You are here: Home > News > The Harvest January/February 2008 > ECS hunger focus

	Volunteers prepare a meal at the Kansas City Community Kitchen, part of the Episcopal Hunger Relief Network of Episcopal Community Services. Photo by Mary Novaria, ECS

ECS to focus on growing hunger needs

By Melodie Woerman
Editor, The Harvest

Episcopal Community Services is shifting its focus to better attack a growing problem in the Kansas City area — hunger. In January the ECS board decided to discontinue the agency’s non-food programs to concentrate on a series of meal programs and food pantries that are making a difference.

These efforts will operate as part of the “Episcopal Hunger Relief Network,” a variation on its former name, the Anti-Hunger Network.

Jay Lehnertz, the agency’s president, said the need for food assistance is growing in Kansas City. A hot meal program at ECS’s Kansas City Community Kitchen now serves about 600 people a day; in the past it was closer to 400. A recent survey showed that clients there increasingly are homeless people, rather than the working poor the kitchen had been feeding.

New clients continue to sign up weekly at the food pantry at St. Paul’s, Kansas City, Kan., and the Saturday morning breakfast program in that parish now feeds about 225 people each week.

Single focus best uses resources

Lehnertz said this need, combined with the agency’s growing expertise in providing food services, convinced ECS’s board that a single focus not only would be the best use of the agency’s resources but also offered the chance to make a real difference in fighting hunger in Kansas City.

Lehnertz said this emphasis also provides the agency’s Episcopal volunteers in Kansas and West Missouri with something important, too — the chance to be part of a larger effort that seeks to honor Jesus’ command to serve the poor.

The agency’s flagship operation is the Community Kitchen, housed at Grace and Holy Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in downtown Kansas City, Mo. ECS took over the kitchen in 2005, and since then it has become one of the main food programs in the area. A volunteer corps of about 400 people makes the operation run, under the direction of Chef Jessica Bero.

A companion program there is Culinary Cornerstones, which provides training as restaurant chefs to people otherwise unemployable because of homelessness, criminal records or lack of education. Bero heads that effort, too, as well as the growing number of catering jobs the program gets.

The two programs at St. Paul’s, Kansas City, Kan. — the food pantry and the breakfast program — link that inner-city parish with suburban congregations that supply volunteers, food donations and an additional network of care and support for ministry there.

Another dozen parish food pantries in the greater Kansas City area also operate as part of the Network, along with a Meals on Wheels program that serves two dozen clients.

An extension of the Eucharist

Lehnertz said while efforts to feed the hungry are critical, ECS has had since its founding in 1989 an additional emphasis on its volunteers. “Part of our mission is to engage Episcopalians and other people in community service,” he said.

For Lehnertz, that service has a deeply spiritual basis. “It’s about our baptismal vows,” he said. “Community service is a way to understand a dimension of Christ.”

Combining food with community service is a natural fit for Episcopalians, he said.

“Feeding people in the community is an extension of the Eucharist,” he said. “The Eucharist binds us together in Christ. Feeding outside the Sunday Eucharist binds us to the community. It identifies us all as the people of God.”

Lehnertz said ECS’s new hunger relief focus not only will engage and enliven more volunteers but also will reach more people in need. A determined commitment to the Community Kitchen has been part of its expanded numbers, he said, and the same is true for St. Paul’s food pantry.

It was struggling to serve its community two years ago, but after coming under the ECS umbrella it not only serves more clients but also has a much larger volunteer pool, thanks to the involvement of the other Episcopal churches in the region.

Deacon Allen Ohlstein, St. Paul’s, Leavenworth, heads the Hunger Relief Network, and his emphasis will be on exploring new efforts. Those will include whether to expand the St. Paul’s breakfast program to more days a week, and the feasibility of offering a Culinary Cornerstones-type program in western Wyandotte County to serve the growing demand for restaurant workers in the area around the Kansas Speedway.

Ohlstein also is looking at how the Kansas City-based ECS food ministry can reach into other areas of the diocese, such as cities in the Northwest Convocation.

A 2006 study by the Kansas City food bank Harvesters showed that the vast majority of food assistance in the area was provided by faith-based organizations like ECS. Of those seeking help, a third lived in rural or suburban areas.

Programs to continue

Programs ECS has sponsored in the past won’t disappear under the new focus, however. Key efforts like Operation Backpack, MissionPalooza and the hospital aftercare program will be taken over by other agencies or individuals with experience and expertise.