Poverty: Let's Do Something About It

Poverty...let’s do something about it                                 Holiday Season 2012          

Forty-six million Americans, the most since the Great Depression, are considered poor, thanks in large part to crippling economic policies. There is something wrong when 40% of children born to parents in the lowest fifth of earners never know anything better.

Government's approach has been to spend lots of money on bureaucratic, top-down, anti-poverty programs. Starting in the 1960s, this top-down approach created and perpetuated a debilitating culture of dependency, wrecking families and communities. We need a balance that allows government to act for the common good, while leaving private groups free to do the work that only they can do.

Loaves and Fishes of Contra Costa (“Loaves & Fishes”), a local nonprofit whose mission is to feed the hungry, has been in operations since 1983.  It started with 2 Contra Costans serving sandwiches out of the back of their car after witnessing a family collecting food out of a dumpster.  The need is serious: 25 percent of families with children in Contra Costa experience hunger at some point each year and 15 percent of Contra Costans live below the poverty line.

This past year Loaves & Fishes served over 171,000 hot meals and distributed over 60 tons of groceries from its five dining rooms in Martinez, Pittsburg, Antioch, Bay Point and Oakley.  Its clients represent a cross-section of Contra Costa: the home owner, the homeless, the employed, the unemployed and the under-employed, families with children, veterans, the old and the young.  No one is turned away, all are welcomed.

Loaves & Fishes partners with other community based organizations to provide access to services that can help their guests cope with the challenges they face.  For example, 

(1) they partner with the Food Bank of Contra Costa and Solano to add fresh produce to its Friday food pantry program to improve the nutritional quality of the food that their guests have for the weekend;

(2) they invite Opportunity Junction, a local non-profit that offers a job training program, to recruit trainees from its dining rooms;

(3) they work with HICAP, a local non-profit, to help counsel seniors on navigating the complex world of Medicare and Medicaid;

(4) they partner with the Food Bank to sign up eligible clients for CalFresh (federally funded food stamps); and

(5) they provide job postings and other leads for services that would help their clients improve their ability to maintain their independence.

Loaves & Fishes is committed to doing what it can to assist its clients in their fight for self-sufficiency.  Providing a hot meal does much more than satisfy an immediate need; it allows people to use the limited money they have to pay for other basic needs such as rent, utilities, clothes, gas and prescriptions.  This allows them to stay independent. Without this support many of them would be homeless.

Please visit the Loaves & Fishes website: www.loavesfishescc.org to learn more about their efforts to help the less fortunate. When you consider your charitable gifts for 2012 please include Loaves & Fishes.