Sisters of the Road Cafe
Genny Nelson, Executive Director
133 N.W. Sixth Ave.
Portland, Ore. 97209
(503) 222-5694

It looks pretty much like any downscale but cozy urban eatery, this storefront with its beige stucco walls and eight or ten purple stools lining both sides of a serving counter, with a bustling kitchen at the back and a dozen tables surrounded with mismatched hard chairs crammed into a nook at one side.

Hungry folks stream in from the moment the doors open at 10 a.m. weekdays until closing time at 3 p.m.; everyone takes a number, places an order for a hearty meat or vegetarian meal (Mexican food on Fridays), and takes a seat while waiting for a friendly, efficient server to hustle out a generously loaded plate.

Welcome to Sisters of the Road Cafe, a non-profit eatery where everyone's welcome, although most of the clientele is made up of the poor folks, some of them homeless, who hang out in Portland's Burnside neighborhood (Old Town-Chinatown), the city's "skid row" for a century or more, now showing some signs of gentrification around the edges.

Lunch is $1.25, Executive Director and co-founder Genny Nelson explains; if you haven't got a buck and a quarter, a $1 food stamp will work (Sisters of the Road pioneered the 1985 federal legislation that permitted the use of food stamps by food providers for homeless people). And if you haven't got the money or a food stamp, you can "barter" for your meal by helping out in the restaurant, bussing tables and doing other needed chores. There's also a program similar to Berkeley Cares in which Portland citizens may purchase and distribute meal vouchers for the cafe in lieu of giving cash to panhandlers.

Meanwhile, a good proportion of the cafe's small staff, including the waiters, head dishwasher, even the assistant chef, are formerly homeless, participants in its job-training program, earning a small wage while regaining job skills and dealing with the issues that have kept them on the streets. More staffers, even the restaurant's "floor manager," are graduates of the program who have worked their way into more responsible paying jobs. Job-training participants may stay for 12 months, during which time they work a five-hour day and also meet regularly with Portland State University social-work students to address issues of dependency, self-esteem, or whatever else stands between them and recovery. While not every trainee has ended up with a fulfilling job, reports on the 18 participants in 1995-96 show a consistent trend toward improvement of their housing and employment situation and include a number of inspiring success stories of formerly homeless individuals who now hold good jobs and are moving up.

This is a wonderful model, heading toward its 18th birthday this autumn, far and away the oldest and most experienced of the small but growing group of programs of its type (Atlanta's Cafe 458 and Chicago's Inspiration Cafe among others) that go beyond the simple "soup kitchen" concept by adding dignity, pride, and a clear understanding that their mission isn't just about feeding people but about rebuilding lives by building relationships.

Sisters of the Road traces its roots to a women's advocacy program that Genny Nelson and Sandy Gooch started in Burnside back in 1979. Called "Box-Car Bertha's" after a fiery advocate of the rights of women "hoboes" during the Depression, the program lasted only a few months before the end of the federal CETA program took away its funding, it gave Gooch and Nelson a clear view of the needs of women, and men too, in the community. The growing number of skid-row women, some with children, had no place safe to go; and in their experience, the region's soup kitchens and shelters were demeaning places that handed out bad food and long prayers amid an air of arrogant paternalism. Sisters of the Road Cafe (continued)

Sisters of the Road -- meaning "women hoboes" and named after Box-Car Bertha's autobiography -- came into being to fill these gaps. Inspired by the Catholic Worker movement, its original purposes, to which it has remained consistently faithful, are: (1) To offer a safe public place for everyone, especially women and children; (2) to offer nourishing meals at little cost or in exchange for labor; and (3) to offer job training and employment experience.

All of this occurs within a philosophy of non-violence and the concept that Catholic Worker movement's Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day called "gentle personalism." Visitors are greeted with hospitality and apparent love; violence is greeted with a firm yet gentle process of "naming the behavior" and declaring it unacceptable. (I saw this in action during my visit when an angry man began shouting and cursing the cafe's cashier. Genny Nelson quietly defused the situation, and the man left, unhappy but knowing that he would be welcome to return the next day.)

Sisters of the Road Cafe is a business, and a thriving one, although its revenue at $1.25 per meal doesn't even approach the $3 cost of preparing each meal. Further, more than half of the 260 meals it serves on an average weekday are bartered, not paid for with cash or food stamps, and Nelson says that percentage is rising dramatically in the wake of welfare "reform."

It is both a public restaurant, subject to all the health and sanitation codes as any other, and a non-profit organization, depending on individual contributions, fund-raising events and grants to support its staff of sixteen of whom three are part-time volunteers. Eligible for TEFAP assistance from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, it took a loss last year when the USDA commodities program ended; it also receives products from the Oregon Food Bank, but runs into a Catch-22 in that much of the food available from the food bank is past its "pull date" for public sale, which means that the cafe, as a restaurant serving the public, isn't permitted to use it.

As if this weren't enough, Sisters of the Road Cafe also provides a weekly self-help support group for women; handles mail and provides a postal address for any homeless person who needs one; and makes large bulletin boards available (in English and Spanish) for community announcements. They're renovating another storefront next door for additional office space, and to house a non-violence library and self-help resource center.

What's more, a major grant application going out soon will seek funding (perhaps in the range of $200,000) to set up another restaurant, this one a profit making coffee house, that will seek to earn significant revenue for the organization while providing additional, more advanced employment opportunities for graduates of the Cafe's job-training program.

But however Sisters of the Road grows, Nelson says, it always comes back to the basics: "Nonviolence, personal responsibility, relationships, that's what it's all about."

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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