PROJECT BREAD
THE WALK FOR HUNGER
Ellen Parker, Executive Director, E-Mail: ellen_parker@projectbread.org
160 N. Washington St.
Boston, Mass 02114
(617) 723-5000
(617) 248-8877 fax
E-Mail: Info@Projectbread.org
Website: http://www.projectbread.org

Project Bread staffers take calls on the FoodSource Hotline.

Seldom is the path from charity to social change marked as clearly as in the three-decade history of Boston's nationally recognized Project Bread.

Founded in the yeasty political environment of the late 1960s by Paulist priest Pat Hughes as a straightforward fund-raising "walk" (and one of the first of its kind anywhere), Project Bread has continued in that important role. It now raises $2.5 million annually, enough to make it by far the largest single funder of emergency food and nutrition organizations throughout the Boston Metropolitan area. For the first several years of its life, that was all Project Bread did, as a volunteer-driven, seasonal activity that geared up every spring for another walk in May; and by most standards it was enough.

But it didn't take the project's organizers and supporters long to decide that raising money for feeding people alone was NOT enough, and Project Bread both grew and evolved, taking as its mission not only to "alleviate" hunger in Boston but to "prevent and end" it.

Project Bread also works with state agencies to increase participation in the federal School Breakfast, Summer Food Service and Outreach to the Elderly programs, provides training to emergency providers, and writes grants using the money raised by the Walk for Hunger to fund more than 350 food pantries, soup kitchens, food banks and food salvage programs throughout eastern and central Massachusetts.

Although Project Bread's promise is to use all the money raised by the walk to fund direct feeding services, it's not slow to raise additional money toward the loftier goal of ending hunger. Its efforts in that realm range from an active FoodSource Hotline (800-645-8333) that hungry people can call for information about where to find food, to extensive legislative efforts to eradicate hunger in Massachusetts through public policy.

Among its victories in this field, Project Bread oversaw one of the nation's first Childhood Hunger Identification Project studies. Then, with the Physician Task Force on Child Hunger in Massachusetts (an ad hoc, highly visible group of pediatricians that mobilizes periodically as a collaborative undertaking of Project Bread), it persuaded the legislature and then-Gov. William Weld to fully fund the federal nutrition program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC), making WIC a de facto entitlement in Massachusetts.

Project Bread's redbrick headquarters in North Boston.

In the last legislative session, working with Catholic Charities and the Council of Jewish Philanthropies, Project Bread pressed successfully for state funding for food stamps for legal immigrants, a benefit that federal "welfare reform" had withdrawn.

And now, with the sad fruits of the state's harsh version of "welfare reform" showing up as an increase in hungry people and a growing strain on the capability of emergency food providers to meet the need, Project Bread and the Physician Task Force are embarked on a new Massachusetts Child Hunger Initiative, a bipartisan effort co-chaired by U.S. Rep. Joseph P. Kennedy II and Suffolk County District Attorney Ralph C. Martin II, which will gather information demonstrating the specific scope and nature of the need, then present an action plan outlining policy initiatives needed to end it.

Operating out of a large but spartan suite of offices in a hulking old brick building at the foot of the Charlestown Bridge in North Boston, Project Bread has a staff of 30 and operates on an annual budget of about $4 million, of which $2.5 million comes from the Walk For Hunger and of which more than $2 million flows back out to emergency food providers.

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.

Browse his book, Reinvesting In America, at Amazon.com.

Send him E-mail.

Back to the @GRASS-ROOTS.ORG Home Page