Week 21 - Breaking Bread

This week we have a new place to tell you about - a soup kitchen called Breaking Bread.  As part of the outreach ministry of the LaSalle St Church, this organization has been working for the past nine years to make the homeless and hungry people they serve feel a sense of dignity and belonging in addition to getting them the food they need. 

It is clear right from the start that Breaking Bread is trying to be more than a simple soup kitchen.  For one thing, the patrons they serve are invited inside more than an hour before the food is served.  The intention here is to give the guests a chance to sit and socialize with each other, and to take advantages of some of the other services they offer.  These services include consultations with a nurse in a private area, "spiritual feeding" with students from the Moody Bible Institute, a room where they can get free items of clothing, rapid HIV testing services, and live music.  No where else Jen and I have been has been able to offer such a comprehensive approach to serving all of the needs of their guests.  The down side is that with an annual budget of only $37,000, they are only able to offer these services once per week, on Wednesday nights.  There was great excitement when we were there because a new commercial-grade can opener had arrived, one that had been needed for a very long time.  They had just received a grant of $950 that let them afford this fairly vital piece of equipment.  At the places we work, I often think about how much more they could do if their budget was doubled, but here I wished for multiplying it by ten.  They would put it to very good use.

Jen and I arrived at about 6pm and found a very full kitchen bustling with volunteers.  Everyone was working on food prep - putting salads into bowls, dishing out jelly for every table, and cooking eggs, grits, sausages and toast.  It was a little chaotic, and seemed a little dis-organized, but we soon realized that we had just walked in at the height of the busiest part of the night.   We were assigned the task of setting cupcakes onto plates that would be handed out for dessert, which we did until they called everyone together at about 6:30.   At that time, Keith, the kitchen supervisor and Marianne, the volunteer supervisor gave us the run down of what Breaking Bread tries to do, and how the evening would go.  It was clear from listening to them that they were both very committed to the mission of Breaking Bread, and that they had seen a lot of interesting things over the years.  Both have been working with the organization for its whole existence.

Once all the food was made and all the guests were seated, announcements were made and we started to serve.  Jen and I volunteered to plate the food, which is done at a bank of steam tables off the dining room.  From there it is loaded on to food service carts which are taken around by more volunteers.  They take great care to serve one table at a time, because guests have been known to receive a plate, hide it, and ask for more.  Things get very fast paced in this part of the night, because once the food starts coming, everyone wants it.  After everyone has been fed, they make an announcement for seconds, and anyone who wants to can come up for more, if there is any left.  The guests can also take a container to go, if they choose.  As this wraps up, people start to leave, and the volunteers start to clean up.  In contrast to the food prep part of the night, the clean up went like clockwork owing to a well defined system.  In a matter of about half an hour, the dishes are all done, the tables are cleared and put away, and the chairs are all stacked.  We finished about 8:30pm.

At the end of the night, we had served about 150 meals, which sounded like it was about average.  The crowd had seemed light just before we started serving, but there were a lot of late comers.  One of the guests serenaded our clean up work by playing the piano (very well) and singing.  He even did a version of Freebird.

One part of the Breaking Bread experience that we did not really participate in was real engagement with the guests.  The staff encourages the volunteers to sit and chat with the guests and spend some time helping them feel like real people instead of the non-persons that our society makes of the homeless.  Since it was our first time, we chose to hang back from this part of the experience.  I think it is safe to say that our experience was less rich as a result, and now that we have gotten our bearings, I think we will make more of an effort to connect with the patrons next time.

All in all, it was a great night.  We met some really friendly people, had a lot of fun and got to see the results of our work on the smiling faces of the guests.  We will certainly come back, although we will have to plan ahead.  Since they only serve once per week, the volunteer slots fill up fast.  We booked this work a few months ago, and the next opportunity will not be for a few months from now.  If you think you might be interested, it is worth booking time as soon as you can.

I did get a chance to shoot a few pics of the driving forces behind this kitchen.  This is Keith and Marianne, respectively, both shown in the kitchen area at Breaking Bread:

If you want more information about this organization and how you can help, go to:
Breaking Bread

Week 20 - The Greater Chicago Food Depository

Ok.  You may notice that this post is going up about two weeks late.  It has been a very busy few weeks, and while Jen and I are still managing to squeeze in our volunteering, it has been hard to find the time to write about it.  In spite of that, I have a good story to tell from this week.  We were back at the Food Depository, which you can read about in more detail in previous posts (Week 1, Week 6), but this time we went on a week night, and got to see a whole different side of what they do.  In the past, we have worked only on the flex line, packing emergency food boxes, which is very helpful, but not exactly at the core of what the GCFD does.  Most of what they do is bring in food, sort it, check it, re-pack it, re-label it, and get it out the door again to their member agencies like the House of Mary and Joseph or the Lakeview pantry (both of whom are mentioned a lot on this blog).  They move food in and out at a rate of over 1 million pounds per week.  They moved 69 million pounds of food last year, including something like 25 million pounds of fresh produce.  It is hard to comprehend how much food that is, until you have an experience like we did this week.

First of all, we worked deep in the warehouse, which was a first.  It is breathtaking.  Pallet racking stretches 30 feet high and covers a floor that would hold four or five football fields.  And all of those shelves are full of food.  I have said this before, but it most reminds me of the warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, except that instead of being forgotten, this food is almost constantly moving.  To stand there thinking about all the people that can be fed just from what is in your line of sight is unbelievable, and when you consider that the shelves are cleared and re-filled every week, you can begin to get the slightest idea about how much good the GCFD does every year.

Which brings us to the surreal part of our evening...  Why it should be surreal escapes me, but it was.  Jen and I (and about 30 other people) spent the night in the company of more potatoes than I have ever seen in my life.  The job at hand was to look at the potatoes that came in, find the ones that are rotting or bad in some other way, remove them and then re-pack the good potatoes into banana boxes so they are ready for distribution to soup kitchens, food pantries and the like.  The thing is, these potatoes come in huge Tyvek sacks, made to be picked up by a forklift.  Each one weighed over 2000 pounds.  The way it works is that they use a forklift to pick up the giant sack and hang it over a rolling table that has raised edges.  Then they cut the sack open and a bunch of people contain the potatoes as they spill on to the table.  Once they are spread around and the table is full, another is brought in to be filled.  The tables then go to another area where crowds of people stand around the tables and pick out the bad potatoes.  They put the good potatoes in banana boxes which, when full, run around a conveyor to a pallet station.  The bad potatoes get tossed in to large cardboard totes which will eventually get discarded.  When they empty a table, they send it back towards the sack for re-filling.  When the pallets are full, they are weighed and wrapped for shipping.  It is a very manually intensive project, but with a big group of people, the work goes faster than you would expect.

Jen and I volunteered to be table fillers, and we worked with a great group of people, most of whom came as volunteers from a local law firm.  We had an almost constant flow of tables to fill, and we rocked it out.  The goal for the two hour work session was to do six of these large sacks and we did seven.  It was dusty, dirty work, but they gave everyone aprons and gloves.  In spite of that, Jen and I both had potato dust tans by the end of it.  Your hands get a little banged up, and there are the occasional rock in the sack along with the potatoes, but it was a great challenge.  Also, the bags had a tendency to let out more than could be handled at one time, but we came up with some great strategies for dealing with that, mostly involving getting another table in place really quickly.

When it was done, we had moved, sorted and packed just under 15,000 pounds of potatoes.  They don't allow phones on the warehouse floor because of the forklift traffic - they want to make sure everyone stays safe.  If I could have, I would have snapped a picture because all those potatoes did make something of a sight.  I tried to figure out how many that was in actual potatoes, but the numbers got too large.  Think of how many potatoes come in the five pound bag you buy at the grocery store, and then multiply that by 3000.  But also consider that in two hours, 30 people did enough work to give a five pound bag of potatoes to 3000 families.  That means everyone working helped give 100 families a week's worth of potatoes.  I think that is a pretty great way to spend an evening, and worth a light coating of dust.

As a side note, the other work going on that night was re-packaging packets of instant oatmeal.  Like the potatoes, these packets come into the facility in giant bulk packages, and have to be re-packed into bags of twelve packets each for distribution.  I don't have the numbers on how much that group did, but it is safe to say that it is an equally staggering number to 15,000 pounds of potatoes. 

I like going to the GCFD because they are really organized with the work force, they do a great job of explaining what needs to be done and how it will help others, and most of all, you can always see the magnifying effect of your work and how a few people working together can really do an exponential amount of good.


To find out more about the opportunities at the GCFD, go to:

Greater Chicago Food Depository

Week 19 - Feed My Starving Children and Lakeview Pantry

This week we went back to Feed My Starving Children, although to a new location for us, and to our old standby, the Lakeview Pantry.  Both were great experiences, and we enjoyed both very much.

On Tueday, we drove to Schaumburg to work with Feed My Starving Children.  You may remember this organization from Week 3.  The Schaumburg location was new for us, and while it is a smaller location, with facilities that are slightly less comprehensive than the one in Aurora, we like it much better because it takes much less time to get there, especially in the evening rush.  You may recall that the goal of this organization is to bring food to the most hungry people in the world, the ones who are starving.  To that end, they have only one product they make, pack and ship.  It is a special formulation of chicken protein, dried vegetables, soy powder and rice.  When mixed with water and cooked, it makes a nutritious mush that is easy to digest and delivers all of the nutrients and calories that a child needs to survive.  As an organization, they are pretty solid.  93% of all donations go directly to providing food, with other 7% used for management and fund raising.  In 2011, they shipped 133 million meals to hungry children all over the world.   When you consider that all of the food is packed by volunteers (565,000 in 2011) and all of the food is paid for by donors, you can see that this group does a great job from beginning to end.  They also have a 99.98% success rate of their food getting to its intended recipients.  Bad weather, political strife and bad luck account for the small amount of food that does not get to the people who need it.  The organization regards this number as miraculous, and attributes their success to the fact that the donors pray over every lot of food after it has been packaged.

This time around, Jen and I volunteered to work as warehouse crew again.  Since most people come with larger groups and since the packing process requires about 4 people minimum, we tend to just take the jobs we can do without having to sneak into another group.  That said, we decided that next time, we are packing food, not warehousing.  The warehouse crew has three jobs - make boxes, keep the rice and soy boxes full at the packing tables, and pack up the full boxes and put them on a pallet.  We got to work with a nice young man named Paul who perhaps 10 or 12 years old.  He was a really nice kid and a very hard worker.  He and Jen managed the soy and rice supplies, while I picked up boxes for most of the night.  There were a bunch of boxes already made up, so we did not have to do too much of that.   The rest of the group we were working with was made up of families from church groups, except for one little clutch of high school girls that worked a table by themselves.  Because there were a lot of kids, there was a lot of energy in the room, and they packed like mad.  It was all I could do to keep up with them as they filled up the boxes.  Each box weighs about 35 pounds, so I got winded pretty quickly hauling them across the room, weighing them, taping them up and putting them on a pallet.  I calculated that in just over an hour, I moved a little over a thousand pounds about 30'.  It was fun, and a good workout, and I was spent at the end.

At the end of the evening, the staff shares some stories about FSMC and their work, makes a pitch for monetary support and show the crew how they did.  They put it on a white board that looks like this:

  We were working with a pretty small group, about 38 people.  The goal for every session is to pack one box of food for each worker present, so we did pretty well.  This food was destined to be part of a much larger shipment to Nicaragua where it is desperately needed.  Not bad for less than two hours work...

I also took a picture of the packing floor:

In the foreground, you can see the trays of materials, a funnel on a stand, a scale, and an odd looking machine on the left.  This is a heat sealer which grabs the top of the bags and seals them closed.  The bags are then placed on the table next to the sealer.  They collect them there until 36 of them are ready (enough to fill a box) and then they go into the box.  The boxes are picked up and brought to another scale to verify that the correct number of bags are in the box, then sealed and stacked on a pallet.  Each station uses five people and there are two stations per box.  This location has twelve stations to create six boxes at a time.  When they are going full force, they can pack around 75 boxes per hour.

The other stop we made this week was to work with our friends at the Lakeview Pantry.  The big news there this week was a new freezer door to replace the old one, which did not seal properly and leaked water all over the floor.  Carrie was very happy about it.  I was also encouraged to hear that the Pantry continues to add to the things it does besides give out food.  They have been doing food tasting parties that include recipes as well as supplies.  They have a book club and movie nights.  It is great to see these initiatives taking off and experiencing some success.  On the food distribution front, it was a quiet night with a small crowd.  That means we get to be a little more generous, accommodate the more choosy patrons, and chat a little more with the patrons, so it was a great night.


If you would like to find out more about Feed My Starving Children, go to:

Feed My Starving Children

If you would like to learn more about the Lakeview Pantry, go to:

Lakeview Pantry

Week 18 - Feeding America and the Lakeview Pantry

Well, as you can tell by looking at our last couple posts, we have fallen into a habit of doing more than one thing each week, and this week is no different.  Jen went to work at the Lakeview Pantry, and I looked into a new place to donate online - Feeding America.

I had seen some TV ads about Feeding America, and I actually thought that it was a government initiative, but when I looked into it, I found that it is a large, nationwide non-profit dedicated to, uh...well, feeding America.  I was impressed by the materials their site provided, because they have a lot of large corporate partners and they do a very good job of explaining their mission.  I will post some links at the bottom to easily find some of the highlights.  I was moved to give them money by two factors.  The first is that they manage to use 93% of donated funds for actual relief operations.  For a national organization, this is a pretty good number.  The second, and more potent reason is that this organization is looking for hungry people everywhere.  That may need a little explanation.

Here in Chicago, Jen and I can give to our local food bank, and we can give to the food bank that supplies all the local food banks in the city.  Giving to Feeding America will allow some of our donation to come back down through that system and wind up helping people in our neighbor hood, but it will also help people in all the vast rural areas of the country who are hungry.  The Feeding America website has some fairly shocking information about how the people who are hungry in America are not just the homeless, and not just those without jobs.  Many people have jobs, work full time, and still cannot feed their families.  A great many of these people live outside the reach of the other wonderful organizations we have worked with.  Spread all over the open spaces in this country are people in need who cannot run around the block to a food pantry because none exist.  Feeding America is working to find ways to reach these people and get them the help they need.  Included in their efforts are a series of mobile food pantries as well as a large network of partners who can help at the local level in non urban areas.

On their website, Feeding America has lots of statistical data about hunger of all kinds, but this is a highlight about rural hunger:

Rural Hunger Facts

• 14.7% of rural households are food insecure, an estimated 3 million households .
• Compared to all regions, the South continues to have the highest poverty rate among people in families with related children under 18 years living in rural areas (24.5 percent) and living in cities and suburbs (19.7 percent) .
• Among all people in female-headed families with related children under 18 years, 50.7 percent were poor in rural areas compared to 35 percent in the suburbs.

They also lay out some of the reasons why hunger is prevalent in rural areas:

• Employment is more concentrated in low-wage industries
• Unemployment and underemployment are greater
• Education levels are lower
• Work-support services, such as flexible and affordable child care and public transportation, are less available
• The rural marketplace offers less access to communication and transportation networks and offers companies less access to activities that foster administration, research and development.
• The fact that so many people need to turn to a food bank or church pantry just to eat in the very same communities where the food is raised is a sad reminder of how much more needs to be done.

After looking over their information, it was an easy call to send some money their way.  I can only hope that some of their initiatives make it to Tuba City (week 13).

Jen also had an interesting time at the Pantry this week.  I was feeling under the weather, and decided not to go, which was OK because all the spots for work were full, or so we thought.  As it turned out, they were short some people and it turned out to be a crazy night.  It was very busy and some less-than-sober guests spilled beer all over the floor.  Now, the Pantry is pretty small, and a puddle anywhere would snarl up traffic pretty seriously.  Jen jumped right in and cleaned up the beer, but the whole night left here exhausted.  On top of all of that, she had to make her way home from the el stop in the middle of a hail storm.  Needless to say, she was not in a great mood when she got home.  We are both going back there this week, and I am hoping for a less eventful night.

To take a quiz about hunger in America from the Feeding America website, click HERE

To find out general information about Feeding America, including how to donate, go to:

Feeding America

For information on the Lakeview Pantry, go to:

Lakeview Pantry