healthy food - Building community at the food pantry - SIBEJO

As a Christian, I highly recommend "Take This Bread" by Sara Miles for those working on food ministry projects.  The author was raised an atheist and experienced a conversion when she walked into an Episcopal Church one day.  At the church, she founded a food pantry, housed right in the sanctuary around the altar, and practiced the "client choice" model.

One of the things she writes about is the community that was created around their food pantry, as most of the volunteers ended up being clients of the pantry.  She saw this ragtag group formed into a community around the need for food, but more important, around the need for human connection.

She expresses it so much better than I, but I came away more convinced than ever that the only way we will solve the problem of hunger is by building community, bringing together those who need help and those who can help in meaningful relationships.

Food for the body can draw people into a food pantry or soup kitchen, but the food for the soul created by being part of something larger than themselves is what keeps them, and in some cases, changes them for the better.  In the North Country, our free will dinners do this well - they don't call themselves soup kitchens and they welcome all to be part of the community.

I highly recommend this book to any Christians struggling with what the call to "feed my sheep" really means.

Gloria

healthy food - "Volun-tourism" - is it a good thing? - SIBEJO

Over the weekend, the Today Show has a segment on "volun-tourism," people using their vacations to do volunteer work.

It sounds great, doesn't it?  Visit some new and interesting place and do some good while you're there.  And I've done it myself, if you count church mission trips to Appalachia and Maine.

But seeing it brought me back to Robert Ludlum's book, Toxic Charity, which I reviewed last month.

Rev. Ludlum spends a lot of time in his book on church mission trips and why they often serve the needs of the people on the mission trip more than the needs of the people at the trip's location.  Too often these kinds of activities have middle class Americans swooping in and trying to fix a problem for people they have defined as poor or in need.  In doing so, they can sometimes infantilize the people the people they are serving and take away their right to self-determination.  One example he gave was of a mission group that built a well for a village in  another country, so they would not have to walk miles carrying their water.  Fast forward a year and the villagers were again carrying water for miles.  Why?  The outsiders built a well, but they did not engage the local people in the project, teach them how it works, or what might go wrong and how to repair it if it broke.

The mission trips I went on were powerful experiences for me.  But when I reflect on it, I'm not 100% sure that they were as important or powerful for the people we were seeking to help.  And it should be about the people in need and the local community, not about those of us from the outside, shouldn't it?

Gloria

healthy food - Can emergency food programs end hunger? - SIBEJO

Although it was written in 1998, Janet Poppendieck's book, "Sweet Charity?  Emergency Food and the End of Entitlement," has much to say to us today.

The book describes food charities (food banks, food pantries, community kitchens) functioning as a moral safety valve which have allowed us as a society to accept the erosion of government's role in fighting poverty and hunger.

My favorite part of the book continues to be the chapter on "The Seven Deadly In's of Emergency Food."  The following are among the reasons that private, charitable, emergency food programs like food banks cannot solve the hunger problem:  

• Insufficiency (there's not enough food), 
• Inappropriateness (it's not the right food); 
• nutritional Inadequacy (it's not healthy food), 
• Instability (programs are hand-to-mouth relying on volunteers and uncertain funding streams),
• Inaccessability (people in need can't get to the charities), 
• Inefficiency (the can of food ends up costing several times its real cost from the time someone purchases it and donates it to a food drive until it gets to the person in need), and 
• Indignity (bread lines in America today!).

Almost twenty years later and all of these things are still true.  And yet, we still have politicians calling for massive cuts in federal food programs "because the private charities can take care of it."  The private charities weren't meeting the need in 1998 when Ms. Poppendieck wrote her book and we have fallen further behind every year since.  

We can only solve the problem of hunger with bigger picture, systems change thinking.  That's what we are trying to do at GardenShare and what our slogan, "Healthy Food.  Healthy Farms.  Everybody Eats." speaks to.

healthy food - Toxic Charity - how our efforts to help may actually hinder... - SIBEJO

Have you read the book, "Toxic Charity" by Robert Lupton? 

This is a book primarily about churches and the charity projects they undertake, but it has lessons for all of us working to build a better world.

Two themes that really resonated with me (and I'm sure there may be more in the future):

Volunteer projects - When a group or even an individual wants to volunteer, it's important to establish motives.  Is it more important that the volunteer activity meet the needs of the volunteers or the needs of the community / the organization you are volunteering with?

This may seem easy to answer, but I can't tell you how many times people have called me with ideas for things they want to do that don't really meet the needs or mission of GardenShare.  They often have a hard time accepting "no" for an answer, even though I think that I am, for the most part, pretty diplomatic in providing that answer!  

Then there are the volunteer groups who expect nonprofits to spend our limited resources to feed the volunteers lunch or provide t-shirts or other things.  We've already spent a lot of resources in staff time setting up and organizing the project, so don't be surprised if we say no to those requests, also!

Ending hunger or poverty -  The book has lots of examples of programs that have not succeeded in ending the social ill they set out to fight.  And a little guidance about how to do better.  Lupton says the key is in relationships.

"To effectively impact a life, a relationship must be built, trust forged, accountability established.  And this does not happen in long, impersonal lines of strangers.  A name and a story have to be attached to each indivdual face.  Highly personal life struggles must be explored and with each person a unique action plan created.  A bed for the night...where to get a job...treatment for addiction...escape from an abusive husband...childcare for homeless children...a wheelchair for an amputee."

This is the same conclusion that I have come to in my 30+ years of work in the anti-hunger field.  We won't end hunger by building bigger food banks and distributing more and more food.  We will end hunger one family at a time, because each family's needs will be different.  And we can only do this by mobilizing an army of volunteers who will work one-on-one with people in need and build these kinds of relationships.

At GardenShare, we have two primary ways of building community - the CSA's and the Farmers Markets.  Can you help us think about other ways we can build community and engage people in need with people who can help?