The Bernardine Center (Supercupboard)
Sr. Rose MacDermott, OSF, Advocacy Education Center Coordinator
Sr. Carolyn Muus, OSF, Supercupboard Coordinator
Sr. Phyllis Duncan, OSF, Emergency Food Cupboard Coordinator
Sr. Reginata Nowicka, OSF, Social Spirituality Coordinator
2625 W. Ninth St.
Chester, Pa. 19013
(610) 497-3225
(610) 497-3434 fax

Add Chester, Pa., to the unhappy list of American cities so wracked by poverty that just about every citizen who CAN leave has done so. Like East St. Louis, Benton Harbor and Camden, this once-thriving industrial town just down the Delaware from Philadelphia saw its life and livelihood die when most of its industry moved South during the decades after World War II. According to a recent Philadelphia Inquirer article, Chester is more than $4 million in debt and is unlikely to be able to pay it off. The state has taken over its troubled schools and may step in to enforce a financial recovery plan for city government, which recently fell into Democratic hands after indictments and prison sentences marked the end of 125 years of Republican rule.

Chester, the 12th largest city in Pennsylvania despite its shrunken population of 42,000, has the state's worst crime rate (three times the per capita violent crime of Atlanta!) and assesses its few remaining residents the highest property taxes in Pennsylvania. It also ranks among the state's worst in poverty (six out of 10 families receive public assistance), and unemployment.

Overall, an urban-affairs expert told the Philadelphia newspaper, Chester is almost unique among American cities in terms of the severity of its plight; yet the situation is almost unknown outside the area, because Chester is geographically and economically "disconnected" from its neighbors to the north in Philadelphia and south in Wilmington. Indeed, it's only a few miles from such posh suburbs as Bryn Mawr and the other elegant towns along Philadelphia's old Main Line.

With such a challenge at hand, poverty fighters could be excused for taking on the job of emergency feeding, housing and clothing alone and declaring that they have done all they could. Instead, though, Chester is the birthplace of the model "supercupboards" concept, a movement that has spread from here throughout Pennsylvania and has begun popping up in many parts of the nation.

The Bernardine Center opened in 1986 as an emergency food cupboard (local lingo for "food pantry"), and so it remains, providing food for some 400 families each month -- a total of more than 4 1/2 million pounds as of last winter -- along with a Thrift Shop and clothes closet to help people through tough times.

But the Supercupboard, as the name implies, is something MORE than just a food provider. Started in 1987 with money passed through the Archdiocese of Philadelphia from the Hands Across America project, it is designed to help welfare mothers get the tools they need to regain self-reliance by passing out education and motivation as well as food.

The concept is simple: Women referred to the program by food cupboard workers, social workers, churches and grassroots groups participate in weekly classes -- five hours, once a week, for a seven-week session (now being expanded to 10 weeks). A large chunk of the curriculum, prepared with the help of the Penn State Extension Service, covers nutrition education, ranging from shopping as a wise consumer to menu planning, food preparation, and creating a balanced menu. In addition, staff and guest speakers cover a broad range of self-improvement topics including parenting, gardening, family relationships, home repairs, budgeting, applying and interviewing for jobs, and that all-important element called self-esteem. The center also provides child care so the moms can attend without worrying about their children, and transportation to make sure everyone gets to the cozy, homelike center in time for class.

It's a slow, tortuous trail, with room for only about 40 mothers per year in a community where the need is much, much more. But the mothers who make it through are showing positive effects, even in Chester's debilitating environment. Quite a few have gone on to earn their GED, attended nursing school or even gone on to college; many find jobs, and best of all, just about all the participants have become self-reliant to the extent that they rarely need to come back to the Center for emergency food any more.

Supercupboards offer a useful lesson in replication. Organized from the outset through the Philadelphia Anti-Hunger Coalition (formerly the Anti-Hunger Council), a total of six supercupboards were organized initially in the Philadelphia area; now there are 10 or 12, counting a couple of semi-active organizations that hold only one or two classes a year.

Moreover, under the umbrella of the Pennsylvania Coalition on Food and Nutrition in Harrisburg, supercupboards have sprung up in Harrisburg and Pittsburgh, and there's a commitment to start one in each of the state's counties. Groups in Maryland, Kentucky and California have requested the Council's materials, and many advocates have come to Chester to see how the Bernardine Supercupboard works. The concept is relatively easy to replicate, Sister Rosa says, because it's relatively simple; the organizers are happy to share information by offering their operation as a model; it is not a terribly expensive program; and it is easily adaptable -- no two Supercupboard programs are exactly alike, as every sponsor tailors the curriculum and the process to meet its local needs.

Supercupboard II
Karen Schmidt, Coordinator
c/o Presbytery of Philadelphia
2200 Locust St.
Philadelphia, Pa. 19103
(215) 732-1842
(215) 546-7800 fax

Grace Lutheran Church, a little red-brick building that looks more like a community center than a traditional church, is one of the few sturdy buildings in good repair for blocks around its corner site in Philadelphia’s battered Mantua neighborhood, a landscape of abandoned buildings, vacant lots, broken glass and graffiti.

But behind a pitted parking lot on the corner of 36th and Mount Vernon Street behind the church, there’s a virtual oasis, a tiny urban glade with shrubs and shade trees. On this sunny spring afternoon, a crew of eight men and women and a handful of toddlers are working hard to rake it, weed it, cart off bags of garbage and litter, and turn it into a raised-bed garden. Working with enthusiasm, they break up and pile fallen branches and carefully set out boards to make sturdy rectangles into which they’ll shovel a pile of rich donated garden soil.

Welcome to Super Cupboard II, a small, tentative but optimistic step in the evolution of the model Super Cupboard program that got its start a decade ago right here in Philadelphia and nearby Chester.

It grew like this, explains Karen Schmidt: Over the years, five regional non profits -- the Philadelphia Food Bank, SHARE, the Penn State Cooperative Extension Service, the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, and the Presbytery of Philadelphia -- have been the primary sponsors of Super Cupboard programs in the city. (Super Cupboards, covered in the RIA field report on the Bernadine Center in Chester, Pa., provide a brief but thorough course in nutrition, self-esteem, budgeting, parenting and related skills to recipients of emergency assistance at the area’s food pantries.)

Several years ago, concerned because unpredictable funding made it difficult to offer Super Cupboards consistently and effectively, the group began working collaboratively to seek funding to hire a staff person to oversee planning of Super Cupboards and get the program better organized. Initially, a federal “Healthy Start” grant in 1991 funded two Super Cupboards -- one at Grace Lutheran and one in Southwestern Philadelphia -- with a particular training focus on improving infant birth weight by targeting pregnant women and new mothers and their nutritional needs, as the funding required. Last year, the groups followed up with a matching grant from Pew Charitable Trust to operate 20 Super Cupboards in Philadelphia and Chester, which Schmidt coordinates from an office at the Presbytery.

Meanwhile, she said, with funding thus stabilized in the tenth year after Super Cupboards began in 1987, providers and recipients alike -- with welfare “reform” as an additional driving force -- were beginning to ask what MORE the program could do to lift welfare recipients toward self-sufficiency. Conscious that the agenda of the traditional Super Cupboards (which Schmidt now calls “Super Cupboard I”) was largely imposed by service providers, she turned to the recipients themselves for input as to the directions a second-round Super Cupboard -- “Super Cupboard II” -- might take. The answer was clear: They wanted help with budgeting, and help that went beyond just handling resources to instruction in using banks, establishing accounts, understanding interest: matters that perhaps ought to be learned in school but that, in reality, don’t form part of public education in inner-city Philadelphia today. So, after fits and starts, two Super Cupboard II sessions -- one at Grace and another in a different part of the city -- started five- or six-week sessions that will graduate on June 11, 1997. In addition to budgeting and banking advice from experts, the groups quickly added on urban gardening components, and picked up a third piece, some advanced instruction in low-fat cooking and healthy menu planning from the Penn State extension workers who provide a similar component in Super Cupboard I.

Schmidt has more Super Cupboard II programs in mind, although the seasonality of urban gardening makes it a possibility only for spring and summer sessions; she’s also talking about ways to bring in career planning, job readiness, goal setting.

In other related developments, they’ve also begun targeting Super Cupboard I sessions toward special audiences -- in addition to the pregnant women and mothers program mentioned above, they’ve had sessions for teenagers and pregnant and parenting teens in Philadelphia and for HIV positive individuals in Chester. They’re also contemplating a Super Cupboard I for pregnant teenagers in high schools during school hours.

Finally, even with Super Cupboard II just getting under way, Schmidt is already looking toward Super Cupboard III. Based on some of the advocacy work that Sister Rose has been doing at the Bernardine Super Cupboard, she’d like to try working with a group that would focus on self-advocacy and community organizing, identifying a local need and learning how to make a difference by working effectively to address it.

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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