Hunger is always perceived as a hyper-local issue. Smaller scale cash donors within a city or town in your service area are often very concerned that their dollars are spent for food within that community. They don’t want it to go to those folks fifty miles away who might as well be in a whole other universe. We might consider this as a parochial attitude and believe that these people don’t see the bigger picture like we do.
But, what if they’re right?
What if we’re so obsessed with total impact / poundage / meal gaps and systemic change that we can’t focus on the type of grass roots neighborhood level work which can be truly successful and sustainable?
Laying our own astroturf has been easier but this stuff grows!
That’s someone else’s job, right? A partner agency who can get into the weeds while we keep that big food machine humming. But we used to say that about a lot of things, like SNAP outreach or nutrition education. I’ve also always been concerned that we’re accidentally creating a ‘new norm’ of food security in that people will get increasingly used to saying: “Yes, of course I’m food secure, because I can go to this pantry on this day and then that pantry on the other day.”
No kind of security.
In Santa Barbara, we are ready to pilot ‘Healthy Neighborhood’ programs designed to be sustainable local solutions to food security and food literacy at the micro level. They represent the next step in the (occasionally painful) realization that we can’t make or keep a community food secure by only working with those who most need our services.
Ouch, what did I just say?
Do you think we have resources to just spray around? Unlike you, we’re not in ritzy Santa Barbara with sun and sand and aging movie stars. We live in the real world and we have to concentrate resources on those most in need.
Someone just out of the picture is filling in their SNAP application. We serve one in four of the population.
Yes, I get that perception, but we are a medium-sized food bank with a modest $4 million cash budget where cash is always tight. It would be easy for us to walk away from such an approach, but we can’t. Let me make clear that our food resources unquestionably go only to those who really need them. But educational and community building resources are going to have to be offered wider than that. Those that can pay will pay or subsidize others. While this creates short-term financial pain, it will also broaden and deepen the donor base and introduce new perceptions of the organization as a good for everyone in the community, not just those ‘disadvantaged others.’ (aka ‘the needy,’)
Consequently, Foodbank of Santa Barbara County’s Healthy Neighborhoods Initiative marks a major pivot in approach, transitioning our work in neighborhoods of high poverty and food insecurity from a client-based to a family-based model. This initiative is designed to bring together a whole neighborhood of families in the effort to build a resilient and nutritionally healthy community, where food and health become the focus for community engagement, education and economic development.
You don’t have to build it for them to come. There’s plenty of buildings sitting there.
Each pilot will be based around key physical locations, operating as Community Food Access Centers, which are place-based, food-centric neighborhood revitalization efforts, uniting multiple educational, nutrition and community development functions. These centers will have a family-based focus. You may be familiar with The Stop in Toronto Canada. At this stage of the initiative’s evolution we don’t have the luxury of building one of these or utilizing a facility just for this purpose, so we have to make use of existing places with their own range of activities – community centers, schools etc.
Initially, the center will only operate one day a week, but it will be intensive. Food and age-appropriate education will be provided for the whole family to attend at a time convenient to them. Childcare and basic food literacy training will be provided for young children; culinary skills will be provided for teens. Education will be culturally as well as age appropriate.
Though there is one day per week where education and services are focused, other satellite activities will happen at other times. There will be regular communication across a number of media and communication platforms to keep the neighborhood informed and involved in the effort. Centers in targeted neighborhoods will provide low-income families with a specific place to go, where people that you know and trust will be teaching and learning with you. The idea is to break the cycle of poverty and food insecurity by including all generations; they will also work to channel partner services in a more culturally-appropriate and culturally-tailored manner, in an environment in which families and neighborhoods feel comfortable coming together and learning with each other.
Providing the life-blood of the Community Food Access Centers and supporting community involvement are neighborhood networks of volunteers – Nutrition Advocates – that provide bi-lingual peer-to-peer education, empowering community members to improve their health. Food-related programs offer the “idea bridge” for others to provide skills and knowledge training.
Other elements of this strategy are:
Small Food Business Incubator – Encouraging entry into local food economy by providing business, food safety and marketing training to Nutrition Advocates and food entrepreneurs, and the opportunity to develop small businesses.
Food as MedicinePrograms – Diabetes Education/ nutrition education/diabetes specific food support programs.
This approach builds on existing geographically local impact groups that we have been working on for the last couple of years and the relationships that have come out of them.
Collective impact projects come and go. Funding comes and goes. The idea here is to find a low-risk approach, because it involves empowering the community to help itself. Networks and relationships will grow, increasing community cohesiveness and requiring less outside stimulus.
Ultimately, a neighborhood approach does not rely on the desire to help ‘others’ but on the practical need to help ‘each other,’ by living in a neighborhood where mutual support to obtain and keep good health reframes how people engage with each other. This is incredibly challenging to our ‘big’ way of operating, but it is also exciting, representing the opportunity for a much more inclusive and empowering approach to our work, and the opportunities for new approaches to how we fund that work.
I’ll let you know how we get on.
In the meantime, why don’t you consider taking a walk and building food security street by street.
In the first of an occasional look at how issues of poverty affect our ability to move people from hunger into health, I consider the Bridges Out of Poverty model in an interview with Debora McDermed who teaches and facilitates the ‘Bridges’ work being done through the Northern Nevada Food Bank in Reno. What use is Bridges to us? How does it work? Does it function best as a simple set of language tools or as a community-wide effort? Does this bridge lead us somewhere or is it really just a culturally insensitive set of labels which only helps further stigmatize people? Read on and find out…
First, apologies for the hiatus. This blog took a break for the last couple of months of 2013, partially because it is the crazy season for food banks. The other reason is that this isn’t a blog that features my knee-jerk reactions to the burning issues of the day like gun control (for that go here), but rather a blog with an educational focus on meaty subjects of current concern in the ‘Health into Hunger’ sphere.
Like Poverty.
In our world we love the ‘F’ word (food); there are even fans of calling people the ‘N’ word (needy) – but whatever you do, don’t mention the ‘P’ word (poverty).
I have been in rooms with dedicated, caring management teams from food banks, where mentioning fighting poverty is like waving a silver cross in front of a vampire. The fear level about this issue is huge: ‘that’s not our concern…it’s mission drift…our donors would hate it…let’s just stick to being the good guys saving the day with the big trucks of food.’
This trepidation extends beyond the food bank world. You can see it in the messaging of an organization like ‘Share Our Strength’ that is focusing on child hunger, with the mantra that ‘we may not be able to tackle poverty, but we can at least make sure that no kid goes hungry.’
My own viewpoint is that food banks cannot escape facing up to wider issues of poverty and how they impact our work. Unless we’re in this just to have long-term job security and to look good at Christmas, then we have to say we have had enough of the current status quo – a national state of rampant malnutrition which continues to weaken the health of our communities. That means we are going to have to deal with poverty to some degree or other.
Most service providers would acknowledge that they have to not only ‘feed the line’ but to do something to ‘shorten the line,’ yet addressing poverty rarely figures in these plans. You would think that poverty is the most tangible thing in the world – you can see it and smell it and touch it – yet when we want to do something about it then it becomes some nebulous mist that seems to slip away from the grasp.
There seems little shared agreement about either its causes and its cures. Consequently it joins the increasing number of subjects – such as immigration and gun control that become too uncomfortable to talk about – and therefore must be placed in some ‘no go zone’ of polite national discourse.
How does Bridges Out of Poverty enter into this discussion? It is a series of training modules designed for individuals in poverty (the ‘Getting Ahead’ course) and for communities or organizations (Bridges Strategy and Applying Concepts courses) that seek to create a framework of common understanding about why people get trapped in poverty and which offers some ways in which both individuals and their communities can move out of poverty.
Now, of course, when you have such a wide-reaching set of social concepts arising from a single person (and one presenting very modest research or epidemiological evidence, and whose trainings are sold through copyrighted trainings and books) two things are going to happen:
The Academic Community Responds.
1. The academic community will go ape shit in their desire to expose and condemn this heretic who has dared skip the years of longitudinal studies and research to say a lot of things which in the end are only backed up by their belief in their own experience and intuition, rather than in a long history of published research. And there are certainly Bridges opponents out there. Here’s a good broadside. Bridges would argue that a lot of these critiques typically focus only on the framework and not how the framework is actually used and adapted within communities.
2. He/She who is condemned for their theories will also collect adherents– people looking for simple solutions to complex problems. These supporters will say that you need to charge ahead with what your gut tells you and not wait for some kind of historical validation, especially with such a pressing concern as poverty.
So, where does that leave the rest of us? We are not academic snobs but we also want to be sure that a new approach follows the doctor’s oath of ‘Primum no nocere’ or ‘First, do no harm’ and ensure that this will not make the situation worse.
Debora McDermod
I did some research into the Bridges work and met with Food Bank of Northern Nevada CEO, Cherie Jamason (who has spearheaded the uptake of Bridges in Reno) and Debora McDermed of The Vertical Dimension Consulting who runs the programs. Subsequently I invited Debora to present a workshop on Bridges at our annual Agency Leaders Summit.
2012 Agency Conference
Her presentation was a huge hit and seemed to touch a nerve with a lot of people from agencies who felt that this work was communicating something that they had believed at some level but never been able to put into words about the challenges they faced with their clients and that it offered some interesting tools for them to try on.
There’s a two-hour presentation, which is an overview. That’s ideal for CEO’s or business people who just want to get the gist. They don’t necessarily want to come to the training. Then, there is a two-day training. The first day considers what is Bridges and what does it mean and why would you be interested in it? How could you immediately put it to use? Day two looks at the tools and the techniques. The two-day version is designed primarily for service providers who want to interact with the client differently or they want to try some new program designs. This training can also be done from an institutional or community point of view. We have run courses for the healthcare, educational and judicial communities. How can these ideas help you be more effective with the client group you are working with. (Here is the flyer from a recent Bridges training conducted by Santa Cruz Food Bank) Bridges Out of Poverty 2012 Flyer
‘Getting Ahead’ is an intense program for participants who want to transition out of poverty. They meet for about two hours a week or somewhere between 10 and 16 weeks depending on the group. They learn the same thing that Bridges trainers learned in the two-day course, except they’re investigating it much more thoroughly. They look at how does poverty occur for them and their family. What are the societal influences in poverty? What are their personal individual influences? It’s really very rigorous.
As to community, once a number of trainings have taken place with different groups, often someone will say: “We need this in a big way for what we’re trying to do.” And so then the program can have a wider community focus. That’s what happened in Reno.
I think Bridges is a long-term vision but it has some short-term gratification. BridgesModel_HardDifferentiators You’re not going to end the poverty in five years. But there is something you can do immediately which I think gives people on the ground tools and techniques and ideas to implement. The training answers a lot of questions that people have never been able to find answers to around why it is so hard to help people make behavior change. I think people are invigorated by that. Poverty is defined by a lack of resources, and the USA is a country that is has severe income disparity as defined by the GINI index. Countries with this great disparity have real problems with upward mobility, hence the need for approaches like Bridges.
You mentioned about changing people’s behavior. How much of this change has to be down to the individual, and how much does the community or society have to change? Where is the line?
These are hard questions.
Sorry. This is such a thorny area, there aren’t many easy questions.
Individual change begins to happen because the program that we facilitate for people who want to transition out of poverty gives them a voice. It’s not a program that’s designed for them. It’s a program that they designed to build their own resources. That creates more ownership, more autonomy, more buy-in. Systemic change is obviously harder. It looks at the way we organize bureaucratic and administrative things to see if it actually enhances people’s ability to take responsibility or if we’re actually putting processes in place that continue to keep them stuck. The community pieces of our program identifies what the barriers are in each community – and they’re going to be different. Some communities have great public transportation. Some have none.
I checked my watch. The bus is due in like 8 months.
What barriers do we as a community need to tackle that would prevent people moving to sustainability over a period of 18 to 24 months. Can they get a job? Can they get transportation? Can they get childcare? Can they get on their feet in that period of time? Or is the community set up such that it will take much longer than this. This process shows what the individual needs to change and what the community needs to change to be able to facilitate this.
What about the blame game? Some want to heap all the blame on the individual and some want to heap it all on society. Can Bridges help with this?
I think so, because this training goes down well with those on both the political right and the left. The right likes it because it makes people accountable. The left likes it because it says it’s not all their fault and we need to make changes to bring mobility back to the United States so that people can move from their economic strata like they once could. It’s a very current, hot conversation when I’m talking to those people because I can talk about rebuilding the middle class. But I should stress that Bridges is not about making people ‘middle class,’ it is about people being able to create stability and build resources. And Bridges isn’t a program brought in from the outside, but a set of ideas. This is why Bridges and Getting Ahead are being used in Australia, Canada, Slovakia, Czech Republic etc and Detroit, Pensacola, Menominee Nation, Appalachia, etc.
Let’s talk in more detail about how the ‘Getting Ahead’ program works.
The first thing participants do is they draw a mental model of what their life looks like right now. (We have them draw because we don’t want to inhibit anyone who doesn’t read or write well.) Then, they identify those factors in their life that are affecting them dramatically. If they’re a single parent; if they are recovering or not yet recovering from substance abuse; are they dealing with the judicial system? These mental models help them build rapport with the facilitator. We call the person who teaches the course the ‘co-investigator.’ It’s not a hierarchical model.
Jose’s mental model sent him straight to the head of the class
We sit at the table with them and say we’re going to investigate the situation, your life and the situation in the community and see what is possible. They start with their own life. The theory of change that Bridges uses says that when you are in poverty, you are in the concrete virtually all the time. We call that the ‘tyranny of the moment.’ Therefore, this makes it much harder to do the abstract thinking which is where all of your planning, and many of your good decisions come from. This might include thinking such as If I spend this money on a plasma TV, I can’t go to the dentist. People in poverty, particularly generational poverty may have never learned how to do abstract thinking. We teach them how you can live in the concrete and think in the abstract. This helps them begin to step back and look at their life and analyze what’s going on and what to do about it. That’s very powerful for people. It’s also very painful. I had one person say, after they looked at their mental model, they said, “Wow, poverty really sucks.” But they were so busy just trying to eat, have shelter, some kind of job that they didn’t really have time to step back and look at it and go, “What new possibilities could I generate?”
Well, we found that one, anyway…
Then, they have a lot of environmental influences like family members and neighbors who are all in the same boat who might live in ‘invisible communities,’ so they don’t know any people who could provide a different kind of help and assistance. Over a series of time, they also investigate societal change and influences. What are the societal influences that have kept people in poverty? What are the hidden rules of class? What does the middle class know that I don’t know? If I knew that, would I behave differently?
We do a lot of work in language skills, because they might habitually speak in what is called ‘casual register’ which is all about relationships and survival. It doesn’t work very well for job interviews or with a judge, or your kid’s teacher, where ‘formal register’ will be more effective. People can get marginalized because they might seem to speak disrespectfully or inappropriately. They start to learn about all the things they need to do to be able to cross this bridge. The course we run is not the end. When they graduate from it, they’ve developed a list of resources both personal and community that can help them move forward. They can’t magically change everything at once so they might decide to work on finance or emotional health.
Then, we encourage a community structure that is there to assist you when you have finished the ‘Getting Ahead’ program. Graduates are invited to meet monthly with allies, people that are wanting to understand how to make this a better community for all. We don’t call them mentors. We don’t call them coaches. We call them allies. This meeting is monthly and it is a partly social, partly educational gathering. Graduates can stay in it for 18 to 24 months past the course. They start to lead those sessions over time. They start to talk about their experiences and share with other people that are trying to transition. So, we build a network for them which can take them to the next level. They don’t have to join if they don’t want to. It’s available to them. So far, we haven’t had anybody not want to do it.
Poverty can be a lifelong challenge. For instance, one of the people who came up to me after your agency workshop who has a job and is living in a $2100 a month condo – which I guess is not hard to do in Santa Barbara. He came from poverty, raised in poverty, and even though he is now out of poverty, he said to me, “I’m haunted everyday of my life that I’m going to end up back there.” What comes out of the wider community support is that people start to get to know each other. They start to understand that people in poverty are just like them. Then, they began to form alliances, when people know somebody who has a job going, and they now have someone to call. That’s social capital. We do it all the time. People in poverty don’t have that. The only kind of capital they have is bonding capital with people who are typically in the same situation as they are, perhaps not making healthy choices or good decisions.
Sometimes they’ve had to separate from some of their family members as part of the process because their family may not be supportive of them in moving ahead, getting out of poverty. There are some emotional challenges that happen along the way, and that’s why we do the emotional resiliency piece within the training. When you start to change, not everybody around you likes it. This doesn’t stop people getting hopeful and positive. They know what they can do. They understand how to build and where to start. They understand how hard it’s going to be, and that we are in tough economic times but they have a place to start.
Why do you think that food banks are well-positioned to get involved in something like Bridges?
Food banks serve so many different agencies and clients in communities that they can act as ‘honest brokers’ in the communities. It is also an effective way for them to work to ‘shorten the line’ of clients. It’s also fun to work with people in a resource-based way versus a need-based way. I think we’re excited that we’re helping people build resources for sustainability. We’re not just giving them something to get through the week with.
What about the food banks that are getting very concerned about drifting from their mission or getting into an area where some of their donors or their board are going to freak out at them by being involved in issues of poverty.
A process of education is often required for the food bank board. In Reno, we happen to have a board chair who is a businessman. He doesn’t want to keep raising money to feed the same people every year. He wants to find a way to help people move out of the need for our services. The logic of it then, from a bottom line point of view can be very appealing. It also involves being a leader in the community in a new way.
It is also be a way of making a difference in a measurable way quite quickly. We can count the number of people we’re educating. We can count the number of people graduating our ‘Getting Ahead’ program. We can count what happens to our graduates as they begin to move on. it’s a win-win. You can lower your food procurement dollars, and you can increase sustainability in the community.
I will tell you on that the fundraising side, the funders for our Bridges work are not people that were funding the food bank before. We’re finding a lot of new funders who are interested in capacity building. They were not interested in needs-based money. There’s been no adulteration of the food bank dollars. In some cases, the same people who donate to the food bank now also give to Bridges. Like Wells Fargo Bank and Charles Schwab. They say, “Yes, we’ll still continue to give for a food distribution program, but we’re also really interested in what happens to these people in the community as they began to grow.”
I believe in a previous conversation you talked about the ‘hidden rules’ about food distribution. Would you to clarify what you mean about that?
With people in poverty, their view of food is all about scarcity and ‘having enough’. People will hoard food. They will take more than they need. This is because of scarcity being the primary focus. It doesn’t have to be good food or be cooked well. It doesn’t have to be nourishing or healthy. But there has to be enough of it. In middle class norms, people may care more about how things taste and look. With food distribution programs, those running them often care most about fairness. So you can see how these two things are going to rub up against each other, because both groups are not necessarily able to compensate for the other’s perspective.
If we have a situation where someone takes more than their allocation, then there is a breakdown in the relationship. There is agitation from the volunteer around fairness and agitation from the client around scarcity. I did a volunteers training at the Reno Food Bank. They were having these type of problems and the volunteers were pretty cranky! After they had the training, they tried some new things that they came up with on their own. There was a much better result meaning people didn’t hoard.
Give me an example of some of the things that they changed.
They changed the order in which they gave out food. People would always get there early, and they would be the same people every week. If you came later and were at the back of the line, sometimes you didn’t get anything. Now sometimes they start at the back of the line or in the middle. The second thing we did was ask the clients how they could improve the situation. The Bridges construct says that you give people in poverty a chance to be a problem-solver. You don’t solve the problem for them. The clients developed a way of trading food at the site. Somebody didn’t want bread. Somebody else wanted two cans of tuna fish, whatever. They figured it out themselves. They were happy with the result. The food bank distribution people were shocked. That’s what happened. There was a little lessening of control, but it worked to everyone’s benefit.
Deb, thanks for sharing some of your work.
THE EPILOGUE…
To move forward the Bridges work, Santa Barbara County Foodbank will be holding a two-day training with member agencies in the first half of this year. We will also look at pairing it with a cultural awareness training component. The Bridges concept of living in the ‘tyranny of the moment’ is fascinating (because we’ve all at least vacationed there…) and so are some of the observations about poverty class vs. middle class thinking in certain areas.
There are so many great things about Bridges. But what of the current challenges I see with Bridges? I would put them in two areas. The first is the ‘class’ labeling that is used extensively, with the intention of moving people from one class outlook to another. I could see that it might be hard to avoid people feeling inferior. There are the potential dangers of what is called ‘classism’, which is prejudice or discrimination based on social class.
Why were people giving him so much trouble about the new Food Bank org chart???
I was brought up in England which had its own obsession with class, which was very clear and on the surface. People opened their mouths and you knew what the deal was. In America, it is more subtle. Money can reveal, but money can also obscure.
I do find the Bridges focus on making everyone middle class a little challenging sometimes as if the middle class has all the answers. I mean if the middle class is so smart why does it seem to be steadily being annihilated through financial genocide…just a thought, folks!
I think Bridges advocates might respond that it is more a process of getting people to look at how the world is working now, to look under the hood at the engine and get a new understanding that will benefit them as they make changes that they feel the need to.
There are some lousy murals of Cesar Chavez, but this is the worst!
The other challenge is culture. Currently, from the small amount I have seen, the program is not very well culturally attenuated. So, within the Latino community for instance, there are many very powerful tools and relationships that help people get by in life through mutual and extended family and community support. A lot of ‘middle class white’ families might give up some of their advantages for grandma living next door to watch the kids. (I know I would!)
There is also more solidity around community development and small scale inter-community investment, both with cash and sweat equity. I have no doubt that as the Bridges program develops further within Latino communities that it will be adapted to better suit a different cultural reality, and that some elements can be accepted and others rejected.
In an upcoming post, we will look at non-profit community development and empowerment programs that use different models – such as the Just Communities program here in Santa Barbara County.
This is an exciting field, because we are getting away from a fixation on scarcity which seems to breed more scarcity, and we are empowering people to generate more. I know I sound like some kind of infomercial dude telling you to ‘generate abundance.’ Or maybe I am. Give me a better tan and a toupee and I would be glad to shill for ‘generating sufficiency’ and ‘generating sustainability.’
I encourage you to investigate the Bridges approach. It is an imperfect tool, but one that is being developed and improved in communities across the country. There is no ‘silver bullet’ (just like with gun control, as Joe Biden said – he does know how to say just the wrong thing at the wrong time, doesn’t he!) At the very least Bridges is an interesting filter for individuals,organizations and agencies to look at the world through and ask: “Does this do anything to help me see more clearly? Or “Can I combine this with some other initiative to provide a culturally and community appropriate set of tools and pathways out of poverty and into a healthy, sustainable community?”
If you were an old timer like me who came of age in the 80’s, but were painfully hip then, you will remember how the musical group ‘Gang of Four’ put it.
Previously in these pages we have questioned whether some of what we do to help clients through our distributions and programs might actually be having a negative effect on the long term health and independence of those clients. Earlier this year I interviewed Jan Poppendieck about her book Sweet Charity, which addressed some of these concerns.
Today on ‘From Hunger to Health’ provide a review of another book, Toxic Charity by Robert Lupton, ED of Focused Community Strategies (FCS) a respected community development organization operating in inner-city Atlanta.
Bob Lupton
The book was published last year, and this piece also draws elements from an interview with the author that took place this week.
What does it say to you?
Let’s start out with a little Rorschach test on your attitudes to our work. How does the following quote land with you?
Give once and you elicit appreciation;
Give twice and you create anticipation;
Give three times and you create expectation;
Give four times and it becomes entitlement;
Give five times and you establish dependency.
Does it piss you off? Do you default to a stance that everyone deserves enough food therefore dependency doesn’t even come into it? Or maybe you kind of agree with it. Whatever your response, I would bet that you will find a lot to chew on in Robert Lupton’s book.
“Food in our society is a chronic poverty need, not a life-threatening one. And when we respond to a chronic need as though it were a crisis, we can predict toxic results: dependency, deception, disempowerment.”
His basic supposition is that a lot of what NPOs and churches do to assist people has a negative rather than a positive result. He is not questioning people’s motivations, but rather the unintended consequences of rightly motivated efforts. He believes that if ‘emergency’ relief does not transition to development in a timely way, then compassion becomes toxic.
Excuse for gratuitous picture of the Toxic Avenger, for those of us of a certain age, with a certain fondness for Grade Z movies.
He provides an ‘Oath for Compassionate Service,’ which is meant to be a guide to the provision of services:
The Anatomy of Giving
Lupton describes his own experience of handing out boxes of groceries from one of his church’s food pantries. He began studying the facial expressions and the how recipients seldom gave him eye contact. The body language of the recipients was head and shoulders bent slightly forward, self-effacing smiles and meek ‘thank yous.’ He observed how quickly the response to charity devolved from gratitude to expectation to entitlement. He then observed his own part in the ‘anatomy of giving.’
Step right up...
“I expected gratitude in exchange for my free gifts. I actually enjoyed occupying the superior position of giver (though I covered it carefully with a façade of humility). I noted a hidden irritation at those who voiced their annoyance when free food stocks ran low. I grew weary of filtering through half-truths and manipulative ploys as I sought to equitably dispense resources.”
After 6 years of running homeless shelter kitchens I would have to agree with Bob’s observation of the attitude he observes in himself and others. He says that doing for rather than doing with those in need is the norm. Add to it the combination of pity that can become patronizing with unintended superiority and charity becomes toxic.
Big is Bad, Small is Good
Lupton spends a good chunk of his book looking at the sometimes misconceived results of church foreign aid trips, and disempowering nature of aid to Africa, but he also provides a detailed demolition job on the work of TAP (The Atlanta Project) born out of Jimmy Carter’s desire to eliminate poverty in Atlanta prior to the 1996 Olympic Games.
JC (the other one) and MJ at a TAP Event in 1993. It almost makes your nostalgic…
This top down approach to community development spent countless millions to leave behind a situation that was actually worse at the end of it. He also looks at the Faustian bargain that was the Salvation Army’s acceptance of a mega donation from the Kroc Foundation to build huge Kroc Centers that would centralize a vast array of social services. While this is convenient for the economies of scale of the service providers, it has the effect of drawing people from miles around to access the services and so distorting the normal societal fabric of the area around.
Asset Based Community Development – The Ninja Star version
Lupton favors the Asset Based Community Development (ABCD) model (More on this in a later post) and his own organization in Atlanta operates on the smallest neighborhood by neighborhood approach. He also musters a pervasive though depressing argument about the effectiveness of microloans overseas and the reasons why they would not work in this country, except for with first generation immigrants. (He has nice things to say about ex-Feeding America CEO Vicki Escarra’s new organization, Opportunity International).
Working for Parity of Relationships is key
Lupton talks about ‘Parity vs Charity.’ That it is a very delicate undertaking to develop authentic parity between people of unequal power. But relationships built on reciprocal exchange (what he calls holistic compassion).
When Justice and Mercy Meet
Lupton identifies compassion as a powerful force, a stamp fo the divine nature within our spirits. It lies within us all – from tender child to hardened criminal – waiting for the right trigger to set it off. Mercy is a power that compels us to acts of compassion. He indicates that the Bible places equal emphasis on both mercy and justice. “He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.” (6:8, NIV)
He breaks this down:
– Act justly. Justice is fairness or reasonableness, especially in the way people are treated or decisions are made.
– Love mercy. Mercy is compassion, kindness or forgiveness shown especially to someone over whom a person has power.
“Twinned together these commands lead us to ‘holistic involvement’. Divorced, they become deformed. Mercy without justice degenerates into dependency and entitlement, preserving the power of the giver over the recipient. Justice without mercy is cold and impersonal, more concerned about rights than relationships. The addict needs both food and treatment. The young woman needs both a safe place to sleep and a way out of her entrapping lifestyle. Street kids need both friendship and jobs. Lupton identifies that mercy combined with justice creates:
– immediate care with a future plan
– emergency relief and responsible development
– short term intervention and long-term involvement
– heart responses and engaged minds
“Mercy is a door, an opening, an invitation to touch a life, to make a difference. But it is not a destination.”
I believe that this resounds heavily within our work in ‘emergency’ food provision. We know that the vast majority of what we are now dealing with is the chronic situation not the emergency one. It is time we owned up to the responsibilities and possibilities of what we are involved in.
What is the real ROI that we are seeking with our billions of pounds of food? Those who read this blog will know that I believe that this return is in terms of a huge impact on the preventative healthcare of our communities and by using food banks to leverage and co-lead community development efforts.
What is the way from here to there? How do we transition from emergency relief to development? We could do worse than follow the steps suggested by Roger Sandberg, Haiti Director of the NGO Medair. He describes a progression of three steps:
1. Relief – Responding to the initial need. (We’ve already achieved this).
2. Rehabilitation – This overlaps with the first stage. It is anything that increases the capacity of a local community enabling them to respond to future crises. (This would include nutrition education and empowerment programs that a food bank can run or champion, and I am sure you can suggest lots of other things at this point in the continuum.
Lupton promotes food bank-supported food cooperatives as a replacement for food pantries that ‘offer free food at the price of recipient’s dignity.’ The cooperatives he mentions in his book are run by Chad Hale of the Georgia Avenue Minestries.
This organization is a member of the Atlanta Community Food Bank. Co-op members pay $3 biweekly dues for $30 worth of groceries. (More on the pros and cons this approach in a later post – if anyone wants to share any experiences, that would be great).
3. Development – This overlaps the other stages too. Development work is long term. It seeks to raise the standard of living and the quality of life for a population over many years. (This corresponds to the work a food bank can do creating jobs, assisting with community organizing and partnering with coalitions to work on long-term change in service areas).
Lupton believes that currently, the food bank network as a whole still remains on the sidelines of these efforts. Many food banks have great untapped potential to be involved in community development, but are shying away from it for a number of reasons.
“Erik, I’m glad that this discussion is coming up. It is encouraging that an increasing number of food banks are reconsidering a more community developmental approach.”
It is not unfair to Lupton to say that he doesn’t necessarily have a lot of answers about what the role of food banks should be in fostering this community development approach. He is clearer on the negative effects of some of what we do now.
That means it is up to us to create this vision for ourselves, in collaboration with our communities and our member agencies.
There is a lot of potential for new ideas and scaling of existing ideas. These are exciting times to be a food banker.
AFTERWORD:I normally stir up the odd vociferous reaction to my posts, and these sometimes upset those on the political left and the right equally. This is usually an indication that I am on to something interesting in my waggling of tooth nerves. The latest post is no exception. People are way too polite it seems to leave stinging comments on the actual blog, but send me emails instead, which is a shame. I am happy for a little public pushback.
The reactions to the Toxic Charity entry largely indicate a concern that this is some kind of right-wing agenda to ‘blame the poor’ for their situation and to cut them off from help. I don’t see it this way at all. I see it more of a case of ditching kind but ineffectual low-touch help and replacing it with long term relationship and commitment to make change in the community (which is the best help of all).
I think it is one of those situations where when we touch a sensitive area, then everyone retreats to a defensive position, sensing criticism and judgment and thinking they hear the things they are expecting and dreading to hear. I’m the most sensitive, touchiest little soul there is, so I am just assuming that others are the same.
It may be very uncomfortable for people to deal with Lupton’s criticisms of things that are close to our hearts, but I think if you look into what he is recommending in its place: Asset Based Community Development, you will see that this is not some kind of harsh ‘fend for yourself’ approach, but involves us helping each other in a deeper, more lasting way.
As I get into this work, I find the default approaches of left and right to be increasingly unhelpful and out of touch with my experience of the world.
Is there a life after food banking? Apparently so. Mari Ellen Loijens worked in development for Second Harvest Foodbank in Santa Clara and San Mateo County from 2000 to 2004, and is now the Chief Philanthropic Development and Information Officer for the Silicon Valley Foundation.
Of course it is every fundraising professional’s secret fantasy to then go on to work at a foundation and give it away rather than have beg for it. (Without appreciating the challenges that go with such a responsibility). So what’s the difference between your time in the food bank looking out, and outside the food bank looking in?
When I was at the food bank, the needs were constantly growing. There was no single year where we had to feed less people than the year before, and I had a strong sense of urgency about the growing need. Now that I’m outside, it seems like it’s endless and I’m more anxious for real solutions to the issue. It’s sort of like being an emergency room doctor, and your concern is how to bandage all the wounds for those who need immediate assistance. Then when you walk outside the emergency room, you think, “How can we avoid the people going there in the first place?”
That’s a question a lot of food bankers are asking themselves. Like me, they’ve seen the capacity of food banks grow with their success at fund raising and their ability to bring more food in to their service area. This has created more ongoing demand, so it’s kind of a spiral. How do you think that food banks could get out of this demand spiral and move towards a long-term solution?
We really need to look at some policy changes. We are a very wealthy nation and the notion that we have so many people who turn to others for such a basic need is troubling. Clearly there is something wrong with a system in which many children go to school hungry.
Food banks and other nonprofits are always very reluctant about stepping into these waters, because they worry about offending donors whose political slant may lead them to believe that we are just ‘enabling’ people. How can we navigate these waters?
Want to dip your toe in…
I think that the problem is that we focus too narrowly on just food. If you only think, “I need to feed people,” and you think, “That’s my only issue,” then we’re back to the doctor in the emergency room who would be saying: “I’m trying to get people to stop bleeding, and it’s so expensive to keep using up all these wound dressings. So the solution is that we need more money for more wound dressings.” It’s a symptom he’s dealing with, not the cause. In the same way, hunger is the not cause, it is the symptom of a greater problem in our system. This comes down to something like minimum wage. Do we have a living wage? Are people able to earn enough where they live in order to take care of something as basic as food and shelter? We have got to move beyond pushing for increased SNAP (food stamp) benefits and into the bigger issues like: How do we make sure people, who are able, can earn enough money to feed themselves and their families?
So, are you saying that hunger is a symptom of the condition of poverty, or of something else?
I think poverty itself is also a symptom. I’m not a socialist or a communist. I don’t believe that everyone should make the same money, but I do believe that Americans, if asked, would say it’s wrong to have a system which forces people to constantly be in abject poverty and unable to get out of it, even if they are working hard, perhaps at multiple jobs. At some point, we are going to have to make decisions about how we pay for our beliefs and values. In the same way we are asked to make tough decisions now about taxes and how we want to pay for the things that we believe our country needs, such as roads or to provide the fire and police services that we want. In the same way, we have to ask ourselves the question: if we think it’s wrong for a child in a developing country to make a dollar a day sewing t-shirts, how are we going to provide an adequate minimum wage so that people in America who work a whole day can feed themselves and provide at the most basic level for their families?
And so how do you see the situation in America now?
I think we have an unspoken social contract in this country which prevents people from moving up out of poverty, and much of that is as a result of not have a living wage in most places. We also do not have systems in place that update the minimum wage as the cost of living modifies in an area. The systems that we do have reward the wealthy and do not help the poor. This means we have to really look at our whole social contract as a country and our value system and say, “Have we set in place laws that support the values that we claim are American?”
Bumper sticker seen outside Santa Barbara’s swankest hotel.
This is the point in the conversation where people begin to squabble about the meaning of the ‘American Dream.’ I see an unspoken fear in many donors I talk to. I would preface my comments by pointing out that these donors are caring and generous people who sincerely want to ‘pay it back’ and provide some level of support for those in need within their communities. However, they may have a voice deep within them, that reminds them how hard they had to struggle and sacrifice to get where they are, so why should they make it easy for someone else? They often don’t see the incredible daily sacrifices and struggles of those in poverty who can find no success story on the back of their struggle.
Whatever the sentiment, Uncle Sam gets pressed into service to wag that finger.
This is why food banks have been so successful, because there is a lot of interest in ameliorating the symptoms but a deep fear of taking the plunge to actually deal with the causes. Either donors are concerned that they will be heavily taxed and lose what they worked for, or they fear that the fabric of American society will change and everyone will expect things to be provided for them without working for them. Consequently they see America losing its ‘can do’ spirit of entrepreneurship and resourcefulness. The type of change that is required to actually deal with a problem is too scary. The same thing is true for issues of immigration, health care and the rest of the sad litany. This means we have to stand around with our hands tied or else harken back to some previous time in our country’s history where these problems were better hidden.
I think a new consensus for action needs to arise that returns the much-loved but threadbare teddy bears of left and right political philosophy to the nursery shelf, and for us to admit that we have grown out of them. They’ll always have a fond place in our heart they were both great in key moments at getting us to the point we are now at as a nation, but now they are getting in the way as our nation enters maturity. These security blankets are getting under foot and gridlocking our ability to do what we do best as Americans – which is to fix something in a no-nonsense straight-forward way.
“I’ve been manhandled so much, I don’t remember whether I’m Republican or Democrat.”
I know from over a decade of working to assist either the homeless or the struggling, that the amount of people sitting on their gluteus maximus and freeloading their way from society (amongst poor people, anyway) is absolutely tiny, just as the amount of people defrauding SNAP benefits is a minuscule amount in relation to the total. Are we going to allow an obsession with preventing the enabling of a few who don’t want to help themselves hold us back from making huge achievements as a country for the vast majority of Americans who work so incredibly hard?
Sounds great, we should import that stuff to America! (Cheaply, of course)
Can you imagine what greatness we could achieve as a nation if we weren’t all so consumed with fear about being able to get affordable medical help, or that we will be living in abject poverty as senior citizens? Modern free market economies are driven by so much advertising and marketing, that are showing people all the things they need to have in their lives to be happy. These forces provide a huge encouragement for people to produce more and earn more. If we can provide a counter-balancing support safety net for all Americans, it won’t extinguish this desire for more – which is equally part of the American temperament. The two can complement each other perfectly well. It’s not exactly a shining city on a hill, but it’s a workable system where we can all move forward at our own pace and to our own ability.
Forgive me for that. As a food banker, if you see a pile of pallets, then your natural inclination is to climb on top of them and start spouting off…
That’s quite all right, Erik. Keep breathing. Seriously, though, I think food banks need to get get braver about legislation. You need to move past the daily problem of feeding people, and start to collaborate with others that can focus on solutions and really start to ask the difficult questions of, “What’s the issue?” Yet for reasons that you mentioned, like when you referred to SNAP fraud, I think food banks are very afraid sometimes of moving in that area, because if you did a survey of people you feed and even one person said, “Well because I don’t feel like working.” That’s a terrible, terrible fear of food banks. Suddenly, no one might want to fund their food bank, because there is one person whose is working the system. So essentially, we are ready to punish and live in fear of that one person. Well, there is always going to be someone working the system. There are people who go to emergency rooms, because they don’t feel like paying for a doctor. We absolutely can’t set up systems to deal with that one person. We look at the big issues in our country like educations reform and how healthcare reform and you hear about those things all the time. I would love to hear our country talk about poverty reform. How we are going to help make a sweep of changes that would impact the base line of our country and help bring people who are essentially stuck because it’s impossible to move on or move out.
So, who do you think are the right people to lead this movement or does it need to come from a ground swell at a local level?
I think both. That is how the civil rights movement happened. You start with that real grass roots movement from people who are experiencing the issues and people who support those people. Then at some point you get the attention of people in a power position with legislation to be able to move those issues forward.
You mentioned that food banks are timid on the public policy front. What else do you think food banks could do to make this happen?
Well, I really like the ideas espoused in your blog about how your food bank is working on regarding entering the preventative healthcare arena. I do think that when you start to see yourself as part of a wider system rather than just an individual issue, then you are able to address bigger issues that have bigger impact. Poverty is not the root cause. People became poor for a reason. The fact that they are poor is not the issue. The fact that they became poor and can’t get out of being poor is the issue.
This requires food banks to build broad coalitions with other social service agencies in their service areas, some who may be member agencies and some who may not.
That is a challenge, because there is often reluctance for everyone to sit down and have a substantive dialogue about how do we move things forward? The subtext from non profit leaders can often be: “I don’t really want to be in a room with them. I don’t want to compete with them.”
Hey, you’ve been in some of the same rooms as me!
That’s the truth about a lot of nonprofits is they’re just completely uncomfortable with the idea of competition, and if I had the answer to this issue, I’d probably be able to save the world.
Nothing wrong with a little friendly competition.
Well, we’re non profits. Competition is way too business-like and vulgar for us, right?
Yes, you’re very sensitive souls. But, it has to start with non profits admitting it is an issue. Then I think, speaking as a funder, that there is a clear role for funders in facilitating this issue. I think it’s all power dynamics. The one with the power has the obligation. Foundations really have the obligation to reach out to the nonprofits and say, “I really want to know and I really want to understand what’s going on. Why is this collaboration and conversation not working for you? Where they don’t have to sit in front of their competitor and say what their fears are. We can ask who would you want to collaborate with and how, on what terms?” I think having an honest dialogue is what moves things forward. This sort of thing needs to occur one on one or in small groups. Large gatherings can neutralize everyone’s desire to make anything happen.
I think what you say about the competition angle is very interesting, because it’s kind of taboo to talk about nonprofits competing. To be a good non profit citizen, you can only talk in the language of shared impact and collaboration. It might be very liberating for people to also have a conversation about competition and to say it is absolutely all right. I presume there is fear that we would be acknowledging duplication of service if we acknowledged competition. Certainly something for people to consider starting a discussion about in their service area.
How do you think food banks and other human services and nonprofit should be thinking about evolving their funding streams over the next few years?
I think if you are looking for systems change, at some point that goes against the grain for sustainability, right? You want to be working towards your services not being needed anymore. The ideal is that you want to be able to talk about what system changes are you creating, so that you should have to provide fewer and fewer services every year? That should be the big boast. “Last year we fed 200,000 people, but this year, thanks to our hard work, we only have to feed 150,000.”
But every nonprofit organization in the world is afraid to do that, because then they assume that the funders will come back and say, “Oh, you need less money this year.” And so the organization declines.
I think that there is a new generation of funders that have a very different way of thinking, and that what people really want to see are problems solved. People are tired of the same problems staying around for generations and generations. You’re right, though. Every nonprofit I know like to boast about how they did even more; served even more. It is a treadmill. But this new generation of funders comes from a very different way of thinking that would say: “No, no, no. The metric I care about is not how many people you serve, but that you made systemic changes so you will have to feed fewer people moving forward.“ It is a way for your organization to evolve to be truer to its mission.
Mari Ellen, thanks so much for your ideas and for your work supporting non profits.
We are hopefully past the days when human services programs are ‘done’ to people via a one-way transmission of goods or services by well meaning and sometimes efficient program staff.
Yet we do still operate in a nonprofit sector where organizations with wonderful development departments can successfully raise money for programs that can be packaged and sold easily, but have little impact beyond the short term.
Proving that impact, specifically the health impact, is a big part of the focus of this blog, but my concern today is the ongoing refinement or reconfiguration of programs – not by the program staff (who might want a quiet life after all the stress of getting the damn thing off the ground and keeping it from falling apart) but by those who are supposed to be the recipients of the program. You know, people.
So in the food area of human services, it comes down to things like having distribution programs at times of the day and days of the week that are convenient for the community, not for the food bank or food pantry; providing the kinds of food that people want (and that are still good for them); structuring the execution of the program in an empowering and sustainable fashion etc. It still comes down to people.
There is a little information on this people power in one of the standing pages of this blog, but here is a chart I recently put together which demonstrates the approach to community leadership and direction of programs that we are trying to engender here in the ‘paradise’ of Santa Barbara (remember, despite Ashton and Mila visiting us last week for a getaway from the white-hot intensity of the media spotlight, there are only 11 Counties out of 58 in CA which have more food insecurity than us. Funny, that didn’t make it into the travel brochures).
This is an early stage flow chart, so apologies for squeezing so much humanity into pastel colored shapes and spearing them with so many arrows. Such is the cruelty of the programmer.
(Double click on the picture to enlarge it)
Our whole deal is trying to build meaningful relationships with people to empower them to transform their lives and communities through a focus on nutrition and health. So follow the arrows up above and try and figure out what the hell is going on.
We have classic kinds of outreach in the community, where bilingual outreach staff are reaching out and trying to build trust. Trust is important in an area like CalFresh (or SNAP or Food Dtamps or…wait for them to change the name again next week) outreach, where there are a lot of fears around signing up for food stamps. (Will my first born have to join the military etc). We find that the food bank can be an excellent organization to build that trust, so that people’s only point of contact is not the (usually) monolithic structure of the local department of social security. We are also there at our own Mobile Farmers Markets and Mobile Food Pantries that bring food out to rural and poorly served area. But this is a very traditional level of contact. It is not desperately empowering, though the help can be beneficial with a combination of short-term (food) and longer-term (food stamps) help.
We don’t want people to be just recipients of services, we want them to be actively involved in helping to shape those services, so we have something called Foodbank Nutrition Advisory Committees, which meet a short while before the beginning of any one of the programs discussed. It can be a pot luck sometimes and is an opportunity for people to get together with one of our outreach staff and provide advice, maybe offer some volunteer support in the actual program, but also to feel comfortable providing critiques of what is working and what is not. Another important side to being on one of these committees is to be able to advocate for help that is needed and to also be able to include those in the neighborhood that might not be able to attend due to disability or looking after kids. As these sessions progress, people feel more comfortable bringing up nutrition issues and concerns and building their understanding and ownership of what is a shared program.
Some people at that point might be interested in getting involved with the local Promotores program and to train as health outreach workers for a number of organizations in the local community. Or they might want to progress on to being Community Nutrition Leaders. These are people who have a closer tie to the Foodbank. They are not just connected to one geographical site, but might be interested in getting involved with nutrition education and CalFresh outreach across a wider area. Stipends can be made available to those who show commitment, along with other acknowledgements, letters of reference for jobs etc.
I think we would be failing the community if we left things at that stage. We as an organization might have had a lot of our volunteer and outreach needs met, but we wouldn’t be doing much to promote systemic change. So the next step is to work with local groups in providing community organization training, so that people feel comfortable moving beyond issues of their own nutritional health and start to ask questions and seek solutions to other issues in the community. These might be nutrition related (like better food in local schools) or they might be related to other local issues. The main thing is providing people with the training and empowerment to decide what is important themselves. Until people own it and generate the power themselves, then it is never going to be sustainable.
As well as advocating over a particular issue, people can also get involved in community development (such as using the Assed Based Community Development model, which will be touched on in a future post). This may seem a long way from a food bank providing some groceries to people who need help. But if the goal is to solve some of problems that lead to hunger, then maybe it isn’t so far fetched.
The Mighty Casserole speaks.
Maybe a simple potluck can be the beginning of an amazing transformation for a community.
From Hunger to Health 