Week 47 - Common Pantry

This week we returned to out friends at Common Pantry, where we have not been for a little while.  As it turns out, we had volunteered to work on the busiest day of their year, the day before Thanksgiving.

As you would expect, donations were up in a serious way this week, and most of it had a Thanksgiving bent.  Local Jewel stores donated 68 full turkeys to the pantry, and they also got a few more from private donors.  In addition, they had lost of cans and boxes of all the necessary trimmings - stuffing, potatoes, vegetables, etc.  It made for a very busy and very successful day of distribution.

Scott, the pantry's manager, told me that they had basically been distributing all day, which is not that unusual since they do an afternoon and evening session every Wednesday.  What was unusual was the number of families they served, which was something the neighborhood of 110 families.  Every family of three or more got a turkey and a holiday bag with stuffing, vegetables, and potatoes and gravy.  They also got a holiday pie, either pumpkin or apple, along with the rest of the regular rations for the week. The smaller families still got the holiday stuff - they just got a different meat instead.  It worked out just right so that the number of turkeys and the number of families who needed them was the same.

Jen got to the pantry first and got assigned to work on distribution, so she got to be a part of the frenzy.  She was in charge of the meat and pies and gravy, so much so that she wound up with one tub of gravy dumped all over her.  She is a trooper though, and kept right on going.  I got there a little later due to some terrible traffic and, after fighting my way through the distribution area, spent the night cleaning up the back room of the pantry.  This room is also the Sunday school classroom for the adjacent church while also serving as a makeshift warehouse area for the pantry.  The room was full of food at the beginning of the day, but was down to a manageable level by the time I got there.  We moved food around, re-packed it from boxes in to crates, (more stack-able) and generally cleaned the whole place.  We spent a good deal of time going through huge boxes of donated plastic bags, trying to find the ones that were still usable and discarding the ones that were ripped, torn, or nasty.  It was a very zen task - all hands and no mind, but my coworkers and I had fun making conversation while we worked.  At the end of the night, it looked like a classroom again, which was very satisfying.

As always, we had a great night of work and really enjoyed the staff and our coworkers throughout the evening.

Before I sign off for the week, I do want to offer, as so many do at this time of year, a quick thought about thankfulness.  This (almost a) year of work has shown us a few new things to be thankful for.  The first and most obvious is the opportunity to help.  We are blessed to have our own needs provided for well enough to be able to spare some time and resources to help others.  This one is evident to us every day, and Jen and I are pretty constantly thankful for our good fortune.  The aspect that is slightly less obvious is that we are also thankful for the people who need the help.  It seems a little gruesome to be thankful for that, because what we really wish is that no one needed help - that everyone had enough.  But we are thankful nonetheless.  The people in need have gotten Jen and I out of our house and into the world, connecting with hundred of wonderful people we would not have known otherwise.  Those people in need show us something wonderful  in ourselves and in humanity at large. They give us the opportunity to help build the world up with our own hands, and get to see the good our hands have helped to make.  As many have said before, they help us, in the most real way I know of, to see the face of God.  I am not an overly religious man, and questions the nature and existence of god almost every day, but when I am least doubting is when I am looking at the grateful face of someone to whom I have just given their dinner.  This work we do feeds our souls as much as it feeds their bodies, and so I am thankful for who need help.  Their need helps us touch the divine.

Have a Happy Thanksgiving!

For more information about Common Pantry, click HERE.

Week 46 - Toys for Tots

Well, it is the week before Thanksgiving, and it seems to be the unofficial start of the giving season.  People are starting to keep track of the things they are thankful for, and to consider ways to make sure others have something to be thankful for as well.  It is the time of year when Jen and I would usually say to ourselves, "Boy, it has been a while since we donated or volunteered...  We should get some food for a food drive or something..."  This year is different, of course, thanks to Our Giving Year, but we still find ourselves even more interested in giving as this time of year comes around.  We have a number of friends who want to volunteer with us, so we are booking multiple sessions each weeks in December, and we are realizing that we have some groups that we wanted to donate to, but may run out of weeks in which to do it, assuming we limit ourselves to a single year.  (We are not, of course going to do that... Giving is now a habit for us and we will keep it up in the years to come.)  The places we volunteer are also filling up with "seasonal" volunteers.  I bring all this up only to point out a couple things:

First, now IS the time to give.  It is cold, and the people who needed help before need even more now.  And it is the time when we celebrate, in whatever way we choose, the solidarity of humankind.  Now is the time of year when we are reminded that there is far more that unites us than divides us.  This season shows us the struggle, the difficultly in loving our neighbors, and it shows us the rewards for doing so.  We are given the bitter cold to remind us of loneliness  and that solidarity is hard to achieve, and we are given the warmth of giving and receiving from our loved ones to remind us that it is worth striving for.  The people Jen and I have met throughout our work this year are the ones who sometimes only feel the cold, the loneliness, the outside-ness.  If you have any inkling to help these people, do it now so that they can get a measure of what the holidays are meant to bring - inclusion and warmth, both physical and spiritual.

The second thing is that we are winding down.  There are only six weeks left in the year and so only six weeks left in Our Giving Year.  As I mentioned above, we still have a lot to do and and plenty to report about after.  We have stepped up to the season, and we are planning to visit pretty much all of our favorite places to work, as well as giving to a couple more organizations.  It is going to be a fun, busy holiday season and a fitting end to this year long experiment.  Jen and I are different people that when we started, and so in addition to describing our work in these last few weeks, I am also going to reflect a little on what we have learned and what it means for us in the future.  I will try to keep these ramblings short, but it seems appropriate to examine where this journey has taken us.

Which bring us along to this week...  This was a busy week at the theater, so it was a donation week for us.  We struggled a little to find an organization to whom to donate because we are now bombarded by requests, as I have mentioned before.  We know that we don't have a lot of weeks left, so we started talking about the holiday season and about organizations that have some meaning for us already.  Jen brought up Toys for Tots.  I have given to Toys for Tots before when I saw a toy drive going on, but I did not have a very personal connection to the group.  Jen, it turns out, does.

When she was young, Jen has very clear and very fond memories of taking toys to a pickup site in on the south side of Chicago.  Toys for Tots is run by the US Marine Corps, but is strongly supported by many of the motorcycle clubs here in Chicago.  The clubs have Toys for Tots parades and toy drives, where they drive their bikes around, in full regalia, to collect toys and raise awareness.  Jen has fond and funny memories of large, heavily bearded guys on Harleys driving around with teddy bears and dolls.  For her, these memories are a part of the holiday season - a part of what Christmas means for her, and so she wanted to make sure we gave to them as part of this year.

So we did just that.  They have a great website which allows you to donate to the organization as a national whole, or to Toys for Tots groups specific to your area.  They are a 97%- 3% charity, which means that only 3% of the money received goes to administration and fund raising.  The rest goes directly into buying and distributing toys.  They collect new and unwrapped toys from October into December and then hand them out in time for Christmas.  Their stated goals are:

"to help less fortunate children throughout the United States experience the joy of Christmas; to play an active role in the development of one of our nation’s most valuable resources – our children; to unite all members of local communities in a common cause for three months each year during the annual toy collection and distribution campaign; and to contribute to better communities in the future."

While we like to help people get enough to eat, at this time of year, we also like to help kids have a happier Christmas, so Toys for Tots was a natural choice.

For more information on Toys for Tots, click HERE.

Weeks 43, 44 and 45 - Lakeview Pantry and Top Box

Well, we have to call it a habit now.  Posting only once every three weeks is a habit...  I am hoping to do better as we look to close out the year, but for now, I have updates and a new organization!

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.