SAN FRANCISCO, CA On October 3rd, just one day shy of St. Anthony’s 58th anniversary of serving San Francisco’s poor, St. Anthony’s will opened its LEED (Leadership in Environmental and Energy Design) certified Social Services Center. The new center will enable the historic San Francisco non-profit to serve more people in its Free Medical Clinic, Employment Program and Technology Lab, and Social Work Center, as well as being home to St. Anthony’s Auxiliary Dining Room.

DEDICATION EVENT

The short and sweet building dedication took place between 12 noon and 1:30 pm at 150 Golden Gate in San Francisco, CA, with hors d’oeuvres and beverages provided by sustainably minded food purveyors such as Green’s, Perbacco, Serpentine, Farmer Brown, Alive!, and Numi Tea. Building tours took place after a brief dedication ceremony with local dignitaries and St. Anthony’s program participants serving as key speakers.

BUILDING GREEN

Designed by HKIT architectural firm, the new service center features open and airy waiting rooms with excellent air quality, natural light, regionally harvested and manufactured wood doors, and warm colored, low-VOC painted walls. By committing to the use of low emitting materials, environmentally responsible equipment, and conscientious management of construction waste, St. Anthony’s is leading the wave of high-level environmental responsibility in the non-profit and social services sector.

PROJECT HISTORY

St. Anthony’s former social services building, located at 121 Golden Gate, was housed in a non-reinforced masonry building that was once home to a parking garage. When retrofitting proved to be too costly and rebuilding impossible without a discontinuation of crucial drop-in services during the building’s renovation, St. Anthony’s looked for other options.

The availability of 150 Golden Gate, across the street, gave St. Anthony’s an opportunity to continue its services while creating a healthier, greener, and structurally sound place to serve guests and clients. St. Anthony’s embarked on an unprecedented Capital Campaign to fund the building, which brought a new category of donors from all over the United States. Many of them have, in the process, learned about the services provided by St. Anthony’s, and become donors to the existing programs.

ST. ANTHONY’S AND ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY

The conscious effort towards greater sustainability is an intrinsic part of the system and culture of St. Anthony Foundation. As a Franciscan organization, the tandem roles of environmental responsibility and social responsibility are fostered in a tradition of social justice. In the Tenderloin, where environmental illnesses such as asthma and diabetes are rampant, St. Anthony’s Green social services building is a discernible investment in a healthier environment for San Francisco’s poor.

St. Anthony’s efforts of sustainability are supported from many different avenues. In addition to a Green Service Center, the in-house “green team” constantly assesses internal practices of sustainability, bringing impactful changes in the way the organization recycles, composts, and reuses. Clothing is recycled and redistributed at the Clothing and Housewares Program; Computers are refurbished in the Employment Program Technology Lab; and thousands of pounds of food each week are reclaimed, served, and finally composted in the St. Anthony Dining Room, which has served almost 35 million meals to date.

Low-income San Franciscans will pay for the second disappointing public budget of the year. Last month, the city passed a budget with staggering cuts to health and human services, especially for poor people. The city budget will reduce or close many non-profits serving the poor.

This month, the state ended the longest budget stalemate in California’s history by passing one that slashes services to the poor and homeless. These are the most vulnerable of the most vulnerable.

The Working Poor

• $70 million cut from child care for CalWorks families
• CalWorkers paid the same wages as in 2004

Seniors

• The entire $190.1 million cut from Senior Citizens Property and Renters’ Tax Assistance
• All cost of living increases cut for 2 consecutive years
• Cuts in Senior Community Employment, Home Delivered Meals, Adult Protective Services, and Multipurpose Senior Services Program

Families and Sick People

• Inadequate cap on dental coverage for children in the Healthy Families program
• Apply twice a year to keep children in Medi-Cal
• $7.7 million cut from mental health managed care
• 5% cut in provider rate for health, dental, and vision plans
• No California Prescription Drug Program for another year

The Homeless

• Complete elimination of the Emergency Homeless Assistance Program. Two San Francisco shelters will lose significant funding.

At St. Anthony Foundation, we’re getting ready for the new guests these cuts will bring to our doors.  That’s why we’re putting up new facilities and refocusing our work. The future is asking more of all of us.

The primary goal of the Dining Room is to provide sustenance for our hungry guests in and environment of dignity and respect.  In doing this we are able to provide a welcoming community, friendly ears to listen, and referrals to other services in St. Anthony Foundation’s network of care.  Our ability to serve every guest in the Dining Room is made greater by truly understanding them and their specific needs.

More than one third of our guests rely on the meals served in the Dining Room as their only source of food each day; many must decide between paying for rent or even for medicine before budgeting for food.  We understand that people with food insecurities need to reach satiety in their main meal of the day, to accomplish that a meal with 20% fat is advised. 

Beef and other meats are critical to our guests.  The concentrated protein helps prevent the cravings that lead guests to spend what little money they may have on fast food or convenience store items high in saturated and trans fats. All of these foods can cause further harm to our guests’ health when eaten on a regular basis, leading to obesity and related diseases, like diabetes.

The homeless and low-income population we serve also need a supplemental diet that focuses on prevention and other special needs such as wound healing, vision impairment and bone health.  To ensure that the Dining Room is providing meals that best meet these needs, St. Anthony’s invited a Registered Dietitian to conduct a nutritional assessment of our food.  The results indicated that the Dining Room’s menu provides excellent sources of macro and micronutrients, reflecting home cooked meals rather than processed foods.  Meals also contain higher nutritional value, not only when compared to the alternatives found in our neighborhood, such as fast food and inexpensive convenience store snacks, but also when compared to other food service agencies. 

The study showed Vitamins E, A and K at “good” levels. To raise that rating to “excellent” the Dining Room immediately doubled the amount of spinach and carrots cooked in meals, and has also added more meals with tuna to increase Omega-3 intake.  Meals are now being cooked with vegetable oil rather than margarine, which immediately decreases trans fats 15%, with a long term goal of completely eliminating trans fats by 2010.

The Fr. Alfred Boeddeker Awards honor individuals and organizations who have helped carry out a vision shared with St. Anthony’s founder, Fr. Alfred Boedekker. Rooted in the Franciscan tradition, Fr. Alfred envisioned a world where every person had adequate food, clothing, and shelter and was treated with the dignity and respect all human beings deserve.

Today’s Awards Luncheon took place in St. Anthony Foundation’s new green, LEED certified social services building at 150 Golden Gate Avenue. Awards were presented to Larry and Sergio Nibbi of Nibbi Brothers Construction and The San Francisco Hilton for their dedicated support to the work of St. Anthony Foundation.

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom dropped by the Tenderloin Tech Lab this morning to showcase his latest initiative: wireless internet coverage to 12 low-income housing projects in San Francisco’s Tenderloin.

The Tenderloin Tech Lab is a partnership with Network Ministries, and will offer computer classes and a drop in computer lab. The Employment Program portion of the tech lab offers a job search program to provide support and guidance for individuals and groups who need assistance finding employment.

Mayor Newsom and select members of the press were given a private “sneak preview” of the new Tech Lab and the rest of our new Green LEED Certified Building. The official unveiling to the public will take place on Friday, October 3.

A few weeks back we blogged about our Backpack Giveaway in San Francisco’s Tenderloin. Hundreds of kids in the neighborhood got their choice of a new backpack, loaded with school supplies, along with a few healthy snacks. This is event is many of our staff’s favorite day, many of us staying late to volunteer. Helping our youngest and most vulnerable neighbors prepare for a new school year is a reward unto itself. You can only begin to imagine our surprise when we were given these hand written and decorated cards from two of the children who received backpacks.  To Alan and Vanessa: You’re quite welcome! Make us proud, learn lots, and do your very best.

St. Anthony Foundation is registering voters. Low-income voters, homeless voters, veterans who have fallen off government radars, seniors who’ve been pushed to the margins of the community. You don’t have to have a job to vote. You don’t even have to have a home. St. Anthony Foundation reminds our guests of this and helps them to register.

Our Justice Education and Advocacy Program does much of this work all year round. They talk with our guests and clients about the issues that affect their lives.  They engage guests in post card and letter campaigns, fax and email blasts. They drive guests and clients to Sacramento to meet with policy makers on health care, housing, and hunger.

Now St. Anthony Foundation is among the hundreds of advocacy and service organizations in the country registering people to vote.  We’ve hired two interns to do on-site canvassing with our advocacy staff. How our guests and clients vote is up to them. What matters to us is that they do vote; that they come in from the margins of society and participate.

The Tenderloin’s direct-service providers have a double edged sword to bear.  The families, seniors, men and women we serve have a tough neighborhood they call home.  To best serve our clients we must be in that neighborhood, close to home, easily accessible with the services that help move people out of poverty, and towards healthy and sustainable futures.

At St. Anthony’s we do all we can to provide the services in a welcoming and safe environment.  It can be a tough neighborhood, but that is no reason people seeking resources and refuge should not feel comfortable coming to St. Anthony’s to find them. We have an amazing team of Client Safety Service staff who do just that, they make sure our guests and clients are safe and at ease when at our programs and service sites. 

There has been a rumbling recently about direct-service lines, the juxtaposition of good service to the community and the unfortunate elements that have become intertwined with the neighborhood’s reputation.   What is most important is to remember that the exceptions are not the rule, and that we must continue to advocate for the good of the most vulnerable in our community.

Slow Food Nation, a four-day festival organized by Alice Waters and the organization Slow Food USA, kicked off this past weekend throughout San Francisco. The event, which featured lectures, food tastings, and cooking demonstrations, sought to highlight how America’s current food system contributes to our myriad health problems, and to promote a system of food production using eco-friendly farming and fair labor practices. Hence the name Slow Food–a rebuttal to fast food and all its discontents.

But at $65 bucks a pop just to get in the door, Slow Food Nation also brought to light many of the disparities in access to the foods they’re promoting. Within sight of the artisan food tastings hosted out front of the Civic Center lies the Tenderloin, a neighborhood with the city’s highest concentration of poor and homeless. High poverty rates and an exorbitant cost of living force many of the Tenderloin’s families to spend the majority of their limited incomes on rent, leaving little at the end of each month for food that’s healthy, nutritious, and not of the fast variety.

I too couldn’t afford the event’s steep price tag, so I’m not sure if solving the Tenderloin’s food problems were on the agenda. For their sake, and the sake of everyone else living in a neighborhood without a single grocery store, let’s hope so.

St. Anthony Foundation offers Healthy Snacks and Backpacks to Tenderloin children

SAN FRANCISCO, CA August 27, 2008 With one of the city’s highest concentrations of children and some of the lowest income levels, Tenderloin children have a high risk factor for both incomplete educations and nutrition-based illnesses, such as obesity and diabetes. To help students and parents work together on building a successful and healthy school year, St. Anthony Foundation will hand out free backpacks filled with dictionaries, notebooks, and healthy eating guides, as well as healthy snacks prepared in the St. Anthony Dining Room, to neighborhood children in St. Anthony’s Green Services Building located at 150 Golden Gate Avenue in San Francisco on August 27, 2008 at 4pm.

The link between healthy food and education has garnered national attention with the implementation of Senate Bill 80 which as of this school year requires that school districts impose restrictions on the use of fats and artificial trans fats. But educators and health providers recognize that interest in both education and good nutrition starts at home.

“We know that children perform better in school when they are eating well. By equipping parents with a better understanding of how to fuel their children’s concentration and retention with healthy snacks, and raising children’s back-to-school excitement with new backpacks, Tenderloin children can start the new school year excited about their health and their education,” noted St. Anthony Foundation pediatrician, Dr. Katy Broner, who will be onsite to provide snacking suggestions to children and their parents. St. Anthony’s will be opening its new pediatric clinic in October of this year.

The backpacks range in colors, sizes, and shapes, as will the students who receive them. The backpacks are donated by groups or individuals through Family Giving Tree and Raft, and are filled with school supplies. Snacks such as apples, raisins, and real juice will be available for the children that arrive to receive their backpacks.