S&B in the field: Association House

So, one of our goals this year is to get out of the house — or, bar — to go see how the organizations Soup & Bread serves are coping with this grim and grueling winter. Funding sources have dried up for many, and recent cuts to SNAP and federal unemployment benefits have further stretched food budgets for their clients. So last week Emily Boerner, who’s helping me with this project, and I trekked over to Association House in Humboldt Park. Founded in 1899 as a haven for new immigrants, AH is one of the oldest settlement houses in Chicago, and currently serves more than 20,000 mostly Latino and African-American people from across the city. They’ve got a high school (El Cuarto Año) and myriad behavioral health programs and family and foster care services and, of course, a food pantry.

Until last year the food pantry was open to the general public — anyone could walk in off the street to request a bag. But thanks to cuts in federal funding (which also eliminated the organization’s ESL and citizenship programs) in 2013 the food pantry closed to all by current participants in Association House programs. Of course that’s still a lot of people — and that doesn’t stop them from occasionally helping outsiders. After a neighboring family with seven kids crashed the Christmas party, income support services coordinator Mirta Ortiz told me, she sent them home with an armful of frozen pizzas.

To qualify for SNAP benefits, a single person can’t make more than $1245 in gross income a month, and receives $189 in food stamps under the current budget; a family of four’s income is capped at $2552, and qualifies for $632 in food stamps. On a practical level, points out Ortiz, this means that few people on unemployment are actually eligible for food stamps. And while the November SNAP cuts shaved only about $20 from a single person’s monthly allowance, that’s still $20 less for someone already living on the razor’s edge of poverty. “People were panicking,” says Ortiz — who suggests that anyone doubting the impact of the November cuts go hang out at the DHS office at North and California, where the line is getting longer every day.

Association House rarely buys food from the Greater Chicago Food Depository, or anywhere else, because, you know, that costs money — though they’ll use the $394 raised at Soup & Bread on January 22 to purchase tuna, rice and other high demand items. Mostly, though, they rely on donations from Whole Foods — which sends over a half-dozen boxes of gently worn fruits and veggies, along with bread and canned goods, every week — as well as the bounty from food drives held by the post office and other organizations. In the video above Ortiz explains what foodstuffs are most in demand, and issues a commonsense plea: Please, people, don’t donate anything you wouldn’t eat yourself!