Why The Human Rights Clinic Matters

Today's guest post is from Dr. Hope Ferdowsian, who has helped to launch and run our new Human Rights Clinic. The Clinic is designed specially for refugees seeking asylum in America, which can require lengthy and sensitive medical examinations. Many thanks to Dr. Ferdowsian for all of her work and support.

The plight of refugees has been a concern of mine since I was a child. My dad is from Iran, and he and my mom, who is from the US, helped my father's extended family seek refuge in the United States when their religious group (the Baha'i Faith) came under persecution. As I grew up, I sustained an interest in human rights violations such as torture and genocide, and continued to learn about populations around the world that were targeted for their ethnic, political, or religious affiliations, or for other reasons.

I’ve been evaluating survivors of torture for about 6 years now, first under the auspices of Doctors of the World (now HealthRight International) and working with independent attorneys, and more recently with Physicians for Human Rights.

Before we moved this clinic to Bread for the City, it was held at George Washington University. We could generally only see patients there on a one-time basis, and since many of them didn’t have health insurance, we weren’t able to connect them with the care that they often needed. Here at Bread for the City, we can ensure that they receive long-term care as well as other services like legal counsel or public assistance. That network is here for them.

This is also a good space for health care providers, because we can support each other. Even when physicians have gone through the necessary training, we sometimes struggle to do this work alone. It’s emotionally tolling. People have very sad stories, and it can be difficult to process that on your own.

All of us who do this work are asked to see more people than we can possibly accommodate. I’m proud to see Bread for the City once again responding to a great need. Our community needs this kind of leadership.

Hope Ferdowsian, MD, MPH, is director of research policy for the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) and associate director of clinical research for the PCRM subsidiary Washington Center for Clinical Research.

A new MILE-stone...

Thank you! (We really can't say it enough.) Thank you to each and every donor who made our new truck a reality. A special "thank you" to Poor Roberts Charities,the District of Columbia Primary Care Association (DCPCA), WilmerHale, Rachel Levinson & Ariel Waldman, and Vaughn & Marion Simmons who gave above and beyond to bring this truck to us.

As George said in his remarks this morning, we truly have reached a significant "mile"-stone with the purchase of this new delivery truck. This truck will transport more than 1,000 articles of clothing, and over 10 tons of food each week. We estimate that in the coming years, it will deliver to our pantry enough food for more than 5 million meals for the hungry.

Thanks to the donors, volunteers, staff, and clients who came out this morning for our celebratory coffee and breakfast (catered by the always excellent Azi of Azi's Cafe!).

Pictured from left to right are: George, Larry, Ted, Damon, and Jenette representing Bread for the City; Karen Szulgit and Eric Vicks from DCPCA; and Cheryl Shigo and Richard Palmer on behalf of WilmerHale.

We need an intern!

Hey readers: you know how great it would be to intern here, right? Please help us spread the word.

Description:
Bread for the City provides comprehensive assistance to Washington DC’s poorest residents – including food, medical care, legal counsel and social services. Through our blog and other social media, we communicate about our work – about the problems of poverty, and its potential solutions – on a daily basis. We are looking for a sharp young consumer/producer of new media for an exciting internship. This is a great opportunity to learn about non-profit communications, new media, social justice advocacy, and a wide range of urban policy matters.
Internships should average 10 hours a week for at least four months.

Responsibilities:

• Daily analysis of major and local newspapers, blogs, and select magazines.
• Work with BFC staff and volunteers to identify clients and community members with compelling stories to tell. Conduct interviews of BFC staff, clients and community members in an atmosphere of dignity and respect. Transcribe interviews and compose for publication.
• Write posts for Bread for the City’s “Beyond Bread” blog. Outreach to local blogs.
• Ditto Twitter.
• Engage with nascent Bread for the City network on Facebook.
• Other tasks as assigned by development staff.

Characteristics and skills:
Must possess strong interpersonal skills and an ability to communicate and work with a wide variety of people. Working knowledge of media – both mainstream and social. Plusses include: experience with photography, video, and/or journalism, HTML-literacy, proficiency in Spanish, an ear for stories. The position requires excellent communication skills; willingness to take direction and also to work independently; confidence, flexibility, and, above all, a commitment to social justice.

Credit: We will support your initiative to receive college credit for this internship.

Please send cover letter, resume, and two examples of recent work to: Greg Bloom, gbloom / AT \ breadforthecity / dot \ org.

The Kid Needs a Bed

I got an email this afternoon from one of our attorneys. She has a client with a young son who does not have a bed. Do you have a twin mattress and box spring you can donate? Could you throw in some new sheets and a pillow?

If you can make this special request a reality, please call or e-mail me. Don't worry, we can coordinate a convenient pick-up.

202.386.7613
KValentine@BreadfortheCity.org

Thanks!

Street Sense gets Web Presence

Our friends at Street Sense have a great new website! The site was produced by Community IT Innovators (CITI). They’ve also recently launched a channel on a neat user-generated aggregation service called MIXX that culls homelessness news from all over the country. (You can find it through the “Homelessness Headlines” section towards the bottom of the front page.)

These are good steps forward. Street Sense’s street-vendor model is an innovative and popular way to engage homeless people in production and vending of their own publication, and each issue contains voices that rarely get heard even on the internet. Street Sense can now share its messages, beyond the street, as part of a broader dialogue.

For instance, we found out about this interesting program in an article called “Crossing the Digital Divide” by Laura Dean:

Helping homeless people become technologically savvy is the cornerstone of Lou August’s business partnership between his technology company, Wilderness Technology Alliance, and D.C.’s largest shelter, the Community for Creative Non-Violence (CCNV).

The idea behind the business model is to build a self-sustaining, technology company that is managed and operated by the homeless, while providing an outlet for D.C. businesses to take advantage of high-quality training programs and refurbished computer systems offered by WildTech-CCNV staff members.

The technology center located at the shelter provides training classes, job search skills, software training classes and Internet access to the nearly 1,000 residents of the shelter. The benefits of the technology classes offered at CCNV reach far beyond the people that reside at the shelter. A $99 computer class is offered every other Saturday to low income residents of Washington, D.C. WildTech-CCNV endeavors to give each participant who completes the class a free, refurbished Pentium-4 computer.

Sounds like a promising attempts to address the Digital Divide problem we discussed here last week. If you’ve had experience with this program, or are aware of similar programs that we should check out, let us know!

Come Join Us!

As you may have read, seen, or heard already, the new Bread for the City truck is finally here!

You're invited to come join us in celebrating the new addition to our team. Our truck's ribbon cutting ceremony is this week:

Thursday, August 27
8:30am
1525 Seventh Street, NW

Free breakfast and coffee! Please RSVP by August 26th to events@breadforthecity.org.

Netroots Nation: Progressive Local Blogging

(Click to read my first and second debriefs of Netroots Nation.)

As the newspaper continues its steady decline, we're losing what little local news coverage we had. Given that local government plays such an active role in shaping the day-to-day lives of its citizens, this is a serious problem.

But already, we can see the shape of what can fill the gap as newspapers recede.

We've written here before about DC's local blogosphere, which is pretty large and lively. Most local DC blogs are written from the perspective of residents who want the best for their neighborhood.

Netroots Nation's "Local Blogs" panel offered up a group of folks who take that to a higher level: they blog with an agenda. (We've got one or two of those here in DC, too.)

On the panel were Dan Urevick-Ackelsberg of Philadelphia's Young Philly Blog, Paul Hogarth of the San Fransisco blog BeyondChron, Eli Ackerman of the New Orleans' Save Charity Hospital, and Josh Kalven who blogs about Chicago on Progress Illinois.

The panel was moderated by Evan Coren, who blogs in our neighboring Howard County.* Evan started blogging to shed light on a specific story: there were plans underway for a major real estate development that he believed "would destroy existing gathering places...and would not be socio-economically mixed."

"I realized there wasn't good way to get info out to the community," Evan said at the panel. "The local newspaper wasn't providing coverage."

So Evan started the Howard County Blog, recruited more writers, and soon this blog became a viable force in the local scene.

"It's not enough to tell people they should be outraged," said Evan about his mission. "By regularly writing about it, you can explain what would otherwise be a very opaque issue."

He explained that by identifying and occupying a specific niche, a blogger can add value to the discussion. "If you don't do it, no one else will."

Josh Kalven noted that bloggers can correct a deep flaw in the newspaper model: "When good muckraking uncovers small but important issues, we can keep them from falling down the memory hole."

The audience for these issues, of course, will rarely if ever compare to the reach of a major newspaper.

"But it's not about the number of readers," said Evan. "It's about who is reading."

The panelists reported that their readers include local politicians and staff, aspiring candidates, community leaders and especially local reporters from the flailing mainstream media. As a result, their coverage can have a clear influence on the public discourse.

But the capacity to write a deeply-informed, regularly updated blog -- usually without any form of compensation -- is fairly rare. Dan reports that finding and keeping contributors is a constant problem at Young Philly ("I would go to parties and actually harass people to write") and that a major blogger signing off can be a blow felt throughout an entire local blogosphere.





But the capacity to write a deeply-informed, regularly updated blog -- usually without any form of compensation -- is fairly rare. Dan reports that finding and keeping contributors is a constant problem at Young Philly ("I would go to parties and actually harass people to write") and that a major blogger signing off can be a blow felt throughout an entire local blogosphere.

Institutional support can help fill this gap: Josh Kalven's work at ProgressIllinois is sponsored by the state SEIU. Meanwhile, Beyond Chron is a project of Tenderloin Housing Clinic, which offers civil legal services to low income San Franciscans. (It's a model similar to Bread for the City and Beyond Bread.)

Already, Beyond Chron's record suggests that small amounts of dedicated resources can fill the gap left by the passing of much larger news operations. When Mayor Gavin Newsom held an orchestrated press conference to announce his budget proposal, Beyond Chron's lawyer/writer/editor Paul Hogarth actually read the plan -- a step farther than most local reporters bothered to go. He discovered that Newsom's public announcement contained some significant deceptions that had serious implications for the health of the city's hospitals, mental health support systems, and other safety net programs.

Though we do need some sort of professional newsmaking capacity to survive even as newspapers fail, when it comes to exposing deception and bad governance, Hogarth says "it doesn't take a lot."

This was a repeated refrain: that small efforts to apply local pressure can have large impacts. "There's more energy around city-blogging than state blogging," suggested Josh Calven. "The issues are more immediate, and the characters are more familiar."

That said, each city struggles with similar problems -- and one of the most interesting suggestions from the panel was that of a future in which these networks link together such that local advocates can learn from what's happening in other cities. Like a League of Beleaguered Cities, suggested Eli Ackerman -- who blogs from post-Katrina New Orleans with a mission that recalls our own SaveOurSafetyNet campaign, with even more urgency.

* NB: Evan's blogging helped him acquire deep knowledge of the issues and the city, and also gave him a potent base when he decided to run for City Council. He opposed a candidate who was not likely to play an active role in pushing for smarter development plans. Evan's campaign -- which was waged both online and door-to-door -- doubled the turnout in the election; he won by 21 votes. Another indication that in local matters with large stakes, small organized efforts can have a big impact.

Food Stamps Use Linked to Weight Gain

Given my recent post on obesity, I thought that Science Daily’s recent article on the links between obesity and food stamp use was especially enlightening.

According to a recent nationwide study, people -- especially women -- who use food stamps also tend to have higher weight gain. The average food stamp user had a BMI (Body Mass Index) of 1.15 points higher than non-users, and women averaged 1.24 points higher.

A large part of the reason is that people receiving food stamps are also probably not purchasing healthy foods. When I brought the matter up, Bread for the City’s Intake Coordinator Sherita Evans made a good point about this: “There are a number of “Good quality” grocery stores in the area, but they do not advertise that EBT is accepted," she said. "These establishments are known for having a better quality and selection of food, but individuals will not frequent these stores because they think they can’t shop there."

For example: Harris Teeter, a fresh foods market, accepts EBT (Electronic Benefit Transfer) but it is not explicitly advertised in their store or on their website. Given the stigma that is already placed upon food stamps, many recipients shy away from these stores. If grocery stores were required to properly disclose that they accept food stamps, use of food stamps at stores with healthy foods would almost certainly increase.

But the more fundamental problem is cost. The average food stamp recipient receives $81 in food stamps per month. On $20 a week, fruits and vegetables -- to say nothing of things like healthy grains -- are way above these recipients’ price ranges. When a Giant Brown Rice Bag costs $2.00 but there's a $0.85 Giant Macaroni and Cheese box sitting on the shelf next to it, the "healthy choice" is a truly difficult one.

It is worth noting, however, that several initiatives have been made to increase the flow of healthy food to low-income residents. Most notably, DC's FreshFarms Markets has a new program that doubles the value of food stamps when used to purchase produce at their farmers' markets. More promising still is the Food Stamp Expansion Act of 2009, which has significantly expanded the eligibility for and amount of food assistance in DC.

Though these intiatives have helped tremendously, they are just small steps in the right direction. As rates of obesity increase, we must consider that people's inability to purchase nutritious foods leads to all kinds of even more costly problems. So where do we go from here?

Who's Left Out Of The Netroots?

At Netroots Nation 2009, more than a hundred caucuses, panels, and workshops grappled with an overwhelmingly broad spectrum of issues: new media strategies, web organizing tactics, and all kinds of modern progressive thinking. But as I wrote on Monday, there wasn't much being said about poverty and the empowerment of poor Americans.

The primary reason for this is very simple: poor people don't attend these conferences, and they're not participating in the netroots' movement. That simple reason is symptomatic of a very complex problem.

To the conference's credit, there was a lively panel about exactly that: "Who's Left Out: Taking a Critical Look at Online Organizing" was organized by Campus Progress, moderated by Erica Williams, and tweeted about profusely by participants (via the #leftout hashtag).

The panelists started off by pointing out that people engage with the internet in patterns that reflect their stations in "real life." As a result, the internet is stratified in ways that mirror real life -- and the nature of your engagement is shaped by your class, race, sexuality and so on. The kicker is that even though most everything on the internet is only a couple clicks away, it's even easier for users to lose sight of all the other different people out there in the world.

The danger to the many strands of social movement that coalesce every year around Netroots Nation is that they tend to talk to and agitate themselves, in virtual spaces where most Americans have never clicked a mouse. (For instance, panelist Matthew Hindman noted that porn sites get 100 times the traffic than the entire political blogosphere.)

From the perspective of campaigns that organize communities to move towards social change, this is a tactical problem with readily available solutions. "Left Out" panelists and participants pointed to a number of ways in which organizers can target their communications to reach people where they are: like text messaging campaigns, which can directly connect with huge numbers of people who don't often or ever access the world wide web, but who will engage via mobile device.

And of course there's the greatest example of internet-enabled social movement to date: the Obama campaign used the web to mobilize large numbers of people, who then went offline to organize much, much larger numbers of people, the largest numbers in recent American history. Many of those Obama supporters never visited a political website -- but they nevertheless showed up to help elect a liberal, wonky, African-American President.

Speaking from the crowd, Alan Rosenblatt of the Center For American Progress suggested that the real question we need to ask "is not 'who is being left out of online organizing?' but 'who is being left out of democracy?'"

You can find the answer to that here at Bread for the City. What's more, I think organizations like ours could play a key role in a solution to the problem. The question, though, is much trickier for us than it is for a campaign manager. Our mission is to help people. As we help meet their immediate needs, we also want to help empower them. But when the full extent of our resources are hardly enough to meet the those immediate needs, how can we help our clients actually engage in the virtual channels through which power increasingly travels?

The "Left Out" panel underscored how difficult this is. It's not just a matter of giving our clients access to extremely cheap desktop computers - we currently offer that opportunity through partnership with First Time Computers, but it's rarely used. (Few of our clients could even afford a monthly bill for dial-up, let alone know how to install and operate the machine.) Meanwhile, readers of this blog know that public libraries are embattled and endangered sites. It's not even a matter of just building more computer-capacity into our own facilities, since our clients often lack the skills that make computers effective tools.

We started this blog with the idea of creating a virtual space in which we could foster discussion about the realities of our clients' lives -- discussion that isn't happening in the media or elsewhere online. But the value of this space is limited by the fact that our clients themselves by and large won't access it. Where to begin solving this problem?

We don't have good answers to this question--yet. We're ready to start figuring it out.

The Netroots Nation and The Other America

This weekend I attended the fourth annual Netroots Nation, a gathering of progressive bloggers, internet organizers, and sundry web-savvy advocates working towards change in America.

When they all get together in one place, things quickly get over-stimulating. Over three days, for at least four shifts a day, ten rooms hosted panels and workshops about foreign policy, the media, climate change, gender and sexuality, elections, science, the Supreme Court, and this year, would you believe it, lots of Twitter.

And yet, as Change.org’s Leigh Graham observed remotely, there is lots of talk about “economics” but relatively few mentions of “poverty.” There’s a lot of focus on labor and health care, both of critical importance to the endangered middle- and working-classes. There’s also always at least one panel about New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina, and this time there was a well-received panel on Hip Hop and social change. But by and large the “other America” seems to be almost as obscure at Netroots Nation as it is in the mainstream media.

All this is not meant to shame Netroots Nation, its attendees or organizers (who do really great work - see Director Nolan Treadway's response in the comments below). The netroots’ agenda should be shaped by the interests of its participants. When it comes to poverty, the problem is not that the netroots don’t care; the problem is that poor folk aren’t there.

It’s not just a matter of attendance, though it can be prohibitively expensive to attend a conference like this (Democracy for America hosts a great scholarship program). There are other major events like the US Social Forum that focus more explicitly on efforts to end poverty. But I think a Venn diagram of the two circuits would reveal very little overlap.

This is symptomatic of a deeper problem: people who struggle to put food on the table are missing out on the great advances in power dynamics – both personal and collective – made possible by the Internet. There is a lot of them, more every day, and they're getting left behind.

All that said, this year’s Netroots Nation did offer some glimmers of hope for a more diverse netroots future. There was lots of talk of the potential for the Obama Administration’s broadband stimulus plan (albeit less clarity on what it will actually look like on the ground) and organizations like Free Press were present, spreading awareness of the digital divide and pointing towards opportunities to bridge it.

And there was even a panel on this very issue – entitled “Who’s Left Out? A Critical Look at Online Organizing” – one of the better attended, focused, and engaged panels that I attended.

But I also attended a panel on best blogging practices – and with those in mind, I’ll have to cut this post off here like so: more on this tomorrow.

Glean for the City: Reaping Abundance

[This week's Glean for the City guest post comes from Susan Birchler, Market Manager at the West End Farmer's Market. Thanks, Susan! ~Jeffrey]

Plant one zucchini plant in your garden and all summer you will have an abundance of zucchini. Even an overabundance. Living things at the lower end of the food chain – apple trees, ants, plankton, etc - tend towards a productiveness that makes for an overabundance of food for things living higher up the food chain.

Now, consider the difference between anteaters and woodpeckers. Anteaters find an anthill (or termite mound) and with their sticky, quick tongues they consume around 1000 insects a minute. Woodpeckers eat ants too -- but also grubs, beetles, caterpillars, tree sap, seeds and fruits. They are opportunistic and flexible, pecking the bark and wood of trees, consuming whatever they find. Zoologists refer to animals like the woodpecker as "gleaners." This indicates that they scour the environment to find scattered bits of food. They are nature's way of efficiently utilizing her decentralized abundance.

Human food systems have been mainly organized to make people behave more like anteaters: channeling vast amounts of foodstuffs through centralized locations, like farms and supermarkets. But that does not mean this system is perfectly efficient - in fact, it leaves considerable waste. Gleaning is an activity often missing from our modern food system. I'm thrilled to see Bread for the City partially correcting that.

Every Sunday, the vendors bring their abundance to the West End Farmers Market. Their fruits and vegetables have been picked the day before, their breads baked early in the morning. When you walk through the market you can smell the earthiness of onions, tomatoes, peaches, only recently separated from the plant it grew on. The farmers are selling freshness. And despite the fact that our market is thriving, there is always some leftover produce.

Yet when the market is over, many vendors don’t have another market for days. Small farmers are usually not equipped with the refrigeration and chemicals necessary to keep leftover produce fresh for two more days; bakers will not sell stale goods.

What to do with leftover produce and breads? Plow it into a compost pile? Throw it away? It is a perennial dilemma. It is not as easy as one might imagine to find a willing nonprofit with the necessary organizational machinery to retrieve our surplus abundance. Smaller agencies, hit with economic slump, have closed their doors or are unable to pick up or distribute the foods. So when I read a piece about Bread for the City's Glean for the City project on the Farmers Market Listserve, I hastily emailed an invitation to glean at our market and received an immediate reply.

The next Sunday Jeffrey Wankel and Heather showed up with a van and bins. Our vendors loaded them down with food. Every week Bread for the City and our vendors engage in a mutually beneficial exchange. The farmers are relieved that their produce will not go to waste; not only that, but it will go to feed those who could not otherwise afford it. The farmers and bakers are so enamored of the process, they sometimes bring extra food specifically to give Jeffrey and Heather.

As market managers, Julie Bryant and I feel like our universe is in harmony. We fulfill our agenda to provide fresh food to the community of consumers. Bread for the City fulfills their agenda to provide nutritious fresh food to a community of people who are not able to access our market. Our collaboration creates a human food system that efficiently utilizes the abundance of grown food by distributing it across a spectrum of the population. We are lucky to have found each other.

[We need an able-bodied volunteer with a large automobile (preferably a truck, SUV, or minivan, but this could be flexible) and about an hour of your time on Tuesday evenings at 6pm. Your work will help us feed dozens of hungry families each week. Please contact me for more details.]

It's Here!

The new truck is here. Damon (pictured left) can barely contain his exictement! (he was smiling on the inside)

Bob with Poor Robert's Charities (pictured right) was one of the generous donors who made this purchase possible. Father John with So Other's Might Eat and Dominick Musso with Martha's Table were also on hand to pick up their vehicles.

Big thanks to Poor Robert's Charities and our community of donors for their generosity!

Don't forget, truck ribbon cutting 8:30am on August 27th. Free breakfast. RSVP today!

At long last...OUR NEW TRUCK

On Thursday, August 13, the much-loved Bread for the City truck was humanely put out to pasture. During its ten years of service at BFC, this truck faithfully transported an average of 8 tons of food, clothing, and other supplies every week. It aided in serving clients over 5.4 million meals, 600,000 articles of clothing, and, this summer alone, helped gather and distribute over 10 tons of produce as part of Glean for the City.

Having amassed such impressive stats, it is not surprising that this vehicle has sustained an equally impressive amount of wear and tear. So, although it is with some sadness that we say farewell, we at Bread for the City are also thrilled to welcome our new truck. The purchase of our brand new 2009 Isuzu box truck would not have been possible without a wide community of donors. To each of them we offer a very sincere “Thank You.”

And we want to extend special recognition to those who went above and beyond to make this purchase a reality:

Poor Roberts Charities, District of Columbia Primary Care Association, WilmerHale, Rachel Levinson & Ariel Waldman, and Vaughn & Marion Simmons.

The new truck needs a name! Any ideas? Leave your name suggestion as a comment. If we choose your name, you will win a signed 5x7 photograph of Food Director Ted Pringle. Whoa. That’s big.

Meet Ted and the new truck at the ribbon cutting ceremony at our Seventh Street Center on Thursday, August 27, at 8:30am. Breakfast provided. Please RSVP by August 22nd to events@breadforthecity.org.

Ousting Obesity: Strategies from the Tobacco Wars

On July 28 2009, I attended a panel discussion organized by the Urban Institute focused on the current obesity crisis confronting the United States.

It is very much a crisis: A full third of American adults and one out of six American children are obese. These numbers are alarming, because obesity has been directly tied to chronic illnesses such as heart disease, diabetes and hypertension. In fact, according to featured panelist Arthur Garson, Executive Vice-President & Provost of the University of Virginia, this is the first period of time since the Civil War that life expectancy in the United States has gone down.

Contrary to popular belief, the rise in obesity is not due to lack of exercise but rather due to poor nutrition. Matthew Myers, a tobacco expert and featured panelist, compared obesity to the public health crisis of smoking, and he provided the panel with a hopeful note by suggesting that we can learn from that effective battle. He proffered three main strategies along those lines that can reduce obesity:

1) Limit the advertising of fatty foods.

2) Create a better labeling system to help consumers distinguish good from bad.

3) Tax fatty foods, which in turn will reduce consumption as it did for tobacco.

I see the potential benefits of these tactics - but I also see complications. While he is correct that taxing tobacco reduced consumption of cigarettes, unlike cigarettes food is a necessity. Taxes on fatty foods would put further pressure upon people who already have a hard time putting food on the table -- and what's more, in neighborhoods like some served by Bread for the City, there simply aren't many alternatives to unhealthy foods. So it's just not as simple as changing people's incentives.

Though this panel discussion did not provide all the answers, it did make one thing clear. Something must be done about obesity, and it must start now.

Bread for the City is conscious of the health problems that surround obesity and has recently taken initiatives to bring nutritious foods into our communities. Bread for the City’s Glean for the City program allows us to provide clients with fresh produce thus adding healthier items and better nutrients to their diets. Through our Nutrition Initiative, Bread for the City has also eliminated trans fat foods from the bags we give our clients. And we are eager to find new ways to partner with organizations like DC Hunger Solutions, which work to expand access to healthy foods in our highly food insecure city.

Contact Jeff Wankel in order to get involved with Bread for the City’s Glen for the City Program. And stay tuned for more!

A volunteer perspective on gleaning

[Another guest post! This one is from Kelly A. Campbell, a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University and a Bread for the City volunteer. --Jeffrey]

Last Saturday was my first day as a Bread for the City volunteer. When my alarm went off at the ungodly hour of 6AM (ungodly for a weekend at least), I was actually pretty excited.

Not only was I going to glean for apples to help provide fresh fruit for food bags to feed Bread for the City’s clients, I was also going to observe and interact with everyone involved.

On the way to Crooked Run Orchard in Purcellville, VA, I learned about how a change from canned goods to fresh produce can help reduce chronic conditions like diabetes. I learned that providing fresh fruits and vegetables to vulnerable residents of Washington D.C. is truly a group effort. Several local farms and farmer’s markets donate the left over fresh produce that they don’t sell to fill Bread for the City’s pantries, truly paying it forward.

In just over a month, between the gleanings, farm pick-ups and farmers market pickups, Bread for the City has received almost 20,000 pounds of fresh food that has helped feed D.C’s low-income population.

When we arrived at Crooked Run Orchard, we were greeted by a diverse group of volunteers who were ready to glean the ripe apples that had already fallen to the ground.

There were young people and older people from all walks of life: college students, professionals, retirees, church members and families with young children. Although we didn’t all know each other, we quickly bonded while we gleaned. We helped fill each other’s bags and issued gentle warnings to beware of poison ivy.

When I arrived back in D.C. and watched the crates of apples being unloaded, it felt great knowing that come Monday morning, some hungry D.C. residents would receive bags of fresh fruits and vegetables.

And, that’s worth getting up for at 6AM any day of the week.


[So far, Bread for the City has brought in nearly $10,000 worth of free produce from regional farms - in just one month! Thanks to all of our participating farms, markets, and volunteers. Please contact me if you'd like to be involved.]

Capital Area Food Bank's "Grow a Row"

[Today we're happy to feature a guest post from Anika Roth at the Capital Area Food Bank (CAFB) -- ed]

Hi folks! I am an AmeriCorps volunteer, working with the Harvest for Health department at the CAFB, which connects to community farms & gardens. I also have my own backyard garden.

This is the first year I’ve had a garden, so I’m experimenting with everything, including how much to plant. It’s surprising which things haven’t come to fruition yet (tomatoes, peppers), and which things have taken off (cucumbers, chard, parsley)! There is definitely more cucumbers, chard, and parsley then I can use. At first I took the extras to my coworkers, but then I had another idea:

My housemate, Stephan, works at one of the CAFB member agencies - a soup kitchen 8 blocks away from our house. I thought I could bring the excess to the soup kitchen, or better yet, I could just give it to Stephan to take with him!

At the same time, the Food Bank has been getting lots of calls from local gardeners who wanted to donate their produce to us. This is awesome because we don’t get lots of produce donations and it’s essential to a healthy diet! Some of the gardeners live pretty far from the Food Bank, though, and they were worried about their produce degrading in the time it took to get it to the Food Bank and then back out to the community.

So we decided to apply the same concept I had used to hook up local gardeners with agencies near them. It’s been fabulous. We’re calling the program Grow A Row, because ultimately we would like gardeners to plan an extra row to donate to their local community organizations. (At this point, though, we’re happy with any extra you already have!)

All you have to do is call or email the Food Bank and we will start to look for agencies near you. We will call the agencies to make sure they are a good fit and help facilitate a partnership between you and them. You’ll also get a nifty sign! (See pic.) To sign up or for more information email us or call us at (202) 526-5344.

Call for volunteers: one hour, one truckload of food for the poor

Our new gleaning program, Glean for the City, is going really well – bringing in literally tons of fresh and free produce for the hungry in our community. Much of that work is done on regional farms, but we also bring in thousands of pounds of produce from local farmers markets right here in the city. So far, we haven’t had enough capacity to get all the produce there is to be had – so we need one or two volunteers to maximize the opportunity!

There’s a local CSA on 16th and P streets NW that is donating their seconds to Bread for the City every week. We need an able-bodied volunteer with a large automobile (preferably a truck, SUV, or minivan, but this could be flexible) and about an hour of your time on Tuesday evenings at 6pm. Your work will help us feed dozens of hungry families each week.

Please contact Jeff for more details.

Apples for the City

With a new month comes a change in produce for our food pantry (which is good, since we want to have variety for our clients). In July, we stocked BFC with over 7,000 lbs. of fresh corn. This month we will glean apples.

Apples are perfect gleaning crops because they’re nutritious, readily edible, and they have a long shelf life. Saturday, I organized our first trip to Crooked Run Orchard, a beautiful, “pick your own” orchard with acres of apples, berries and other fruits. I was accompanied by an eager group of volunteers from our friends at WilmerHale.

With a record turnout of volunteers, we gleaned over 1,000 lbs. of apples in just over an hour. We even had young children picking an apple here and there, and some of the older kids were our best volunteers.

While we picked apples, we discussed the impact gleaning is having at Bread for the City. With our new found surplus of fresh produce, the pantry has been able to remove unhealthy canned alternatives.

Volunteers were shocked by the quantity after we stuffed the van with thousands of apples. One volunteer remarked that, “It’s amazing that more organizations don’t glean.” A few of our volunteers from Saturday have already signed up for another event with Glean for the City.

A day later, I took my usual trip to the West End Market, where the quantity of our yield has increased steadily in the last month. In my first two trips combined I collected 1,000 lbs. of produce; this Sunday I brought back over 1,100 lbs. We had a delicious variety including corn, eggplants and even nectarines. The fridge in the pantry was stuffed so full that I needed to wedge bins of corn against the door to keep it sealed.

We have received thousands of pounds of produce from West End Market, and they have been very accommodating in the process. As it happens, we now have an opportunity to repay the favor. Care2 is running an online voting contest for the country’s Best Farmers Market. Please go there to vote for West End Farmers Market, Alexandria, VA today!

So it goes: Goodbye to All Matt

This is a sad day here at Bread for the City. Matthew Siemer—whose official title is Volunteer Coordinator, but who is also known as “the Blogfather”—is leaving us after two years of transformative work.

Matt turned his internship into an actual paid job here at Bread for the City, and in so doing he created new and greatly improved systems to organize our vast, diverse community of volunteers. It's remarkable that a person could pull off such a feat while remaining universally liked and admired.



Matt also launched this blog. He didn’t do it alone, of course: in a brief period of time, his enthusiasm for the project sparked the interest of many people who were inspired by the possibility of this new way to stand witness to the challenges, tragedies, and hope that we see here at Bread for the City day after day. That enthusiasm still persists, and will outlive his tenure here – proof of a job well done.

I wasn’t around when Matt initially conceived of the idea for Beyond Bread, but I imagine it happened in a room lit by a single bare bulb, his face half covered in shadow, in one hand a half-eaten peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, and in the air a prolonged silence, until suddenly he speaks aloud to no one in particular: “It is my duty, because this might be the inner chronicle of what we are,” he says in glowering mock-Bavarian snarl. “And we have to articulate ourselves. Otherwise we would be cows in the field.”