For two of the past three weeks, Jen and I went to the Lakeview Pantry, one of our absolute favorite places to work. We had a night that was slow and pretty easy, and another night where the place was fast and furious. We brought in some clothes we collected for their "goodwill" area, and I fixed the latch on an interior door in their cargo van. We met new friends and got to work again with the old ones. Carrie, the site administrator has been training her new assistant, Elizabeth, to run distribution sessions, and so Elizabeth ran the show for both of our recent work calls. She is still learning the ropes about how to be loud and confident in a room full of patrons, but she is dedicated and did a great job with the recent busy night. Also, Carrie gave me a Pantry T-shirt, which was nice. In short, our time there was everything we have come to expect, and we feel like we are part of the team when we are there. I have made a proper pitch in a while, but if you have any thoughts about volunteering at a pantry, I highly recommend either site that Lakeview Pantry operates. They are a great group of people and they are doing a whole lot of good.
The most interesting part of the last couple weeks was two weeks ago when we volunteered with a new organization, Top Box Foods. This is a new group to us, but also a new group in general, only having been operating since May of this year. The mission of the group and the story of its origin are both pretty cool.
About a year and half a go, Chris Kennedy, son of the late senator Robert F. Kennedy, stepped down as president of the Merchandise Mart here in Chicago. He was an unmitigated success in the world of business, but he was tired of the corporate world and the greed that permeates it. He took a year to decide on a new direction and formulate his new business model - a non-profit designed to bring real, healthy, fresh food to people who did not have ready access to it. He called it Top Box Foods and it opened in May of this year.
In Chicago, as in other places, there exist "food deserts" - places where there is a lack of income and of decent grocery stores, but plenty fast food restaurants. People in these places cannot not afford to buy healthy food, and even if they could, they cannot travel by public transit to get it, or haul it home. Top Box gathers up food from many sources and packages it into a variety of different purchase options. The boxes include real meats, fish, fruits and vegetables. Most of the food is uncooked, but some boxes include heat and serve meals. The most popular is the family box, which is meant to feed a family of four for a week of dinners. The box includes 17 pounds of food, and comes complete with a pie for dessert. That box, containing something like 28 meals, sells for $36. Other boxes sell for as low as $19 and all of them are a much better deal than the average grocery store in Chicago. That covers the affordable part.
Now for the accessible part... Since a big part of the problem is that the families who need this food don't live in a place where they can get it, Top Box had to find a way to bring the food to where it was needed. To do that, the company has created a network of host sites, partnering with churches, community groups, and food pantries. The host site helps publicize the products which Top Box offers and helps to collect the orders. Then, once a month, Top Box sends a truck to each host site loaded with the boxes that have been ordered. Patrons come to the site (a place to which they were most likely already going for one reason or another) and they pay for and pick up the food. Payment can be made with cash, check, credit card or food stamps. The cost of the boxes covers the logistics of getting the food and packing it. The price also includes a 5% donation which goes to the host site to help defer the costs of working with Top Box and to help forward their own programs. It is these site visits which use volunteers, to help process patron orders and help put the actual boxes in the hands of the patrons.
Jen and I worked with Top Box at a Methodist church in Evanston where there is also a food pantry. The day we helped was the first time that Top Box was delivering at this site, so there was some confusion. The pantry served a great many people, and in an effort to stay out of the way of their activities, we set up the Top Box station on the other side of the building. That meant that there needed to be some people directing the patrons who had made orders to where they could pick them up. As it turns out, this is the job Jen and I would up with. While the rest of the volunteers worked outside, we sat at a table in the lobby of the pantry talking to patrons and perspective customers. Since it was the first time there, a lot of people had not heard about Top Box, so we got to do a lot of talking. The result from our listeners was overwhelmingly positive. Everyone who heard about it wanted in. There were even some people with suggestions about additional host sites. We referred those people to the staff outside, because it seems like there is strong interest by the Top Box leadership in expanding coverage as quickly as possible.
As a bonus, we also got to meet Chris Kennedy. He came by to see how things were going, and was very nice. You can see by the look in his eyes that he sees how big this could be. A report in the Tribune mentions that he has plans to take Top Box nationwide if possible, which seems like a great idea. We have seen so many people who desperately need any food at all, but Kennedy is looking at the millions more who just need a little help. If food costs a little less, then they can give a little more to their kids in the way of clothes or books or shoes. If healthy food is affordable more kids can be spared the burden of being overweight from the start. Top Box represents that little bit of help that can make the difference in life changing from unbearable to tolerable. Rather than bringing a lot of help to a few people, the way a pantry or a shelter does, this could bring a little help to thousands upon thousands of people, and could make a tangible dent in hunger and poor nutrition in America. We loved helping out, and are overwhelmingly inspired by the possibility of this idea.
Part of the promotional materials we handed out were small pages that showed what comes in each box. I snapped some pictures of those pages and they are shown below.
To read the Chicago Tribune article about Chris Kennedy and Top Box, click HERE.
To learn more about Top Box Foods, click HERE.
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