Sabathani Community Center
James Cook, executive director
Clarissa Wall, director of the family-resource center
310 E. 38th St.
Minneapolis, Minn. 55409
(612) 827-5981

This prototypical grass-roots service organization houses one of the largest food "shelves" in Minnesota, but it does much more too. The 24-year-old operation started as a program to keep youngsters off the streets at Sabathani Baptist Church, located in one of the region's few predominantly black neighborhoods on the near south side of Minneapolis. It quickly outgrew that single purpose and almost as quickly graduated to independent status. It now fills the entire basement of a renovated old junior-high school building that also houses a group of other non-profits (including the Emergency Food Shelf Network).

Clarissa Wall, a jolly woman, herself a product of the community, has worked at the organization for 22 years, and her pride shows through. She is ready to cite statistics about the center's traditional food-shelf operation (11,325 unduplicated individuals served last year, and neat, precise computer records to prove it). But more important, the people here know the meaning of self-reliance, and their pattern of growth demonstrates an intelligent evolution from feeding people toward providing them the resources they need to feed themselves.

One key development here came when Wall realized that the same people kept coming back to the food shelf month after month, so the group has developed twice monthly workshops focusing on the street-smart use of food resources. Staff covers such logical areas as planning meals wisely with the food available and stretching the family's food dollar by taking advantage of sales and specials.

In one particularly replicable model, Wall has established what she calls the center's Coupon Corner. She gathers coupons from volunteers, ranging widely through area churches, businesses and clubs asking people to donate coupons for food and related products to the center. There, more volunteers sort the coupons into categories and store them in envelopes - one each for meats, produce, prepared foods; others for cosmetics, kitchen supplies, even cigarettes. ("I don't judge them," Wall says. "They're going to buy them anyway, so if I can save them a little money, they'll have it for food.") The recipients are urged to go through the coupons and take what they can use; and as an incentive, there's a monthly contest in which the person who saved the most money using coupons wins a prize. Last month's winner saved an incredible $198 on her grocery bill by purchasing almost everything she bought with coupons.

Another creative idea is the center's annual Income Tax Assistance program, in which workers aggressively recruit eligible poor people to qualify for Earned Income Tax Credit and rent credit assistance.

They have a huge clothes closet, supplied with truckload-size donations of used items from local corporations and schools; and they constantly struggle to recycle furniture for people getting back into housing.

The center also has opened two emergency houses for homeless families WITH CHILDREN, and provides an informal kind of "intensive case management" for the families housed there - an average of a three-week stay - pulling together all available resources to help them get back on their feet.

There's a bright, happy spirit about this place, and their good ideas seem to be working.

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.

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