The annual report of cities with green buildings was released, and I am surprised to say that San Francisco has fallen from second to third this year. In the San Francisco-area 173 buildings qualified for the EPA’s Energy Star label, down from 194 buildings in 2008, according to an article on SFGate this morning.

St. Anthony Foundation hopped on the green bandwagon a few years back when we began planning our new LEED certified Social Services Building at 150 Golden Gate.  Now that we are all moved in and after a year of operation this new space has helped us not only meet the vastly increased demand for services in recent months, but has allowed us to do so without skyrocketing utilities costs.

In fact our building is one of the first green, gold-level LEED certified human services buildings in San Francisco.  LEED is an internationally recognized green building certification system, that verifies a building was designed and built with optimal energy savings, water efficiency, CO₂ emissions reduction, improved indoor environmental quality, and stewardship of resources and sensitivity to their impacts.

We are pretty darn proud of that and plan to continue finding ways to serve our poor and homeless neighbors in an efficient, eco-friendly and sustainable way.

St. Anthony Foundation was proud to be in the magazine California Home & Design for its new green building at 150 Golden Gate. After years in a crumbling brick building across the street, this LEED-Gold certified building has allowed St. Anthony to show its environmental stewardship. May is already underway with two celebrations this week–namely, Cinco De Mayo and Mother’s Day. Tacos, a traditional Mexican dish, will be served on the fifth, and hopefully Sunday’s Rosemary Lemon Chicken will please all the mothers who dine at St. Anthony. Looking forward to a wonderful menu this week with fresh local vegetables and a variety of delicious meat dishes.

May 4 Barbequed Pork: served with baked beans

May 5 Cinco De Mayo Soft Tacos: Chicken, beans, rice, and salsa

May 6 Black Bean Chili w/Ham: served with cornbread

May 7 Baked Chicken: with a herb and cheese crust

May 8 Chef’s Choice

May 9 Saigon Sandwich: Vietnamese style turkey sandwiches with Asian vegetable salad

May 10 Mother’s Day Lemon Rosemary Pork: braised in a lemon rosemary sauce

Please check back for weekly installments of On The Menu!

Last night we hosted our first annual “Sock It To Me” donation drive in our new LEED certified building on 150 Golden Gate Avenue.

Many stopped by to drop off new pairs of warm socks for San Francisco homeless during the winter month. Wine, spirits, appetizers and silly musical holiday chestnuts kept the night lively as we dressed the Christmas tree with pounds and pounds of pedestrian undergarments.

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Historic nonprofit offers help to SF neighborhood with highest citywide rate of diabetes hospitalizations

SAN FRANCISCO, CA November 19, 2008 On World Diabetes Day, St. Anthony Free Medical Clinic will be offering free blood sugar check ups, as well as diabetic foot and eye exams, medication review, tips on holiday diabetes control and free massages to San Francisco’s poor and homeless. St. Anthony’s effort to address the staggering rate of diabetes in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district comes at a time when nearly 24 million Americans, 8 percent of the population, are reported to have Type II diabetes. Diabetes can also lead to kidney failure, blindness and heart disease.

Diabetes in the Tenderloin

The Tenderloin district has the highest citywide rate of ambulatory hospitalizations due to diabetes, according to a 2007 Building a Healthier San Francisco’s Community Health Assessment, as well as the city’s highest concentration of people living below the poverty line. The prevalence of Type II diabetes is highest among adults from low-income households.

 “Tenderloin residents lack adequate access to nutritious food and safe spaces for exercise, which dramatically impacts two of the leading factors in diabetes management- diet and exercise.” noted St. Anthony Free Medical Clinic Director, Dr. Ana Valdés.  “We try to address those factors through education, active medical care, and diabetes management techniques.”

St. Anthony Free Medical Clinic

Established in 1956, the St. Anthony Free Medical Clinic is the first Free Medical Clinic in the United States. The new clinic, located in St. Anthony’s new LEED certified service center, will open in January of 2009. It will provide over 12,000 patient visits annually, of which approximately 25% will be pediatric visits.

St.  Anthony Free Medical Clinic is one of the many free, life-sustaining programs and services of St. Anthony Foundation that helps to heal individuals and families. St. Anthony Foundation is not funded by federal, state, or local government money, and is entirely supported by private donations.

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.

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.

While surfing the internet, watching the tube, flipping through the paper, scanning bus and BART advertising, the message is clear: green is here, and here to stay. What used to be hippie babbling of green house gases and global warming is taking a serious tone having everyone hopping on the eco-friendly, sustainable, organically made, no-emissions bandwagon.

Now I don’t usually think of St. Anthony’s as an environmental agency, as a conservation focused non-profit, but looking around lately I might change my tune. Today I caught myself in what felt like a karmically charged moral dilemma between tossing my apple core in the garbage or making the 15-foot journey to do the responsible thing and compost it. Of course I composted it, it comes as second nature now. It is an institutionalized behavior; recycle and compost are the first options, then if you must, in the garbage it goes.

The mantra goes beyond our office work, and this sustainable ideology guides our direct-service protocol as well. The Dining Room composts or recycles 70% of its waste, and our new building will be the first direct social service organization to have a green building. It is reassuring to know that even in the health and human services work that St. Anthony Foundation is dedicated to, we remain conscious and pro-active in our efforts to keep a healthy city and environment for everyone.

St. Anthony Dining Room will celebrate Earth Day with a healthy vegetarian meal of organic greens from Greeleaf Produce, freshly stuffed baked potatoes, and delicious desserts from Just Desserts Bakery. Using a careful recipe of food reclamation and resource management, St. Anthony’s serves an average of 2,600 healthy and filling meals 365 days a year at an average food cost of 33 cents per serving, and at no cost to the hungry Dining Room guests.

More than 75% of the 6,000 pounds of food that is prepared and served each day to San Francisco’s hungriest residents is reclaimed food, such as second-harvest fruits and vegetables or day old baked goods from bakeries, which would otherwise be thrown away. But St. Anthony’s commitment to sustainability goes even further. 70% of the waste matter (from preparation scraps to unfinished meals) from St. Anthony Dining Room is composted or recycled, which is then used as soil amendment for local farms. Next year, the St. Anthony Dining Room will be housed in San Francisco’s first LEED certified Green Direct Social Services building.

“Earth Day is really about bringing awareness to responsible utilization of our resources. At St. Anthony’s we feed a lot of people every day, but we do it with serious consideration of the resources at hand. Food gets transformed to nourishment, waste gets transformed to compost, compost gets transformed to food. And lives get transformed in the process.” Noted St. Anthony’s spokesperson Francis Aviani.

“As an award winning natural bakery, we create a lot of delicious desserts before we perfect a recipe,” Noted Just Desserts Executive Chef, Mani Niall. “As a socially-responsible business, it makes sense for those desserts to go to food banks or St. Anthony’s”.

Just Desserts is known throughout the U.S. for their award winning all-natural desserts. Greenleaf Produce provides peak-of-the-season produce to many of San Francisco’s finest restaurants and food service facilities. Both organizations contribute to Bay Area sustainable resource management by donating their overages to food banks and organizations like St. Anthony’s.