The new U.S. dietary guidelines, which recommend eating more potassium, dietary fiber, vitamin D and calcium, and avoiding saturated fat and added sugar, can add almost 10% on average to your yearly food bill. For many low income Americans the “luxury” of eating healthy is all but unobtainable. For most of our clients the best option to stay full and stay on budget is to purchase processed foods from fast food restaurants and corner stores. These meals are typically high in fat and sugar and low in valuable nutrients, compromising client’s overall health and ability to avoid medical complications like diabetes and obesity.

At St. Anthony Foundation we connect low income patients with fresh foods so they have a chance to meet personal as well as nationwide community health goals. Our social work center guides clients in where and how to use their food stamps to purchase produce from local farmers markets. Our Fresh Fruits and Veggies program connects Medical Clinic patients with healthy food options, which we in turn teach patients how to prepare during our Clinic Cooking Classes. These classes are geared towards diabetic and overweight patients looking to manage their diets and offer tasty recipes that are low in sugar, salt, and fat. In our Dining Room, meals area always served with a vegetable and a side of fresh fruit.

At St. Anthony Foundation we aim to make healthy food options accessible for patients and clients by connecting them with services and providing healthy, nutritious meals. It is our hope that one day healthy food will be an option for everyone — not simply those with greater economic means.

The Tenderloin Technology Lab in collaboration with their new intern, Antonio Renteria, and the St. Anthony Foundation Social Work Center will be beginning a new series of workshops that are focused on encouraging our guests to become more self-sufficient. These workshops will focus on finding housing, medical/dental, and mental health resources online. The three classes are running on Monday afternoons from 1:30 pm to 3:30 pm starting July 11th. We are all excited about the prospect of expanding the possibilities in the Tech Lab to improve the lives of our guests by giving them access to the internet “help buttons” that can help alleviate  some of their issues.

Today, Dudley has a home, stable health, and the energy to do the activities that let him feel like himself. Two years ago he was in hospice care, and was not expected to live.

Dudley first arrived in San Francisco from Los Angeles in 1992, and found himself in the Tenderloin without a support network or stable footing. “My family’s all scattered,” he says.

It wasn’t long before he found his way to St. Anthony Dining Room for a meal, and later enrolled in what was then the Employment Program. But he had been dealt some crushing blows. Dudley had long struggled with alcoholism; he took his first drink at the age of 5. When he was also diagnosed as HIV positive, he became a regular client at the St. Anthony Social Work Center.

Dudley’s health continued to decline, until he was one day hospitalized with HIV/AIDS-related pneumonia. “The hardest part was my willingness to take meds,” Dudley says. “I wanted to check out. I believe that my mental state was so bad it affected me physically.” (more…)

Times are hard and you have your own worries. But you know that things aren’t any easier for the people who come to St. Anthony Foundation for help.

We have some easy ways you can keep giving, or even give more, to buy food, clothing, and healthcare for your low-income neighbors. Here’s Easy Giving Number 4.

Do a Drive.

Organize your family, friends, social group, professional association, church or congregation to collect something the guests at St. Anthony’s need.

1. Do a clothing drive. St. Anthony’s clothing supply has run pretty low. We’re putting out the call for more clothes: washed, repaired, and ready to wear.

Bring them to the Free Clothing Program @ 101 8th Street and Mission.

See Ty Hilkert’s blog last week for a list of what we need and what we can’t take. (Or call at 415-592-2826 or email thilkert@stanthonysf.org.)

2. Do a sock drive. We’ve talked about a sock party in your home. Your guests bring $5 and a pair of socks for our guests. Try a sock drive without the party. There is no time of year we do not need them. There is no St. Anthony’s program that does not use them. We can provide boxes or bins or simply send signs for you to make your own collection bin.

3. Do a toiletries drive. New, unopened, any size:

Bring them to our offices @ 150 Golden Gate or to the Free Clothing Program @ 101 8th Street and Mission.

4. Assemble self-care bags. New, unopened, travel size only.

Put the bags in a shopping bag or box addressed to “Social Work Center.”

Bring them to 150 Golden Gate, between Jones and Leavenworth.

If people like you take simple steps like this, we really will get through the hard times together.

Ed. Note: This week’s entry was written by Florence, who has been working with us since September 2009. Florence is a student at Berkeley and spends much of her time and talents finding ways to support St. Anthony programs and clients. Below is just a sampling of her experiences thus far:

@ the Social Work Center:

Registering clients for food stamps can get depressing, especially when they really need the extra help but are not qualified because they earn “too much.” Here’s a dilemma I came across recently: a client gets a monthly benefit of $925 in SSI but has to pay a $900 monthly rent. She is left with $25 for all her other expenses. She doesn’t have enough to cover even her basic needs but is ineligible for food stamps because she is on SSI.

@ the Clothing Program:

During the past holiday season, I had the privilege of organizing clothing drives at the University of San Francisco and the Shinnyo-en Buddhist Head Temple in Redwood City. A USF student and I scattered donation bins all around campus and the temple in November as we also educated others about the acute plight of the homeless during the winter months. Between USF and Shinnyo-en, we collected more than 30 large bags of clothes and shoes in just a few weeks! To learn about how to organize your own Clothing Drive for St. Anthony foundation, click here!

@ the Intern Room:

“Go home, Florence,” or some rendition of that, chimes every Friday at 5pm. “Five more minutes” is my practiced reply, but there is no doubt I’d rather stay the whole night. There are simply too many temptations in this room. Shelves of books, books, heavenly books! Topics range from poverty to spirituality to business, making sure interns do not, and can not, cry from boredom. Even the intern desk is stacked to the nines with books like San Francisco Tenderloin, Street Sheet, Voices From the Heart, and Social Welfare at a Crossroads, two of which I checked out to read without time constraint…(and yes! interns can check books out, too!). But books are not all the intern room has to offer. There are also binders full of studies and research on homelessness, policies, mental health and the like!

What more can I say, I love this place!

I’m excited for the next few days, although deadlines loom, I’m taking some time to visit the Dining Room and a few other programs to learn about some new integration we are coordinating between them. Preparing for the upcoming St. Anthony Foundation Newsletter I have the chance to step away from the desk and go see our programs in action and check out the newly opened emergency clothing closet, see the Tech Lab’s new presence in the Dining Room, and how we are integrating social workers into services across the board.

St. Anthony Foundation has always encouraged and referred guests to use other programs in the foundation, however now we are taking it a step further and providing outreach in the Dining Room, which is historically the main entry point into our services. We understand that many of the obstacles of homelessness and poverty are interrelated, and our programs work together to comprehensively address them.

I don’t want to give you all the details yet, but it is indeed a very exciting time for us. Look for the St. Anthony Foundation Newsletter Spring 2010 edition coming soon to a mailbox near you!

After being hospitalized for 13 months, Dudley was discharged to the streets. With the help of St. Anthony’s Dudley now has a place of his own.

Subscribe to the St. Anthony Foundation YouTube Channel and watch more first hand the stories from St. Anthony’s guests and clients.

St. Anthony Dining Room and Social Work Center try to fill in the gaps of escalating food needs for San Francisco’s poor.

The economic crisis has filled our minds, news and conversations with many troubling questions, from the highest economic strata down to grassroots organizations. All seem to conclude with one resounding answer: uncertainty. On this block of the Tenderloin, the thing we are certain of is that cuts to other agencies will directly result in more people coming to St. Anthony’s for services.

“They just keep coming, more and more every month,” lamented Rosita Nangca, St. Anthony Volunteer, “And now people are coming from all over, usually it’s just from our neighborhood [Tenderloin] but now from Daly City, from everywhere.”

Rosita is not only a volunteer, but a participant in St. Anthony’s Brown Bag program. Every third Thursday of the month St. Anthony Dining Room holds our Senior Brown Bag program, providing 200 seniors with groceries including fresh produce, juice, eggs, beans, rice and other pantry and nutritional staples. Currently our Brown Bag program is stretching to accommodate 215 seniors, straining the program maximum of 200. Each quarter we open enrollment and usually all new participants are accepted. For the first time ever this quarter, we were not able to accommodate all the seniors, and a waitlist was started.

(more…)

Every day that I come to work, say my hellos coming up from BART, wave hi to Dining Room staff, to Fr. Alfred Center guests working in the Dining Room as part of their recovery program. Make the left at Golden Gate and go up through the Social Work Center, the Clinic and the Employment Program and Tech Lab. (If I wanted to get real technical I’d tell you that I then walk past JEVA, our fantastically organized volunteer and advocacy program, but I digress.)

Every day I come to work I see these programs and the close-knit community of support that they offer to people most in need. But my friends and family don’t know first hand about the work that is done here, so I try and find ways to get them connected. The most powerful way to connect is to volunteer. And, our amazing group of volunteers regular and one-timers can attest to that. The connection is immediate, the sense of community is infallible. But, there are so many other ways to see what is going on down here at the foundation.

Maybe social networking is not the first thing you turn to when trying to search out community causes, events and organizations. Perhaps when you think of charity or “soup kitchens” (but please don’t call us a soup kitchen, those Dining Room chefs whip up a mean lunch every day of the year, not to be served with a spoon!) you don’t think of giving a “poke” or a “tweet“, but perhaps we could change your mind. St. Anthony Foundation is reaching out and connecting with folks who can’t come down here every day or every month and offering a bit of our community to the online community. On ourFacebook page, this blog and even on YouTube we’ve got a lot of exciting events, drives and video to help you stay connected and to help you share your St. Anthony experience with friends and family who have yet to learn about us.

I invite you to visit our Facebook page, take a peek at the YouTube videos and tell some friends. At 58-years old St. Anthony’s might not be a spring chicken, but we are learning new tricks and are excited to be able to share our daily work with you.

Many people think of poverty programs as schools or hospitals. Poor people come to the program, they use the tools they are given, they graduate from poverty. They find the cause of their poverty, they are cured.  The next group comes in.

At St. Anthony’s we have thousands of guests who do graduate. They learn new skills or they learn to speak English. They get clean and sober or they get health insurance. They find a job that will allow them to live independently.

But many of our guests face multiple barriers to participating in society. They live with both physical disabilities and mental health problems. They struggle with an addiction and they struggle with illiteracy. They are elderly, which is not a disease and has no cure.

These are the guests we hope to keep connected to our programs, not to graduate. If they keep coming back to St. Anthony Social Work Center, they can access benefits and keep the stable housing we’ve helped them find and get help managing their limited incomes. If they keep coming to the Free Medical Clinic, they can get help managing a chronic illness and get medication on the spot, so they don’t forget to take it. If they remain in the Madonna Senior Residence, they can built strong relationships with other residents and blossom anew by aging in place.

These are the guests we hope will stay in community with St. Anthony Foundation. Their lives will become more stable; they may even become more self-sufficient. But their strength lies in staying together, not in “graduating.” And by remaining in community here, they make our community strong.