Food is Comfort

The statistics of domestic violence in our country are staggering. One in four women in the U.S. experiences intimate partner violence in her lifetime. Approximately 15.5 million children are exposed to domestic violence every year. And in our own community, The Metro Nashville Police Department received over 26,600 reports of domestic violence in 2014 - that’s one report every 20 minutes.

In January 2017, we began a partnership with the YWCA, providing weekday dinners for their Weaver Domestic Violence Center. This 51-bed shelter is the largest domestic violence shelter in Tennessee, providing a safe space for women and children escaping domestic violence (men are housed at another partner facility).

“The women, the children, our staff - anyone who walk through these walls - deserves a clean, welcoming, healthy place,” says Laura Clark, the Residential Coordinator at the shelter for the past 17 years.

The YWCA empowers domestic violence survivors to take control of their lives, while offering them safety and the resources to ensure their self-sufficiency. The YWCA’s programs are designed to empower women and offer opportunities for self-determination in every area of life, including the design of their food program at the shelter.

“Food is so powerful...And sometimes the women couldn’t eat what they wanted. They couldn’t buy what they wanted. Everything was locked up. Everything was centered around the control of their abuser.”

— Laura Clark

In contrast, the two kitchens at the shelter are stocked with pantry items and ingredients for the women and families to have access on their own schedule. They have spaces for any of their personal food, and can add requests for spices or other pantry items to a community shopping list.

"At first when they talked about having (TNFP) I didn’t know exactly what it was – they started and thought, ‘Oh my gosh - I don’t know why we couldn’t have found you all years ago!’"

The dinner meal at the shelter, provided by TNFP, is advertised to start early evening, but the women can come at whatever time works for their schedule. “Many of the women work, have school, and are taking care of their kids. When they come here, we want to offer at least one good meal a day – which is (TNFP),” Laura tells us.  “Food is comforting. And our goal is to make sure they’re fed and they’re taken care of – it’s just one less thing to worry about.”

When asked about how the food has been received, Laura shared, “I have seen positive impacts. Some of the women have never eaten like this. It’s healthy, and it’s flavors that you don’t get just anywhere - even in the restaurants,” she adds, smiling.

“This is a different way of life for a lot of these women and kids. And I’ve seen a difference. I’ve seen a difference in people and the way they eat.”

And of course, this is just one small piece of the much broader impact of the YWCA’s work. In 2016, the YWCA served 453 adults and children at the Weaver Domestic Violence Center, providing not just a safe space, but also case management, safety planning, support groups, and counseling.

We are so grateful to be a partner with the YWCA in this important work! Learn more about the YWCA’s mission and programs on their website.

A Day in a Dozen: Our First Day at St. Luke's in 12 Photos

Today's "Day in a Dozen" features a new, very exciting partnership with St. Luke's Community House.

Last week we launched a new partnership with St. Luke's Community House in West Nashville, serving 1,330 meals each week for St. Luke's preschool and mobile meals programs. St. Luke's Community House has been meeting the needs of families in The Nations community for more than 100 years. St. Luke's is a United Way Family Resource Center, providing a comprehensive list of programs and services for children and youth, adults, seniors, and families as a whole. As part of this new partnership, The Nashville Food Project has taken over St. Luke's large commercial kitchen, giving TNFP a second kitchen from which we can produce even more meals to feed our city and bring communities together.

We began serving meals at St. Luke's on Monday, March 28. Longtime TNFP volunteer cook Ann Fundis, who is helping to launch the partnership as Kitchen Manager, arrived bright and early at 6:30 AM to begin prepping breakfast for the preschool and getting the kitchen ready for the day ahead.

Here's Ann Fundis checking inventory of a donation of healthy snack packs.

Here are our meal counts for all of our St. Luke's meals.

We're in organizational heaven over here!

By 8:00 AM, Ann was joined by TNFP staffer Sarah Morgan who began serving breakfast in the preschool classrooms. Monday morning's breakfast was sausage biscuits with orange juice. 

At 8:30 AM, the staff, joined by St. Luke's interim cook Mike, began prepping and cooking lunches for St. Luke's mobile meals program and the preschool. At 9:45 AM, volunteers Debbie Willis and Shellye Geske arrived to begin plating mobile meals lunches. The delicious lunch of baked ziti with meatballs, carrot and raisin salad and orange slices fed both the seniors receiving mobile meals and the preschoolers. 

At 10:15 AM, St. Luke's mobile meals volunteers arrived to pack up the lunches and begin deliveries to seniors throughout the community. We loved sharing with these volunteers a bit about TNFP and learning more about why they give their time to this vital program at St. Luke's.

By 10:30 AM, all of the mobile meals were out for delivery, and our volunteers had some time to begin prepping for afternoon snacks for the preschool and other meals later in the week. Here's Shellye and Debbie prepping kale from our gardens for Thursday's meals.

At 11:00 AM, we begin serving lunches to the preschool classrooms. At this point, we've already served 200 meals, and it's not even noon yet!

Here's Sarah loading up a cart to deliver meals to classrooms. 

And here she is setting up lunch in one of the preschool classrooms. There, the teachers will portion the food out and serve the kids this yummy lunch.

Once lunch is served, we clean up before the staff take a much-needed break. Then at 1:00, we begin prep for the last meal of the day - snacks! Today, the preschoolers are getting some of those healthy snack packs of cheese and crackers Ann prepped earlier along with some apples that Sarah slices before serving at 2:00 PM. Once snacks are served, the staff preps meals for the following day before cleaning up and heading home at 3:30 PM.

And that's a wrap! In our first day at St. Luke's we served 260 meals! We are so excited for this new partnership and how it will help us grow our reach in this community. We're honored to partner with an organization with a long history in the city of Nashville, and we can't wait to see all that this partnership will hold for the future of TNFP. For more information on this partnership, please contact us at info@thenashvillefoodproject.org. Be on the lookout for volunteer opportunities to open up shortly!

Unique New Meal with Friends

This February, TNFP began providing lunches to Friend’s Life Community, a nonprofit that empowers adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities, their Friends, to live as independently as possible as they age out of other support services. Their mission is to create opportunities for teenagers and adults with disabilities to develop socially, grow personally, and enjoy community as they experience life together.

TNFP’s first question for any new, prospective meal partnership is “how can food support what’s going on in your community?” For Friend’s Life, this question had a unique answer.

 A big part of Friend’s Life programming is to get Friends out in the community to practice daily life skills. When the Friends were going out together to restaurants, the staff saw that ordering food was a big challenge. They had an idea to set up a simulation in their own facility that would allow the Friends to practice social and money math skills.

“We wanted to set up the cafe because we saw some deficits and places that we could grow our social skills and grow our manners. This simulation is giving them the chance to practice that here before we take it back out in the community and see how we learned,” said Jenna Sutter Brown.

 “We’re taking things step by step,” she adds. 

At first, Friends were asked to choose between two entree options for lunch at the cafe they set up in their facility. Now, the Friends are placing their order from a menu with a cashier. Friends line up and order one at a time, and then pick up their food from “the kitchen.” The next learning objective Friend’s Life staff plan to implement is to simulate payment by pre-loading debit cards for Friends to use at the counter. Eventually, they hope to help each Friend develop “go-to” orders for several restaurants in town, even making cards with pictures of food for those Friends with limited verbal skills.

TNFP’s relationship with Friend’s Life began with the Friends volunteering in our gardens. “Not being able to see the reward right away is tough…Now we have the connection between all the work to what actually ends up on their plate. It brings it full circle for them,” Jenna tells us. Much of the produce the Friends help grow in TNFP's gardens end up in their meals. 

Health concerns can be a challenge for those with intellectual and developmental disabilities, so encouraging nutrient-dense foods is a priority at Friend’s Life. Staff have long emphasized healthy choices, but since Friends would bring their food from home they weren’t able to introduce new foods.

Jenna explains, “This gives us a little bit of control, knowing that (TNFP) is going to provide us with something that is filled with colorful, rich, vitamin-filled good food. That gives us peace of mind. We’re seeing that if we give them the option, they’re willing to try new things and actually like it.”

The ability to provide a nutritious meal is part of our mission, but knowing that Friends Life takes it further within their community by linking the meal to skill development is immensely gratifying.

The Seed is in the Ground

Good morning, friends!

Those of you who have spent some time at The Nashville Food Project know there are a lot of moving parts to our programs. Navigating the year-over-year growth of our organization and the day-to-day operations takes both planning and improvisation. 

I was recently introduced to an internal food project document maintained by our indomitable meals team - The Meals Worksheet. This is a planning spreadsheet shared between six people with columns for rescued food coming in, menus going out, hiccups during volunteer meal prep, last minute ingredient switches, and the like. Here is a snapshot of what this document looks like in action:

Likewise, our garden team keeps a massive spreadsheet of plans for the various gardens we steward across the city, with columns for seed variety, greenhouse start dates for succession planting, row feet per crop, numbers related to yield, and more. Our garden team manages to this document with an impressive level of geeked-out detail. Here's a look:

These are just a couple of the tools we use daily to help us plan, communicate, and document the many changes that affect our work flow, our programming, and the good food going out into the community. 

When you're growing, cooking, and sharing food for and with the masses, it's essential to make plans. Of course, our growing edge is not learning how to plan better, it's how to let go of the plan when a Pyrex measuring cup shatters into the tomato sauce 20 minutes before meal service or a group of volunteers pulls the strawberry plants from a garden bed instead of pulling the weeds. It seems like life’s best lessons are usually learned when things don’t go as planned.

I'm in awe of our devoted staff who keep well-managed plans and yet stay flexible to the inevitable curve ball, whether it's a bushel of fresh quince to be incorporated into a meal or a hailstorm in March. This work reminds us that we can usher our plans only so far before we must let go of the reins. Or as the poet Wendell Berry, who is so-often quoted in my columns, reminds us: 

“The seed is in the ground.
Now may we rest in hope,
while darkness does its work.”

— Wendell Berry

Grace and peace,