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NYT: The Capital's Kitchen
January 17, 2012
The New York Times
The Capital’s Kitchen
Published: January 15, 2012
For 23 years, D.C. Central Kitchen,the country’s oldest community kitchen providing meals for the poor andhomeless, has taken discarded food and marginalized people and found value in both. It’s a nonprofit that gives new meaning to free enterprise.
What started with one refrigerator truck has grown into an organization that provides about 5,000 meals a day to homeless shelters, halfway houses and other sites in Washington. Half the staff members are ex-convicts, former addicts or onetime homeless people, who finished thegroup’s training program and are now prized employees.
In 2008, as the economy slid into a downturn, the kitchen employed 60 people and its annual budget was $7.4 million. Today, with the economy still struggling, the staff is twice as big and its budget has grown by almost 50 percent to over $10 million.
The growth has come by training people others consider unemployable and creating jobs in its income-producing Fresh Start catering business, forwhich it pays a decent wage with full benefits. With hunger rising in the recession, the kitchen has expanded to meet greater needs, but its leaders know that the solution to hunger ultimately is putting more people to work. The kitchen sees itself as helping to carry on Martin Luther King Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaignfor economic justice, empowering the dispossessed and feeding the hungry, caring for the people in line while helping to shorten it. The kitchen provides sustenance, income, dignity and hope.
