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ebonypearl at 11:50am on 11/05/2008A year ago, $30 worth of food would feed 80 - 90 homeless people on Sandwich Saturdays, and $5 gas would get the food to them.
One one hand that's not many people; on the other, that's 80-90 people who got to eat a decent meal one day a week that otherwise would have had no food at all.
Now, with rising prices, to feed those same numbers of people, I need $80, and I spend $15 in gas. I know how to find food cheap, the problem is the cheap food isn't there to be found. The bread at the day old bakery was 35ยข a loaf, now it's $1.10. Lunch meats, cheese, peanut butter - all have risen substantially in price. Eggs have gone from less than a dollar a dozen to almost $3 a dozen - and that's not the free range organic eggs.
I've cut back and pared down in as many areas as I can. I have nowhere left to pare.
What I've decided to do is to increase the classes I teach on guerrilla gardening and wildcrafting and dumpster diving and frugal cooking.
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I don't tag either (mostly)... but my journal isn't as useful or interesting as yours. :)
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1. Find where the homeless people are
2. Make sandwiches
3. Deliver the sandwiches to the homeless
1. To find people for Sandwich Saturdays, you go where the homeless hang out - start with the shelters and food banks, and ask the people who work there. Look for abandoned buildings and vacant lots where it looks as if something big has been sleeping there - chances are, it's people. Go early early in the morning - before sunrise to see if people are there. Tell them you have sandwiches for hungry people - just sandwiches. Don't bring anything else with you, keep your cell phone handy and ready to hit speed dial or whatever it is cell phones have. Dress very casually but covered up - worn sweats work well. Don't go alone. Be confident, a "Hey, I've sandwiches if you're hungry." works well. Don't add anything else. It takes a while to build trust - both ways. Most are decent people down on their luck. Not all of them are decent, though, so don't take any chances.
I don't know where you live, but I live near a large city and we have (depending upon whose count you use) between 3,000 and 7,000 homeless people living around here. Finding them isn't hard.
2. Making sandwiches - count how many homeless people you've found in the places you're willing to go. Buy bread at the day old bakeries - enough to make at least 2 sandwiches per person. Depending on your finances, you can fill the bread with peanut butter, sliced meats and cheeses (it's cheaper to buy chunk meat and cheese and slice it yourself, but it takes longer), vegetables (like lettuces, tomatoes, sprouts, pickles, cucumbers, bell peppers, onions, paper thin slices of zucchini...), mashed beans and cheese (cheaper than peanut butter if you cook dried beans yourself instead of using canned beans and just as nutritious), or tuna salad or egg salad or whatever fillings you have.
Put the sandwiches in baggies or wrap them in waxed paper.
2a. In cold weather, you can make soup instead or with the sandwiches - the containers cost more but you can buy them in bulk at places like Sam's or Costco. Since the ingredients for soup cost less than sandwich ingredients, it kind of balances out, but because of the containers, the soup does cost slightly more than the sandwiches.
3. Put the sandwiches/soup in the back of your car and drive with someone out to where the homeless are. Keep the driver in the car with the motor running and a cell phone ready - you probably won't need it, but in the rare cases where one or more of the homeless people are drug addicts instead of unlucky, you'll be glad you do. Don't ever relax your guard doing this - the homeless population shifts, and you never know if someone will be on a bad drug trip when you bring out the sandwiches.
When you bring the sandwiches out, just hand them out. Don't give a sermon, or lecture them, or set conditions on the food. Just give them the food with a simple, "Good luck." If you have to ask them anything, keep to a very simple , "Are you hungry?" And when they say "yes", hand them the food with a "Then here, eat."
And that's it. Whether you make and hand out 4 sandwiches or 100, you've done something.
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I know a lot of agencies who will claim the small charities that fly under the government's radar (and there are a great many of them) are scams, but most really aren't. They are composed of people who want to do some good, however small it may be, and they don't want their donations to be swallowed up in government regulations, fees, licensing, and limitations. They don't want their donation to be eaten by advertising, by paying salaries to the organizers (running a charity is a very profitable business - most charity leaders make the same or more than their equivalent in private businesses). They want as much of their time, goods, and effort to go to the people who need it.
That means no accepting donations from others who are not actively involved in what you are doing. No fundraising to support your charity. No bake sales, no garage sales, nothing that can be seen as taking money from one set of people to give to another set of people. No applying for a 501 (C) tax exemption. No incorporating. No accepting money from any agency at all, private or public.
It will severely limit what you can do, but everything you do will have a direct impact on those who most need it.
You can dedicate 10% of your income to give to someone who needs it in small gifts or donations (like the man who started Modest Needs (http://www.modestneeds.org")), or you can make and give away sandwiches, or you can make up gift bags filled with small toiletries and coupons for free things like meals and haircuts and hotel rooms and brochures on where and how to get more help and hand those out to people begging on street corners, or other small acts of charity and kindness.
Charity isn't owned by big corporations. It's owned by our hearts.
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Today, the same English muffins are $2.99, the eggs were $1.19, and the box of oatmeal was $1.99.
Not good.
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It's a cyclic thing - when the poor are deprived of too much of the bounty of their hard work, they rebel and things change maybe for a hundred years or so, and then the "bosses" get greedy again and steal from the poor until the poor rebel again. Look at history, and see why the guild system arose. When it became corrupted by the "bosses" it fell in disrepute and the poor were oppressed again, and then the unions rose, and all was reasonably equitable until the unions were corrupted by the "bosses" - but by then, society had during that period also passed laws benefiting the poor workers (the length of the work week, overtime pay, sick leave, paid vacations, health insurance...). Only now, even the laws are being corrupted - the work week has crept up from 35 hours a week in the 70's to an average of 50 hours a week now, people are fired for using their sick leave and maternity leave, overtime has been legally removed from a lot of different job categories (my job is one of them - I can be "encouraged" to work overtime, but I won't be paid for it), health insurance is no longer a given and hasn't been, really, since the mid 80's. Bosses often treat their employees with contempt and when they don't they are oblivious to their plight. It's criminally wrong for people working a full time job to be unable to support themselves and be denied pay raises (just basic cost of living increases) when the bosses make sure they receive huge pay raises each year. American businesses are more productive now than ever before, on average they make larger profits, so it makes no economic sense for the wage laborers to be so poor, for there to be such a huge gap between what the person on the bottom makes compared to the person on the top.
Eh, but you've heard this rant from me far too many times.
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