By about ten this morning, outside the food pantry I run at St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco, the line of people waiting to get free groceries reached around the block. There were hundreds in the crowd: Chinese grandmothers with kids in tow, Salvadoran moms lugging babies, African-American ladies with their shopping carts, tired-looking white couples, Mixtec day laborers, Russian seniors, some homeless guys, a few sex workers and a man who told me, almost crying, that he’d lost his car because he couldn’t keep up with the payments. He wanted me to pray that he wouldn’t lose his apartment, too.
You may have heard that the economy is in trouble. You may not know, yet, how hungry your neighbors are. But we can tell you: sixty percent of the people in our area who use food banks have at least one working adult in their household. It’s just getting harder and harder for people to pay rent, buy gas, and also put enough food on the table when they’re working at minimum wage jobs.
Our food pantry serves more than 600 families every week. We give away around seven tons of food each Friday– fresh vegetables, fruit, cereal, rice, beans and moreº–that we buy for pennies a pound from a local food bank connected with the nonprofit national association America’s Second Harvest.
And every week our numbers grow. So though feeding people is my joy and my vocation; though I believe offering food to everyone without exception is one of the best things a church can do, it’s not enough. “Faith-based charity” can’t be the solution for an economy in which low-wage workers are suffering more each month.
posted July 28, 2008 at 6:09 pm
It seems like there are two bad choices when it comes to faith-based charity: either fund exclusively liberal and mainline churches (making the program look like parochial payola), or fund churches who preach against government programs, thereby undermining any good government seeks to do (including the faith-based charity itself).
posted July 29, 2008 at 8:58 pm
I suspect that painful times are growing all around, in ways that are easy to miss if one’s own life is stable and one doesn’t make time to pay attention.
I’m just back from a trip to our local Wal-Mart.
On the way, I heard that Massachusetts is unable to offer student loans to thousands of students who were counting on them in order to go back to school next month.
As I walked around, I noticed that they’d removed the top level of shelves, reducing their total inventory. I’m sure that’s a quiet response to our rural and small town Kentucky neighbors having less to spend than at any time since the store opened.
As I checked out, I noticed that my clerk had braces on both hands and flinched when she moved one of my bags to my cart. I was able to quickly move the others myself, and I thought about what it means to stick with a lifting job when your hands are injured.
And now, as I think back, I realized that something didn’t happen. Wal-mart is where I regularly see members of our area’s small-but-growing Hispanic community. Not this time, as though a set of farm and construction workers have quietly left the region.
None of that can be solved by charity. All of it can be improved by government working to ensure that everyone able to work has a decent and stable opportunity to do that and everyone whose health makes work unrealistic has a safety net that won’t give way. That sort of system, fundamentally capitalist but with standards of honesty for corporations and systems of support for the least among us, is what built American prosperity from 1945 on, and it’s time to get back to those basics.
posted July 31, 2008 at 5:50 pm
Thanks for your thoughtful note. I agree: there’s plenty of precedent for government ensuring decent wages and working conditions across the board, and we need to do more than “charity” if the economy’s going to recover. Sara
posted July 31, 2008 at 5:51 pm
Thanks for your thoughtful note. I agree: there’s plenty of precedent for government ensuring decent wages and working conditions across the board, and we need to do more than “charity” if the economy’s going to recover. Sara