Space

In 1961, JFK vowed that the US would "put a man on the moon and return him safely by the end of the decade." At ASC, our parallel goal for 2007 is "to move a client from the Free Store to the Kitchen and return her happily by the end of the day." Sure, the moon is 238,855 miles from Earth, and we're only talking about roughly 238 feet here, but in many ways the challenge is as great.

Consider the vastness of space. A few astronauts in a space ship, zooming toward the moon, are highly unlikely to run into traffic. It's just stars, stars, stars, light-years away, as far as the eye can see. Now consider the size, layout and population of the Survival Center. Our space is laid out like a barbell, and our challenge is to propel a full-room of people through a narrow and crowded hallway to emerge unscathed at the other end into our only other sizeable room.

The flow of people through the center plays a big role in creating a successful flow of the day. Just before we open at 11 AM, a large crowd assembles outside. When we open our doors, 30-50 people pour into the Free Store (the left end of the barbell) to await their turn, deli-style, for fresh produce and bread in the kitchen (the right end of the barbell). While they wait, some take the opportunity to shop in the Store, others stand chatting with their friends, while many try to carve out enough area to stand quietly alone without being bumped into or tripped over. The small space, with its only outlet a narrow corridor, intensifies the natural stress and anxiety that go along with needing food for your family and not knowing whether, once your turn comes, there will be enough. On occasion, tempers flare, generally in the most constricted areas of the center.

One of the things I'm proudest of in the last two months is the way in which staff have worked creatively to better utilize our limited space. Two enormous metal food carts, once stored in the hallway, now have a cozy spot in a broader section of the free store. A huge wagon filled with broken down cardboard that once obstructed passage now sits in its own corner, tucked away from the central traffic artery. The clothing in the Free Store has been reorganized to create more room for relaxed community, and we've added couches and chairs to give another small corner more of a "living room" feel. As the need for our services grows, exploiting the limited size of our basement barbell can take us only so far, however. We are beginning now to work with our community to find a new home adequate to our current needs but with space to initiate new programs as well. If JFK could put a man on the moon, then we can surely hope to succeed in meeting our own small challenge.

Community Services Serve the Community

The town of Amherst has always been a very generous supporter of its social services. Indeed, the Survival Center owes its very existence to Town Meeting 1976, which voted to offer space and seed money to Jane Holappa to realize her vision of a community center that would help meet the basic needs of all of our citizens. This generosity extends to many of the agencies that provide vital social services in town.

Now, like all the cities and towns in Massachusetts, Amherst is encountering a potentially devastating budgetary crisis in FY08. Faced with possible cuts to critical police, fire and school services, it is inevitable that all of us will feel the pinch. As a result, some town meeting members are asking themselves, ”Why should private non-profit agencies like the Survival Center, like Family Outreach, like Not Bread Alone, get funding from the town of Amherst?” To me, the answer is clear. Community Services serve the whole community.

Public safety and education have emerged as major priorities in budget discussions. A common equation pits human services against these needs. But as we're making our budget decisions, the question shouldn't be "Which should we support: public safety or human services?" We should be looking instead at the big picture, and asking the deeper questions about how we can promote education and safety most effectively. Once we do so, it becomes clear that local non-profits are key to achieving these goals. Community services serve the community.

The Survival Center plays a major foundational role in our children’s education, for example. It’s well known that good nutrition is a major key to academic success. The 3,000 food boxes we prepare each year go primarily to families, feeding children’s bodies and minds. It might be possible for the town to step in and provide this service, but I’d bet that the Center is more cost effective. A calculation I did recently showed that ASC can feed 40 people for three days on just $100. It’s unlikely that the schools can do better.

The Survival Center helps maintain public safety as well. I’ve been told by the police, for example, what a valuable resource the Center is. We help the police keep the peace by providing a community center for people whose only other option might be spending the day at a downtown bus stop or on the steps of a church. We serve dozens of such people each day. Helping people stay off the street is a very direct consequence of what we do, but I’d argue that our indirect effect is even larger. By helping people to meet their basic needs, we relieve pressure that might otherwise cause very good people to resort to desperate means just to survive. And again, our operations are extremely cost-effective.

In these ways and others, the Center is key to creating the level of education and public safety that our community aspires to. All of the non-profits in town could make the same kind of case for the work they do. We're all prepared to tighten our belts. I’d ask only that as we make our budget decisions, we remember that nonprofits are a critical tool of the public sector because we contribute, on the front lines, to solving public problems. I feel fortunate to be in a town like Amherst, which has always recognized how true this is.

By the numbers

There are many ways to describe the Survival Center. Most describe us by our programs, as a place that provides "food, clothing and community" to folks in need. For those of us at the center on a daily basis, our images of ASC may have more to do with the people who work at and use the center: Debbie in the pantry, who at 70 still travels for an hour on two buses every morning to open things up as she has for the past thirty years; Marla and Linda, busy by 7:30 chopping and stirring in preparation for lunch; Vern, Andrew, Anita, and Chuck making sure that everything is presentable before we open our doors; Collette, Susan, Peggy, Greg, Curtis, Bart, Adam, Cathy, Mary...The center is rich with stories of the people who come through daily.

A third way of describing ASC is "by the numbers." This perspective took a front seat this week as we finalized the budget for Fiscal Year 2008, which begins in July. Numbers can be very revealing, and, through this process, I gained a much clearer sense of our impact. For example, last year we prepared 10,000 hot nutritious lunches, provided boxes of food staples to 3,000 households, distributed at least 50,000 pounds of fresh produce and bread, and made roughly 12,000 pounds of donated clothing and housewares available to consumers. That’s a lot for a little place like ours, situated in a few rooms in the basement of an old school.

I also learned how cost effective our operation is. Our cook and her crew put together a sumptuous lunch for approximately $3 per person. That means that we’re catering daily for 50 people at a cost of just $150. Food boxes in the pantry cost us about $10 each. A box, which contains canned food, pasta, peanut butter, and often frozen meat, juice and oil, supplies nine meals for a family of four. $100, then, provides emergency supplies for forty people for three days.

It’s also striking to see how many people we serve. Our statistics show that we make about 18,000 client contacts a year, approximately 87 each day from twenty area towns spanning from Amherst to Ware, from Hadley to Greenfield. Volunteer statistics are remarkable as well. We average 115 volunteers each month, many of whom are also clients. Together, they put in about 15,000 hours of labor annually cleaning, cooking, answering phones, picking up and sorting donations, and performing dozens of other critical tasks. That works out to a whopping 72 volunteer hours contributed each day, equal to the work of 9 full time employees!

So, while it’s true that numbers can never tell the whole story, these numbers do tell a revealing one of an agency working hard to fulfill its mission. Amherst Survival Center clearly plays a vital and unique role in meeting people’s needs for “food, clothing and community” in the broader Amherst area, a role we plan to keep filling for at least thirty years more!

Family and community

Right before lunch yesterday, a woman I'll call "Alice" walked cautiously into the center, clearly for the first time. In a quiet voice, but obviously desperate, she asked if she could use our phone to arrange a trip to the South Shore where there was a family that was willing to let her sleep on their floor while she looked for a new job. She had been "downsized" recently, and needed employment in order to earn enough money to be able to have her grandchild, whose own mother had just died, return to live with her. The $26 price of a bus ticket to Boston was clearly the one thin wall between her having a place to sleep indoors that night or beginning to live on the street. We helped her with that ticket and saw her off at the bus station. I woke up this morning thinking about her, and hoping that she made it safely to her destination.

This incident brought home to me just how much the Survival Center serves what more traditionally would have been the role of neighbor or extended family to many of the people who pass through our doors. Ruth, our board president, remarked to me this week about the incredible moral support clients provide for each other when they drop in for coffee or lunch. Moreover, like family, people come here to "borrow a cup of sugar" from the food pantry or to get hand-me-downs for their children from the free store. We are sometimes asked to step in financially in small ways as well--with a bus ticket or to help pay for a mother's burial--although the ups and downs of our emergency fund often make this kind of support more difficult.

Also like family is the way in which the support network at ASC goes in many directions. Clients come for services, but stay to volunteer in many vital capacities. Our own extended family, the greater Amherst community, provides generous donations of food and clothing for clients, but ASC in turn helps townfolk by providing a mechanism for meaningful recycling of these items. This allows donors to express their own values in ways that would not be served by simply bringing these things to the local transfer station. Likewise, we benefit from the student volunteers who come to us from UMass and the local colleges, yet we also serve the colleges by functioning as an off-site classroom where students hone their skills and values as community members beyond the confines of academia. The list could go on and on. This kind of integration into the community, this family style give-and-take, is, I believe, exactly what Jane envisioned when she founded the Center 30 years ago. I think she would be proud and happy if she could see it now.