Hosea House
Amanda Pulliam, executive director
2635 Gravois
St. Louis, Mo. 63118
(314) 773-5438

Like so many of the best model programs, Hosea House started in a small way to address a specific problem, but quickly grew as its creative leaders saw an array of needs and came up with creative ways to address them.

It was founded in 1977 by a non-denominational group of people associated with churches on the city’s South Side, who were concerned about the increasing number of homeless people on the street and responded by holding rummage sales. They soon added a food pantry, and over the next decade added (and sometimes spun off) services to meet a broad range of social needs.

The group’s organizers soon saw that grassroots organizing -- bringing neighbors together to identify needs and create innovative responses -- was the way to go. Although its primary activity remains food distribution (it is the city’s largest food pantry, distributing some 20,000 pounds of food to 4,000 people each month), the real point of Hosea House’s programs is to find ways to get people out of hunger.

Its efforts fall into two broad categories: First, they’ve found a number of creative ways to make more food available to poor people at minimal cost; second, they’re looking beyond food provision to becoming what Pulliam calls "a community center."

One of their most effective models on the food-provision side is a creative link between farm and market called the Rural-Urban Linkage Project (LINK). This project, a joint venture of Hosea House and Lutheran Family Services of St. Louis, works like this: Hosea House contracts with two Missouri farms -- a couple in the town of Bourbon who grow organic crops, and a poor, elderly farmer in the "Bootheel" area -- to provide produce for distribution in the food pantry.

By going directly to the farms, Hosea House gets produce at low cost by cutting out the intermediate levels of wholesaler and distributor, while supporting the low-income farmers with reasonable prices. But that’s only a part of the genius. By getting guaranteed fresh produce, the pantry gets considerably improved shelf life compared with shopworn produce donated by groceries and the like. What’s more, Hosea House hires unemployed and homeless people (for minimum wage) to help harvest the crops, providing them some source of income. And finally, by harvesting more produce than the food pantry needs, Hosea House sells the excess at FULL retail at a city farmer’s market, providing enough extra income to pay the harvesters and other incidental expenses. They hope to add a third farm and increase sales, hoping to evolve gradually from a food pantry into a community food cooperative.

In a separate project, Hosea House organized about 40 food pantries to pool financial resources for increased buying power, and arranged with Tyson Foods to purchase chicken by the truckload for a favorable price.

In addition to feeding, though, the organization is moving in many other directions. Several years ago, organizers started referring food clients to other social-service agencies, but noticing that people didn’t have transportation and tended to be apathetic about following through on referrals, Hosea House began providing peer counseling and education, using formerly homeless people and experienced welfare clients to work with the people.

Hosea House’s new tutoring program, "Back to the Basics," uses community volunteers, business and civic leaders to provide intense education sessions in whatever subjects the people say they need: parenting, stress management, budgeting.

Its many other projects include: