for utilities, child care, child support, or medical expenses. These households may have extremely low—or no—income left after those bill are paid, yet they haven’t been able to access a program described in a recent New York Times article as “a vital safety net.”

Increasing the availability of food stamps keeps families from making difficult choices: leaving utility bills unpaid in what’s known as the “heat or eat” dilemma, or foregoing important medication or housing payments. In turn, helping people get food stamps may reduce the strain that Bread for the City and other food pantries are facing in these difficult times.

But here’s the thing: in order for the changes to go into effect, the Department of Human Service’s computer system needs to be changed. These changes were first supposed to be completed on October 1. Then that was delayed until January — and now we seem to be looking at further delays. In the meantime, many of our neighbors are in great need of this additional assistance. Even though we have attempted to learn more about what is causing these delays for months, no satisfactory answers are forthcoming.

The Income Maintenance Administration (the agency in the Department of Human Services that administers food stamps) needs to implement this change as soon as possible, or at the very least let the public know what, exactly, is causing the delays and when we can realistically see our clients’ suffering alleviated. The vagaries of “our computers need changing” and “in a few months” are not acceptable when people need food. Bread for the City will continue to work to make this change come to pass, and assure that our clients know about it and receive the benefits they are entitled to. And that will include the two clients I spoke with last week.

>
A lot of things come to mind when one considers Bread for the City’s Legal Clinic Director Vytas V. Vergeer: fierce defender of tenant’s rights… preventer of evictions… champion of the disenfranchised… staunch advocate of the poor… feared opponent of landlord counsel… um, snazzy dresser. Well, we can add another item to the list: co-recipient of the DC Bar Foundation’s prestigious 2010 Jerrold Scout Prize. This is THE top honor that one can receive in the local non-profit legal services community. It is awarded annually to an attorney who has: worked a significant portion of his or her career at a non-profit organization providing direct hands-on legal services to the District’s needy; has demonstrated compassionate concern for his or her clients; and has exhibited a high degree of skill on their behalf.

So what makes Vytas so special? He has dedicated virtually his entire legal career to serving the poor. He started practicing in the District’s Landlord & Tenant Court in late 1994, and has been an almost daily fixture in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia ever since – defending thousands of tenants facing eviction, filing tenant petitions and major lawsuits alike, and testifying before the City Council. He also is a champion for reform in Landlord & Tenant Court, pushing to make the Court more navigable for unrepresented litigants and to make it possible for tenants to bring actions against landlords who refuse to make essential building repairs. Of course, you can’t discuss Vytas without noting his distinctly wry sense of humor. At times bedeviling, though more often endearing, his humor, coupled with his sharp legal mind, make Vytas an effective advocate for DC’s low income community both inside and outside the courtroom.

In addition, as a manager responsible for helping chart the course of Bread for the City, Vytas brings a sense of thoughtfulness to his work with his colleagues coordinating programs, developing budgets, and communicating to the media, our funders and the public the challenges our low income neighbors face in accessing legal services — and justice — in DC. And in true Bread for the City fashion, you can also find Vytas answering phones, unloading food trucks, or setting up the reception hall for the annual fundraiser event.

To Vytas, the hard work and long hours he puts in isn’t about just being a lawyer and winning cases, it’s about providing justice for all. For all that he has done and continues to do in service to the low-income community, we congratulate Vytas on this latest accolade.

Warmest congratulations also go out to Eric Angel, legal director at the Legal Aid Society of the District of Columbia and the other co-recipient of this year’s prize. And in a simple twist of fate, Eric’s wife is none other than Su Sie Ju, a six-year veteran of Bread for the City and current NW Legal Clinic Supervisor. And Eric’s co-worker, Appellate Director at the Legal Aid Society, happens to be Bonnie Robin-Vergeer, Vytas’s better half. Just goes to show you how small the world of legal services for the District’s poor really is.

In summation… V3 1, Chicago Cubs 0. Maybe 2010 is the year for the Cubs too?

>Congress recently passed legislation to provide case management and housing assistance for thousands of military veterans who now struggle with homelessness. This provides a much-needed swell of resources for DC’s large population of vulnerable veterans — a group that we’ve been seeing substantially more of, especially at Bread for the City’s Southeast Center.

In response to the rise in both need and resources, Bread for the City has recently forged a partnership with the Homeless Veteran Program within the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA).

“It can be so challenging to return from military service,” explains Sherita Evans, Bread for the City’s intake coordinator and all-around superstar. “Our veterans struggle with debilitating injuries, post-traumatic stress disorder, and difficulty finding employment.”

Sherita has taken the lead in our collaboration with the VA, helping them adapt their case management procedures to best connect clients with resources in the community, especially when it comes to affordable housing.

“The VA Subsidized Housing Program (VASH) is like Section 8, specifically for veterans,” she explains. “But even with a voucher, it’s still a challenge to find suitable housing.”

“For instance, take the application fees: they’re $25 to $50, each time you apply for an apartment. For people with a steady job and income, that’s not a big deal. But if you’re homeless and applying to four apartments each week—how are you going to get that money?”

This problem was preventing many of the VA’s clients from successfully placing themselves in housing. Sherita helped the VA find a new approach.

“I told them to make it work!” says Sherita. She helped case managers at the VA draft a waiver form that enables veterans to bypass many application fees. “You have to go beat the streets. When your client needs to find housing, go with them—as a social worker with the VA, you can throw some weight around and get application fees waived. That might be non- traditional, but housing is hard; you gotta do what it takes.”

Even then, finding a suitable array of options can be difficult. “Southeast is different from the rest of DC. A lot of places advertise in the window, not in the classifieds or on Craigslist,” Sherita explains. “You gotta get out of the newspaper and up from the desk.”

And once housing is secured, veterans can then turn to Bread for the City for even more assistance. “The VASH program doesn’t include food stamps or social services benefits,” Sherita explains. “So we’re able to get them into a networked array of resources—including food support and legal assistance.” This is especially important for veterans with families: “vets can go to the VA hospital, but their spouse and children may not be able to. That’s where we come in—we can address the entire family unit. We can connect the wife and children with the resources they need.”

“The demographics of soldiers are changing,” continues Sherita, explaining that we’re seeing more young veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In other instances, active enlisted men leave behind families who need help: “If my husband is in Iraq, he’s being compensated—so I may not be eligible for food stamps. But I still need help!”

“Sherita is incredibly responsive and always willing to come out here to offer assistance—that’s rare in today’s age,” commends Steve Mason of the VASH program. “All of our clients thank us for connecting them with Bread for the City.”

“Sherita assisted me in getting into the place where I’m established now. When I ended up on the streets of DC, a case manager with the homeless division suggested that I could get specific help at Bread for the City. I was tired of jumping in and out of shelters. Sherita directed me to the Vet Center at Chesapeake House. And even though I didn’t meet all the criteria—I didn’t have 60 days clean—I was able to talk to the people and they were ready to give me a stable, sober environment. Today I have six months clean time and my own home. “ — Mr. Klink, a veteran of Vietnam who suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder. Mr. Klink received a housing voucher but was still without shelter.

>What’s the Deal DC — one of these neat new discount websites that offers deals on various things and places around here — has selected Bread for the City as a beneficiary in a special charity promotion this week. If you sign up for What’s the Deal DC’s e-mail newsletter (from January 4th, 2010 to Sunday, January 10th) and select Bread for the City, they will donate a $1 to us. We get money, you get a daily discount offer in your email — sounds like a good deal to us!

So click on over and select Bread for the City. (And remember to click the link in the following email so that your signup gets counted for us.)