Good Food Kitchens program grows from the Central District to help feed King County

Kristi Brown and Damon Bomar

The city says that a Central District program that started with a handful of restaurants has grown into a partnership of 29 restaurants and caterers, sourcing from 10 local farms, and 21 different community organizations, with 97% of restaurant partners and 81% of local farms BIPOC-owned.

The Good Food Kitchens program served its 13,000th meal last month and has a goal to serve nearly 40,000 more.

“Good Food Kitchens was created to address the needs of the entire local food system,” Mariah DeLeo, Good Food Economy Program Manager, said in the announcement from the city’s Human Services Department. “It is not just a food assistance program – one that importantly ensures people in need receive fresh, nutritious, culturally relevant meals – but it is also an economic assistance program, an employment assistance program, and a local food system resilience program.” Continue reading

Seattle Community Fridge: a new network of ‘Little Libraries’ for fresh food across the city

(Image: Dorothy Edwards/Crosscut)

By Margo Vansynghel / Crosscut.com

If you didn’t know it was there, it would be easy to miss. To find it, ignore the view of Elliott Bay and make your way down a set of gravel steps. Walk past the apple tree in full fruit toward the small plots of land teeming with zucchinis and tomatoes. There it is, on your right, in front of the toolshed: a small, unassuming fridge, painted sky blue and decorated with a pattern of luscious peaches and emerald leaves.

“FREE FOOD!” black letters on the fridge exclaim. “Take what you need, leave what you can.”

The refrigerator, plugged in and nestled in the leafy shade of Seattle’s Danny Woo Community Garden, is part of a new, citywide network of so-called “community fridges.” Taking after similar projects in New York, Oakland, San Francisco, Milwaukee and other U.S. cities, a local group of volunteers installs and stocks the fridges as a way to get free, fresh food and produce to people who may need it, no questions asked. Amid rising food insecurity, this literally cool food pantry can keep produce and other surplus food donated by volunteers — eggs, bread,  yogurt — fresh for longer.

“We all need food, and we all deserve it,” says Christina Charlton, one of the Seattle Community Fridge’s volunteers. Plus, there’s plenty of it, says Jordan Saibic, another volunteer. “A lot of people don’t have access to food, [but] there is actually so much food that is thrown away, either from restaurants or grocery stores,” Saibic says. Continue reading

CHS Pics | A hot meal and Community Lunch in Cal Anderson Park

A hot meal and community — even when you need to spread out across Cal Anderson to enjoy your lunch at a proper social distance — means a lot right now.

Every Tuesday and Friday, Community Lunch on Capitol Hill serves a few hundred hot lunches from 11th Ave’s Central Lutheran Church. During the COVID-19 crisis, folks are eating in the nearby park.

CHS stopped through to show you the goodwill and let you know more about how to help: Continue reading

City Council overcomes mayor’s veto on Seattle’s Sweetened Beverage Tax revenue plan

The Seattle City Council doubled down on its plans for how best to spend $6 million in Sweetened Beverage Tax revenue Monday, voting to ignore Mayor Jenny Durkan’s veto of the legislation.

Only interim Council member Abel Pacheco, downtown rep Sally Bagshaw, and North Seattle rep Debora Juarez sided with the mayor Monday.

CHS reported on the fight over funding scraps for health and food programs as the mayor attempted to focus the tax revenue on a smaller set of existing resources vs. creating new, often progressive programs.

The tax on sugary beverages was originally earmarked for creating new programs related to “healthy food and beverage access, birth-to-three services and kindergarten readiness, a public awareness campaign about sugary drinks, support for people actively living with obesity and diabetes, community-based programs to support good nutrition and physical activity and evaluation support for those programs.” With Monday’s veto-killing vote, the council’s plan for new programs can again try to move forward.

Meanwhile, Monday’s full City Council action also included approval of Seattle’s Green New Deal resolution. Durkan’s response to the approval was much friendlier than the sugary beverage tax situation. In a statement, the mayor applauded the vote and said she was “committed to expediting climate action” by issuing an Executive Order directing City departments to “evaluate how they can accelerate their action items under the City’s Climate Action Plan, and how Seattle can best meet the goals of the Green New Deal.” The final resolution can be found here.

After more than 400,000 meals for those in need on Capitol Hill, Don Jensen exits Community Lunch

Don, center, with volunteers (Image: Lucas Boyle)

In 1985, a group of local Lutheran churches banded together to provide a hot meal for low-income senior citizens of Capitol Hill. Ten people showed up for the first lunch.

On a recent rainy March day, the scene at the Central Parish House of the Central Lutheran Church looks very different. A quickly-growing crowd of over 30 people huddled under and near the awning of the entrance to the church, waiting for the doors to open at noon for a warm lunch of chicken and rice casserole.

Inside, plates clatter while a group of volunteers arranges the food, including a side of vegetable salad, buffet-style, on long tables near the back of the large, high-vaulted room. Others fold napkins and add more chairs to each table. At least 150 people are expected to come through the doors in the next hour. Continue reading

With 5,000 to feed every week, Cherry Street Food Bank seeks new home

After 35 years operating out of their space on 8th Ave and Cherry, the Cherry Street Food Bank is being displaced to make room for a new 30-story condominium tower. They’ve got until March 1, 2019 to vacate, and Northwest Harvest is scrambling to find a new home for their flagship operation which serves an average of 5,000 people a week.

Northwest Harvest CEO Thomas Reynolds considers the Cherry Street Food Bank the “beating heart” of their operations.

“We deliver to others who provide food but Cherry Street is a direct line to our most important stakeholder group: people with lived experience of hunger.” The food bank provides bags of groceries as well as sandwiches and other ready-to-eat meals for people who have no kitchen in which to prepare meals. Continue reading

Wave of support helps community group add new dinner night for Capitol Hill homeless, hungry

(Image: Community Lunch on Capitol Hill)

(Image: Community Lunch on Capitol Hill)

With social services outside Seattle continuing to dwindle and sometimes unexplainable opposition to providing help, here is a little bit of good news for homeless and hungry people in the city. Despite concerns from some neighbors in the area, a Capitol Hill nonprofit is able to move forward with its plan to add another day of hot meal service to its offerings.

Community Lunch on Capitol Hill tells CHS that it can move forward with its plan to add another night of dinner after a Wednesday meeting with neighbors near All Pilgrims where the meals will be hosted.

Community Lunch has been providing hot meals and a social structure — sometimes 200 to 300 diners at a time — in the neighborhood for nearly 30 years. The schedule these days has been Tuesday and Friday lunches at Central Lutheran and a Thursday night dinner at Broadway’s All Pilgrims.

Beginning next week, the organization will now add a Wednesday night dinner at All Pilgrims.

Executive director Don Jensen said the neighborhood discussion gave a few people living near the church an opportunity to air concerns and ask the group to work to address worries about increased numbers of homeless people coming to the area for the dinners.

He also said he was very happy with the tide of support that followed a social media post showing a note distributed in the area about the new night of service. Jensen said that people looking to support Community Lunch can check out the group’s website for ways to give and, especially, volunteer. He said the new Wednesday dinner service is still in need of help.