Food For Thought (And Survival)

St. Anthony Dining Room and Social Work Center try to fill in the gaps of escalating food needs for San Francisco’s poor.

The economic crisis has filled our minds, news and conversations with many troubling questions, from the highest economic strata down to grassroots organizations. All seem to conclude with one resounding answer: uncertainty. On this block of the Tenderloin, the thing we are certain of is that cuts to other agencies will directly result in more people coming to St. Anthony’s for services.

“They just keep coming, more and more every month,” lamented Rosita Nangca, St. Anthony Volunteer, “And now people are coming from all over, usually it’s just from our neighborhood [Tenderloin] but now from Daly City, from everywhere.”

Rosita is not only a volunteer, but a participant in St. Anthony’s Brown Bag program. Every third Thursday of the month St. Anthony Dining Room holds our Senior Brown Bag program, providing 200 seniors with groceries including fresh produce, juice, eggs, beans, rice and other pantry and nutritional staples. Currently our Brown Bag program is stretching to accommodate 215 seniors, straining the program maximum of 200. Each quarter we open enrollment and usually all new participants are accepted. For the first time ever this quarter, we were not able to accommodate all the seniors, and a waitlist was started.

Rosita and her husband, a Navy veteran, live in a Tenderloin building along with other seniors, many of whom are also veterans. She helps the seniors who cannot leave their apartments due to disabilities and age by bringing them groceries and cooking community meals. The energetic core of her family and friends, Rosita has a resolute work ethic and determined optimism that wavers a bit thinking about the severity of the situation her neighbors and friends are facing.

“Some of them have to live up to five people in one studio apartment. There just isn’t money to make it,” she shrugs, “Food like this helps make ends meet, and it is good food too.”

In spite of the relief provided by rent control and subsidized senior housing, 79 percent of elderly renters living alone in San Francisco are unable to make ends meet. This trend will certainly continue as seniors run out of resources. The California Department on Aging has cut $310,000 from funds for senior programs which resulted in the closing of senior food distribution sites. These cuts, coupled with other reductions in services, leave more seniors without critical supplemental services. Among the population St. Anthony Foundation serves these cuts leave people needing more than supplements; they need to find complete substitutions.

In the Dining Room and Social Work Center need for services began to escalate immediately as the economy began to decline. The Dining Room witnessed a 10 percent increase in families coming in for lunch. The Emergency Food Assistance Program, a service which we created to provide a reserve in unforeseen situations, has become a staple for our guests as other agencies’ food programs are chiseled down.

Since February our Social Work Center has seen a spike in clients signing up for Emergency Food Boxes, a program designed to assist Tenderloin residents who have medical dietary needs, or children under age 18. This program has been swamped with people from outside the neighborhood who need help but are ineligible because they live outside the Tenderloin. People who do qualify for the program are asking to receive food more often. The meats and high quality food in these bags are expensive, usually donated, and hard to come by, so the staff are maintaining the duration of time between food boxes to aim for nutritional sustainability over time.

St. Anthony Foundation will continue to find ways to innovate, pool resources and ensure stability for our already borderline guests, as we have through seven recessions. We have implemented program assessments and adjustments, acute resource management, and collaboration with other organizations as critical strategies for adapting to the current economic climate. We are renegotiating pricing with our vendors, while purchasing cooperatively with other agencies for better pricing. In six months time, as severance and unemployment run out for the recently unemployed, we will indeed see new faces in the Dining Room, and in all of our programs. So we prepare, and look to our community partners and supporters to help through the upcoming hard times.