Bread for the City

>Last week I sat down with Bread for the City client, computer literacy peer educator, and Save Our Safety Net lead volunteer, Michelle Washington, to learn a little about her story.

Here’s some of what she shared with me:

When you can’t work, you risk getting to a place where you feel like you’re not worth anything. My elderly parents were taking care of me for years in which I had no income. I became very depressed – never even had the lights on because I couldn’t afford the electric bill. My friends would come over and sit in the dark. I remember being down in Eastern Market and some guy was singing “Nobody Wants you When You’re Down and Out.” And I turned to him and I said “I only have one dollar but I’m going to give it to you because you’re so right.”

I’d believed in the system but the system was failing me — and I was coming to be just like the people you see on the street. I needed counseling and I needed education. And I needed support. And that’s when I found Bread for the City.

They have a holistic approach, a multi-disciplinary team that worked not only on your health, but on your mind and your soul. The doctors knew my name and always treated me with respect — which is just what I needed at the time. They were also able to refer me to all kinds of different programs that I needed.

That’s how eventually I obtained my Social Security Insurance. SSI denied me at first, as I was having trouble validating my injury. Bread for the City’s case manager helped with the paperwork and arranged for me to see a medical specialist who confirmed my disability.

Eventually I came to the point where I wake up at 5:30am and dress like I have somewhere to go. And then Dr. Randi gave me a real reason: through the new computer literacy course, I’m able to share my computer skills with other Bread for the City clients. It’s a new niche for me. And I’m so thankful for that, because when you go out to help somebody, you forget about the problems that you have yourself.

Think of someone not as strong as myself, without parents to turn to. People you see walking around, failed by the system, with no one to trust.

Today, the safety net that saved me is itself in need of saving. Case managers can’t manage the flood of cases. It’s so hard to get food stamps, housing waitlists are stalled, and shelters are full.

It’s a trickle out effect: when people get desperate, relationships between individuals deteriorate. Community falls apart.

Now the city’s budget deficit is even worse. But the Mayor is downplaying the situation, and the articles about what’s happening to the city’s services aren’t front page any more, or even front page on the Metro section. You have to read that whole paper to find the little article that says “this is getting shut down.”

So that’s where we come in. Our mission at Save Our Safety Net is to convey this reality to people. We have to shake things up. We have to let the Mayor know that this is a crisis that demands better leadership. Stand with us and Save Our Safety Net!

>Bread for the City’s Stacy Braverman, our legal clinic’s Sutherland Equal Justice Fellow (and fierce Beyond Bread blogger), is about to hit the Big Blue. (Well she already hit it, but we’re about to see how it all went down.)

This last January, Stacy was a contestant on Jeopardy! (She’s the top-left entry in the menu of videos right now.) The show finally airs tomorrow.

This was the first game-show that Stacy has appeared on. When asked how she prepared for the challenge, Ms. Braverman said “I read some Wikipedia pages.” No sweat!

Stacy hasn’t clued us in on how it all went. She did say that her worst nightmare scenario — “that the final question would be about public benefits, and I would choke” — did not in fact come to pass.

We’ll be joining her to watch in the basement level of the 18th Amendment, 613 Pennsylvania Avenue, SE.

The show airs at 7:30 and we’ll be at the 18th Amendment starting around 6pm – and they’ll be donating 15% of their proceeds from the evening to Bread for the City.

>Well, folks…

Art with a Heart 2010, the 20th anniversary of our signature fundraising gala is behind us. And what a 20th anniversary celebration it was!

From celebratory cupcakes donated by Georgetown Cupcake, to our most exciting Live Auction ever, together we raised nearly $280,000 to benefit our programs here at Bread for the City.

Since 1990, through just 20 evenings of Art with a Heart, YOU have helped…

- provide 5,000 job physicals
- provide 7,000 social service visits
- provide 10,000 hours of legal service
- provide more than 150,000 meals
- raise a total of $2.5 million

This most definitely calls for a HUGE “Thank You!” to our sponsors, donors, staff and volunteers who made this year’s Art with a Heart the best yet.

More photos courtesy of Moshe Zusman Photography are on the way and will be posted soon.

>

“At first, people looked at this piece of equipment like alien technology,” he said. “By the third course, they, without prompting, came in, plugged in the power cord, mouse, booted up and brought up Google!” Clients have been meeting once a week to use our computers to access the internet, something they’ve never been able to do at home (the average income of our clients is $7,000, and few could afford their own PC and ISP).

The class is co-taught by two of Bread’s own clients and volunteers, Michelle Washington and Susan Berger.

Michelle used to be an elementary school teacher and recently started collecting computer donations to teach PC-literacy to her neighbors. “I was teaching it out of my apartment–to seniors. Seniors were expressing an interest in accessing the internet.” In fact, older students in BFC’s class have brought in their younger relatives to let them teach their elders what they already know about the internet.

Now, in addition to teaching our course, Michelle has also offered to drive students to Project Reboot in Rockville, Maryland, to pick up a cheap refurbished computer.

Susan used to teach computer courses at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Library, and was an IT coordinator for charter schools, and is now helping our clients become comfortable with the machines. She starts by pointing out all of the hardware, the buttons, the drives and the mouse, and saying, “Do not fear this!” Susan says that fear of breaking the machines or using them incorrectly keeps many beginners away, as computers appear to be very fragile and very expensive.

One of the students, Dorothy Kemp, was held back for years from using this technology because of a horrible work experience. After a coworker lost a very important document while working on the computer, which almost resulted in their termination, she resolved to write everything by hand and stay away from computers all together. After exploring for only a few weeks what computers have to offer during our class, though, she realized what she has been missing.

People were thrilled to overcome this initial barrier to information but are still ready to learn more. Vince says that “people feel so empowered when they can find information for themselves or their family members. People are really hungry for this access.” One of our students, Debbie Banks, recently went to Project Reboot and picked up her very first personal computer. “I’m so thankful,” she said, “because even though this class is going to end, having this computer will keep me going on practicing, and will help me out try to get to back in school”.

Bread for the City is doing its small part to address the drastic gap in information access caused by the “digital divide,” but there’s a lot more work to be done. Roughly 40% of Americans still don’t have internet access at home, and while other organizations like Byte Back, Project Reboot and First Time Computers tackle the issue head on in the District, many DC residents still don’t own computers or don’t know how to use them. And even before people can use computers, they have to know how to read, and adult literacy is an entire issue itself, especially in DC. Nevertheless, courses like ours provide extremely useful and needed education to the many low-income workers who have never had the chance to experience computers regularly.

>We recently took the first step in an exciting new direction for our food pantry: opening up our menu so that clients can choose which foods they receive.

>The new D.C. bag tax has dramatically decreased the consumption of plastic bags in grocery stores, and it will raise a good amount of money for cleaning up the Anacostia River. But it also affects our clients disproportionately more than many of those people who you might have read complaining about it in the newspaper. A nickel a bag really adds up when you’re earning less than $7,000 a year — and reusable bags can cost as much as five dollars.

Bread for the City always strives to find ways to help our clients – so in an effort to help adapt to the bag tax, we are distributing thousands of reusable bags in our food pantry. And we are thrilled to announce that we have just received a generous supply of 5,000 reusable bags from District Department of the Environment (DDOE). (They are sturdy and handsome and they have information about the Census printed on the side.)

While staffing the pantry front desk, I find that our clients are well aware of the bag tax. Many of them have found the free reusable bags to be a pleasant surprise, since they can’t afford their own. We hope to put at least one bag in the hands of every client — no small task, as the supply of DDOE bags will pretty much last us just one month.

But we see promising signs that this, too is working: last week a client stopped me as I handed over a bag, saying: “I brought the bag you gave me back! I use it all the time. You can keep your new bags for someone else.’’

>Most days, clients of Bread for the City’s pantry take a number, wait their turn, and receive a standard bag of pre-packaged groceries. These bags are carefully balanced to provide a rounded set of food items – canned fruit and vegetables, a packet of rice, a meat item, etc, in proportion with the size of a client’s family. Recently, however, we started to change things up a bit.

In the past few years, as part of our mission to serve and care for people in an atmosphere of dignity and respect, we’ve overhauled our pantry menu to feature an array of more nutritious items. The results of that Nutrition Initiative were really positive: healthier diets and higher client satisfaction.

Now we are experimenting with pantry innovation once again: exploring opportunities to enable client choice in our pantry menu. We envision a food pantry in which people can select which food they bring home, just like they would at a grocery store.

To be sure, this would be a logistical challenge. But there’s quite a few reasons why client choice would be an effective process. For one, Bread for the City is not the only source of food for our clients; many clients may already have sufficient amounts of certain kinds of food, but may be in greater need of others. Some of our clients have special dietary needs that make certain foods especially important, and others not helpful at all. And most of all, as our nutrition consultant Sharon Gruber says: “one of the most debilitating things about living with a low income is a lack of control — and food is one of the most basic things that we can or cannot control in our lives.”

Louise Thundercloud, a longtime Bread for the City client and community activist, wrote about that very point on this blog, explaining that a lack of control over food “is related to the problem of very low self esteem: feeling as though you deserve only what is given to you, because you feel so terrible about yourself.”

So on January 28th, we transformed our Southeast Center food pantry into a makeshift grocery store. Armed with a reusable bag, clients selected every component of their groceries. Bread for the City staff engaged directly with clients to help put together food bags. Clients pondered their choices, happily snatching favorites while politely declining other items they might not want or need. Staff laughed with clients and chatted about the choice experiment.

“Choice is much better! I get to pick what I want. This month I have enough cans and dry goods, I just needed meat and fresh veggies.”

Indeed we noticed that, when given options, clients displayed a clear preference to avoid waste, and many even took pride in leaving food behind for others.

We asked each client survey questions after shopping, and 97% of participants rated the experience a 5 out of 5. I asked one beaming client what she thought, and she replied, “I love this because I get to pick out the best options for me. Please keep it going!”

Stay tuned for more results of this exciting new experiment…

>This is a guest post submitted by Natalie Kaplan and Lee Goldstein of George Washington University. Contact the BRIDGE project at hmsr152project@gmail.com.

After 9/11 we were told that if we had only connected the dots, we might have stopped the attacks. If we had assembled the fragments of information we had, we would have put together a picture. The same is true in understanding poverty. We have to connect the dots among disparate problems faced by struggling families, problems that may not seem related, yet interact and reinforce and magnify one another.

So the concept of BRIDGE, to map the social services available in the Washington area, may give both providers and individuals a way of connecting the dots, of navigating among the varied agencies to address disparate problems. It can provide a gateway into the multiple forms of assistance that many families need.

-David Shipler

Pulitzer Prize Winning Author of The Working Poor

From food pantries and meal programs, to shelters, job training, health services, arts and recreation programs, community gardens, and overall case management, a wealth of non-profit organizations and service providers exist to serve DC citizens in need. But a disconnect often exists between knowledge and access to many of these invaluable services. The BRIDGE (Bridging Resources in D.C. to Guide and Educate) guidebook, a pocket-sized publication created by students in The George Washington University’s Human Services program, seeks to “bridge” these gaps between availability and access to the valuable social services throughout the District.

The BRIDGE guidebook, featuring 64 pages of information about over 550 social service sites throughout the District, is now available for service providers and individuals throughout the District of Columbia.

The BRIDGE Project started a little over a year ago as a serendipitous turn of events. Every year, the students from the George Washington University’s Human Services program help to run the University’s version of Hunger and Homelessness Awareness Week. The weeklong slew of events includes a food drive, poetry slam, Hunger banquet, and culminates in students’ participation in Fannie Mae’s Help the Homeless Walkathon. During the Walkathon in November of 2008, Director and Professor of the Human Services Program, Honey Nashman, approached us with an idea to map the social services available throughout the city. We were given the unique opportunity to serve as teaching assistants and lead this newly formed class project aimed at mapping the social services available in the District of Columbia. We gladly accepted with little idea of how things would turn out, or how big the project would become.

Having worked with multiple organizations throughout our three plus years as Human Services majors at GW, we were able to quickly make contacts at Bread for the City, DC Central Kitchen, and their supporting network of social service providers: HAFA (Healthy and Affordable Food for All). With their guidance, and the foundation provided by the DC Food Finder, we worked with 13 students to collect information, update, and map over 550 service providing organizations throughout the D.C. area.

For more information, or to find out how you or your organization can request copies of the BRIDGE guidebook, please contact Natalie Kaplan and Lee Goldstein at hmsr152project@gmail.com. Please visit our website to follow our BRIDGE BLOG and learn more about the current class’s work. From the website, you can view an electronic version of the BRIDGE guidebook and help us track our progress through the Distribution Feedback Form. Additionally, if you find listings that are no longer accurate, information that needs updating, or another site you think should be included, you can fill out the Site Update Form listed on the website as well.

Thank you for all you do to make Washington, D.C. a better community for its residents, and with your help we look forward to making the BRIDGE publication as useful a resource as possible!