Bean's Cafe
Maggie Carey, Executive Director
Barbara Lee Bennett, Social Services Coordinator
Susan Churchill, Volunteer Coordinator
1101 E. Third Ave., PO Box 110940
Anchorage, Alaska 99510
(907) 274-9595

Not just another soup kitchen, Bean's Cafe is a very, very good one, where hungry people get more than just a meal: they get dignity, self-respect, and a hand up and out of the troubles that put them on the street.

Bean's was founded in 1979 by Lynn Bellew, a migrant from the Lower 48 who came to Alaska in her pickup truck with her daughter and, appalled to see poor Alaskans dining from dumpsters with little alternative but a traditional prayer-oriented rescue mission, started serving soup out of the back of the truck.

Before long, Bean's moved into a cinder-block building in downtown Anchorage, and just as quickly outgrew those quarters, its 79-person limit imposed by fire-safety laws forcing hungry diners to form long lines outside even in the dead of an Anchorage winter. Bean's got a $600,000 state allocation to build the large, well-equipped building and high-tech food-service kitchen that now serves from 300 to 400 people daily, breakfast weekdays and a hearty, main-meal lunch seven days a week, 365 days a year -- a total of some 350,000 meals served last year.

Hearty meals at that, based on the bill of fare one weekday, a tin platter heavily loaded with a slab of hot pollock and a bun, spicy macaroni and cheese, green beans, salad, prunes and figs, white cake ... and the institution's trademark, a large, steaming bowl of hearty bean soup. "It may be the only meal some of them get today," Bennett said.

Feeding hungry people is only one-third of Bean's mission. It also operates as a simple day shelter for homeless people, its doors standing open throughout the day, no questions asked, to anyone who walks in and is willing to obey its basic rules of behavior.

And, through Bennett and volunteer assistants, Bean's offers simple, pragmatic social services helping some 1,500 people each year with such fundamental needs as a safe place to store important papers or medications, first aid, and referrals to literacy training.

With a staff of only fourteen and literally hundreds of volunteers, Bean's gets by on a lean $500,000 annual budget, looking to community donations for fully 85 percent of the food it serves, including road-killed moose supplied by the state Fish & Game Department.

Bean's also shines in fund-raising and community publicity efforts, with such creative ideas as the annual "Bean-A-Fit" drive, in which citizens of Anchorage volunteer to host bean suppers at home for the cafe's benefit and sell bags of bean-soup mix (each year a new specialty) for $3 a bag. In a new twist this year, residents were invited to compete in a Bean Soup Cook-Off to determine the coming year's mix and raise money.

All the feature stories on @GRASS-ROOTS.ORG's pages are reported and written by Robin Garr, a prize-winning journalist who has visited more than 500 innovative grassroots programs in all 50 states since 1990.

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