Project Hand-Up Provides Incentive On The Pathway To Self-Sufficiency The Spokane Food Bank Teams Up With Six Other Agencies To Maximize The Power Of Food In The Lives Of Individuals

For all its rewards, food banking can be a frustrating business.

Millions of pounds of food leave the Spokane Food Bank every year, and nearly every ounce will end up on a table where it will make a difference.

But only rarely do food bankers have a tangible sense of the individuals whose lives have been touched.

A few years ago, the Spokane Food Bank began a search for ways to connect directly with the lives of recipients, a way to maximizethe power food has in the lives of the poor.

“We tend to be a resource for three groups of people,” said Al Brislain, executive director of the Spokane Food Bank.

“One group is slowly working their way out of poverty on their own. They have a minimum-wage job, but they are slowly going to make it out. The emergency food program helps when they hit a crisis.

“The second needs our supplemental food program on an ongoing basis. Maybe they are elderly, or disabled, but they will be challenged probably for the rest of their lives, and for the most part they may need the food bank system for the rest of their lives. If we can give them food, we’re helping them out.

“The third group is the people who need something more to help them move forward.”

It’s the latter group that Project Hand-Up aims to serve.

Project Hand-Up was formed in 1997 with a focus on leveraging food resources to make a concrete difference for people struggling to be self-sufficient.

“We looked at the fact that what we do well is handle food,” Brislain said. “There are other programs out there that help them move toward self-sufficiency. We thought that rather than create a self-sufficiency program of our own, we would use our food as a tool to help those other programs.”

If clients could be helped though the difficult transition to self-sufficiency. and if the food could give them an incentive to complete a difficult program, then the food would do double duty.

“That way the food is both a reward for making the effort and an incentive to continue,” said Brislain.

Ultimately, the food bank aligned itself with six programs, each with its own self-sufficiency initiative:

Casey Family Partners Breakthrough for Families, a program of the Volunteers of America

Building Bridges to Employment, a program of the Spokane Neighborhood Action

Program Project Self-Sufficiency, a program of the Institute for Extended Learning at the Community Colleges of Spokane

The Washington State Department of Employment Security (DES)

The Department of Social and Health Services(DSHS)

Food bank program manager Connie Nelson said Project Hand-Up was developed to operate parallel to the better-established emergency pantry system.

“The program was designed in recognition that most folks, if given a small amount of assistance outside the pantry system on a regular basis, could move from where they are to where they want to be.”

Project Hand-Up operates somewhat differently than the outlet system, Nelson said.

“Most of our programs through the pantry system allow clients to access services up to six times a year; here, it’s once a month.”

And because the food is provided at the beginning of every month, recipients can budget for it, allowing them to be more thoughtful about their cash and food-stamp expenditures.

“The idea is that Project Hand-Up allows them to do their planning for a month at a time, and use the dollars they would have used for that food on something else.

“The utility bill, for example.”

Nelson said that clients can identify the value of the program.

“One lady in the Project Self-Sufficiency program itemized out what she saved from using this box of food and she came up with $280 - that’s money she can use for other things; tuition, books, utilities, or buying her son a new pair of shoes.”

The Department of Employment Security and DSHS run programs designed to help welfare recipients become employable under the terms of Work First, the state’s welfare-reform initiative.

Food from thee food bank is used as incentive to help families ease into the transition from welfare benefits. As recipients move through the Work First agenda, their benefits are gradually removed.

For example, said Nelson, “In the past, there has been some child-care offered, but in the new rules, as you go along the path, people are being asked to make a co-pay for that child-care. Even though it may only be $10 or $20 a month, that can be quite a lot when you’re living on a fixed amount.”

“Hopefully, this food helps ease the pain of the transition,” Brislain said, “and tips the scales toward staying in the program.”

The Breakthrough for Families has a different set of goals. It works with runaways teens and other at-risk youth and their families.

The task fixing broken families and, for many, food-bank food is a key factor.

“The food bank is a wonderful program,” said Kim Rogers, project director. “We love it. We are so happy that they chose us to collaborate with.”

Breakthrough for Families uses what’s called a wrap-around, or integrated services, approach in which services and service providers are brought to the client, rather than the other way around.

“It’s a strength-based, needs-driven mode where the services are created around the family’s needs,” said Rogers.

Many factors may cause a young person to endanger him or herself by running away or living a dangerous lifestyle, but money - or the lack of it - is clearly a key in many cases.

“One of the attributes we see in the majority of the families we see is the lack of income,” said Marilee Roloff, Executive Director of Volunteers of America.

“Half of them live below the poverty line,” added Rogers.

“Our goal is to stabilize the family first,” she said, “and then develop a plan around what they need to be able get to where they want to be.”

For some, the security offered by a box of groceries every month can make the difference between success and failure.

“These families often have to choose which bills they are going to pay this month, and the food frees up resources for the family so they can pay for other things.

“It helps relieve the stress on families.”

Hunger plays other significant roles in the well-being of a family, Rogers said.

“If they are hungry and can’t get food, they can’t focus on other things. You have to take care of their basic needs before they can move on to fixing the other problems.”

Trust must be established before the wrap-around process can work, and the food helps there, too.

“No child at Crosswalk has come to the door and said `I need counseling,”’ Roloff said.

“They say, `I’m hungry.’

“You can’t prove to them that you can help them until you show them that you are willing to help them with the basics, the real concrete things, not the esoteric, psychoanalysis.

“Food is a real prover and a trust-builder.”

“We have an on-site pantry,” Rogers said, “so we make an order to the food bank and put in the pantry and once or twice a month deliver it to the families that have chosen to receive it.

“Most families express deep gratitude and appreciation for the food bank; I can’t tell you. Especially the ones who are struggling and who have to choose between getting the lights shut off and paying the groceries.”

“When these families move on, it’s Breakthrough for Families they’ll remember, not the food bank,” Brislain said, but that’s okay, because the food will have done what it needed to do.”

Leslie Bargel remembers the first batch of food bank groceries she received after joining Project Self-Sufficiency.

“I didn’t know there was going to be a food program when I signed up. It was one of the most exciting parts of our four months for me. It was like Christmas, you know?”

Bargel, a 41-year-old mother of three, signed up for the program after seeing an item in the newspaper.

Project Self-Sufficiency is a 12-week program that helps low-income single mothers gain some of the skills and attitudes that will help them move toward independence.

“What we do is pick a person up, both personally and academically,” said program coordinator Mary Wilkinson-Orvik.

The experts say that folks who live in poverty normally face a wealth of problems, whether it’s bad health, substance abuse, domestic violence or simply a family situation that seems beyond healing.

Bargel had made the effort to attend college in the past, but a series of family crises intervened. A random death of a loved one is disruptive, but Bargel lost three brothers in a single decade.

Still, she tackled Project Self-Sufficiency with real optimism.

“I signed up because I wanted to see what options I had available to me,” Bargel said.

Wilkinson-Orvik said the program stresses fundamental academic skills and a range of personal-development concerns.

And food has become a valuable part of the experience.

“One of the largest concerns these mothers have is that they don’t have enough food for their kids - and they don’t.

“By getting them food from the food bank at the beginning of the month, they can plan ahead. They feed it into a menu, so they can make their food stamps go farther.

“The students tell me they are saving $60-70 a month because of the food bank food.”

Project Self-Sufficiency introduces students to the Washington State University’s Cooperative Extension program for cooking classes and sends them to the food bank for some basic lessons in budgeting and food management.

“We met at the food bank on one Tuesday each month,” Bargel said. “They helped us be accountable to each other, and we learned to help each other out by sharing recipes and other ways of preparing things.”

Some of the students “passed on the produce because it would go to waste,” she said, “but I told them to take it and trade it with their neighbors for things they could use.”

Another Bargel idea:“When it’s your child’s turn to take treats to school, you don’t have to send cupcakes. Send oranges with smiley faces drawn on them.

“But you have to have to have the smiley faces.”

Students who complete the course can continue to use the food bank for another year, and Bargel said that’s a bonus that can’t be taken lightly.

“It really helps. It helped me save some money so I could pay off the phone bill. I loved it. I told everybody about it.”

Besides, she said, “Food is the number one need that you need to fulfill before you can go other places in life.”

Al Brislain has been in and around food banking most of his adult life and he understands the complex relationship that exists between poor people and those who would give them a hand up.

It takes care, he said, to craft a program that works.

“There is the fear that the food bank may be perpetuating the individual’s problem,” he said, “whether it’s substance abuse, a lack of education or domestic violence. If the food bank is just propping up a dysfunctional system and keeping them from getting the help they need, then it’s not good.

“But if food is used as a tool to help people move along that self-improvement track, then it has truly served its purpose.

“We’re stewards of these resources and there is a real sense that this food is entrusted in us to use it well, to use it properly, not just to hand it out on the street corner.

“We feel this program is doing that, and doing it well.”