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Organization History & Description of Programs Loaves & Fishes has long worked to help our clients reach financial and responsible independence with long-term solutions to poverty and homelessness. However, we also realize that emergency needs are often a huge stumbling block for many individuals who come to us. To help address these emergencies, we will always focus on our soup kitchen program as the core of our services. The soup kitchen program is our means to most directly reach the greatest number of individuals and families in need in Hartford, CT. Recent figures demonstrate that 31% of Hartford residents live below the poverty line-roughly 35,741 individuals. Over 33,000 people in Hartford participate in the Food Stamp program, but food stamps alone are not enough to achieve food security. Indeed, as our daily number of meals served has increased over the last several months, we are aware of ever greater hunger issues for families in Connecticut, hunger issues that we try to address with nutritious, hot food for all.
Organization InformationLoaves & Fishes Ministries, a tax-exempt charitable organization, provides human services in Hartford, CT. Our basic programs revolve around our soup kitchen, started two decades ago on Asylum Hill. We serve an average of 130 meals each day, Monday through Friday. Our related programs have developed in response to changing client needs. Our mission is to provide the means for motivated individuals to move themselves out of the cycle of poverty and addiction into sober, responsible lives. This starts with providing nutritious food to those in need.
Loaves & Fishes maintains constant direct contact with our clients in order to ensure that our programs meet changing client need. We created our Sewing Program after extensive job-training questionnaires and follow-up conversations with the women in our client population, who overwhelmingly asked for the chance to learn sewing as an employable skill. Similarly, the Aetna Food Service Training course was planned after thorough research into what clients were interested in that would also provide gainful employment in Hartford. Business Initiative$ was created to answer the growing need for entrepreneurial training in all of Hartford attested to by community financial organizations and prospective clients. The role of volunteers at Loaves & Fishes remains essential to our operation. Meals in the soup kitchen are prepared and served by local volunteer groups (under the supervision of our kitchen director) from businesses, churches and synagogues, community groups and schools. Over thirty groups are involved, each on a cycle of monthly service. Since each volunteer group consists of approximately twelve members, close to four hundred people from the community and surrounding towns are involved with helping feed our clients. This noon meal is vital to the functioning of our overall program, because it draws many clients to our facility who are in desperate need of many of our other services. Often, these individuals are not aware of the opportunities available at Loaves & Fishes Ministries, and after eating here and becoming comfortable with our staff and our programs, they will on their own initiative seek further help. See Demographics for more information.
In addition to our noon meal, CIGNA, Prudential Financial, St. James's Church, West Hartford, St. John's Church, West Hartford, First Baptist, WH, and many more groups provide clients with bagged meals and sandwiches several times a month, so that clients often have weekend meals. These volunteer groups bring over 250 sandwiches each, on various days throughout the month. Our clients take these individual bag meals with them as they leave the dining room. The volunteer groups buy, assemble, and deliver the bagged meals to our facility. The Pantry Program continues to serve families (individuals with proof of dependents living with them for whom they are responsible) every Tuesday. We have recently adapted our Pantry guidelines in light of changing client needs, and now accept families who receive State assistance or who are living at the poverty/low-income levels as defined by the State. This modification allows us to reach individuals with families who are now off of welfare but working minimum wage jobs that often pay less than their former assistance. Our Direct Aid assists with emergency needs of clients. We can help with bus passes, school books, clothing needs for work, medical prescriptions, etc. Our office helps clients make connections with other area human service agencies for shelter, food, and clothing. Our Mental and Physical Health Counseling services continue to be an attempt to remedy the great lack of health care of all types now available to the poor and homeless. We offer connections to mental health counseling with outreach psychologists from Hartford Community Mental Health Association and Capitol Region Mental Health Center, who will meet individually with clients in need of psychiatric help. Nancy Guyette, nurse from Charter Oak/Rice Heights attends our facility every Wednesday during the mealtime. She sees any and all clients who have a particular health problem, or who need medical advice, a blood-ressure check, or a sympathetic ear. Her numbers indicate that she sees an average of 110 clients each month. Our Catering program offers low-cost, high quality fare to a variety of clients, from individuals to State agencies. In the past year we again catered the Harriet Beecher Stowe House birthday celebration (with cake for 500), we cater West Middle School monthly PTO meetings, and many smaller meetings and luncheons. This program has come to serve as an example to us of how to offer entry level job skills for clients responsible enough to successfully complete a training program. The Sewing Program was the impetus for our comprehensive business training program, Business Initiative$, which began business training courses in October of 1999, and has now completed over 14 successful sessions. The next session will begin September, 2008. This program offers many components of a traditional microenterprise program combined with elements tailored to best fit our clients and the needs we have discovered through daily interaction on Asylum Hill. We now have over 70 graduates of the program. Opening Doors, our jobs training program, has been a great success. Opening Doors helps make clients aware of the CT Department of Labor One-Stop Centers, where they can receive individualized training and case management in their job search. In addition to helping clients become aware of opportunities at the One-Stop Centers, we also offer classes in ESL, computer literacy, employment skills, and budgeting on-site for registered clients. The results include helping individuals into the program; getting them the training they need for employment, and then helping them find and retain those jobs. We are particularly aware of the ongoing need for the jobs program, highlighted recently in CT news. Statistics cited in a recent study by CT Voices for Children (reported in the Hartford Courant on 9/2/07) show that since 2001 low-wage workers in CT-those earning between $8 to $10 an hour-had the greatest real wage decrease in the country. For instance, almost 17% of CT's workers earned $9.91 an hour or less last year: this means that even working full-time a family of four would remain at the federal poverty level ($20,615/year for a family of four in 2006). Although the State's unemployment rate in July was 4.8%, in Hartford the rate was 9%, and the unemployment rate for minorities was about 8%. Clearly, we need to continue aiding individuals in their pursuit of employment, and in their attempts to get better, more full-time jobs as well. Each registered client in this program meets with a staff member (case manager) to assess skills already possessed and determine next steps. Job postings are given, and appointments can be made for resume creation, on-line job searches and individual on-line job application work. If appropriate, client is admitted to either ESL class or computer class. Every quarter we provide: skills assessment on an individual basis; job postings, employability and skills training, support services (soup kitchen meal and bag lunches), resume creation, ESL and computer classes, on-line job search and application. |
| © 2008 Loaves & Fishes Ministries Inc. |
We continue to provide access to feeding, counseling, and educational/training programs, with an increased emphasis in the last several years on employment training and economic development through our Opening Doors program. Our holistic approach means that we are able to impact many aspects of our clients' lives, and they are able to utilize various programs which meet their changing needs while having the continuity of a trusted staff who knows them. Perhaps the most important benefit to the community from Loaves & Fishes' soup kitchen is our multi-faceted approach to helping our clients. We do not only provide food to the hungry, although we continue to serve a growing number of clients each day. During our noon meal, we also provide clothing for clients, weekly pantry bags for families and full bagged meals for all clients once or twice a week, HIV+ testing and counseling, social service contacts and entry into our other applicable programs, and special holiday offerings.
Loaves & Fishes is unique in its holistic approach to services, offering programs that allow individuals to move towards personal responsibility. We work extensively with other agencies to offer counseling, education, and healthcare to our clients. We continue to offer motivated clients the chance to learn skills for viable employment in order to move themselves off welfare. Our holistic approach means that we are able to impact many aspects of our clients' lives, and they are able to utilize various programs which meet their changing needs while having the continuity of a trusted staff who knows them.