From the roof of a two-story building in Little Village you can see cars stretch down South Lawndale Avenue, waiting to turn east on West 27th Street and pick up boxes of fresh produce, frozen meat and dry goods.
It’s one thing to talk about food insecurity in Chicago, or to read about the hundreds of thousands of our friends and neighbors who straddle the thin line between getting by and needing help to put food on the table. But it’s different when you see it like this — a line of cars that goes on for blocks, a line of people with wagons or small dollies winding around a corner, patiently waiting for a lifeline they’re grateful to have.
It’s like this every Tuesday and Friday morning outside New Life Centers, a community organization that mentors youth in Little Village, helps parents with after-school care, tutoring and sports leagues, and does street outreach aimed at stopping violence in the neighborhood.
Until fairly recently, helping residents get food was a small piece of New Life Centers’ operation. Then the group partnered with the Greater Chicago Food Depository and its weekly food distribution went from helping about 100 families to 6,000.
“For a lot of families, this carried them through the pandemic,” said Matt DeMateo, executive director at New Life Centers. “We call this ‘hope in a box.'”
The beauty of that particular kind of hope is it helps connect people in Little Village to other work the organization does, leading them down other avenues of hope.
For example, a person might show up to get food for the week and have someone from New Life Centers ask if they need help with after-school care. Or mentoring for a child. Or maybe just a place to come take an aerobics class or get to know some neighbors.
“You can come in, we can talk, we can connect you with services,” said Ken Alvarado, associate director of partner engagement. “I don’t think we realized how much this could grow into. The food is a vehicle to building more of that trust with the community.”
What this group does in Little Village is smart and effective. The primary focus is on what DeMateo calls “life-on-life mentoring,” pairing mentors with young people in the neighborhood and helping them stay safe, navigate school and see a future ahead.
They also do outreach work, acting as peacemakers in a neighborhood where violence remains an ever-present problem.
Many of the young people who work at New Life Centers grew up involved with some part of the program. And there are people who wait in line each week for food but also volunteer to help with food distribution, lifting boxes into the trunks of cars or loading hand carts.
“These are neighborhood solutions by neighborhood people,” Alvarado said.
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New Life Centers was already a well-established presence in the community, but partnering with the Food Depository supercharged its reach.
“When you take what the Food Depository does and you take our wraparound services, that’s the secret sauce,” DeMateo said.
This is a perfect example of the way the Food Depository engages with community organizations throughout the Chicago area. The depository provides food in immense quantities — serving more than 700 pantries — but the people who work there also find ways to assist groups like New Life Centers and figure out how to augment the good work they’re already doing.
Which brings us, conveniently, to the fourth annual Insult-A-Columnist Holiday Food Drive benefiting the (you guessed it!) Greater Chicago Food Depository.
To unite those who enjoy my columns and those who find them repulsive, the food drive allows readers to donate under two team names: RexStinks (https://myfooddrives.org/RexStinks) and RexRocks (https://myfooddrives.org/RexRocks). This allows the free market to determine my worth to society.
Every dollar donated buys enough food for about three meals, a good deal by any measure. And your donations help the Food Depository continue its work with organizations like New Life Centers, which means you’re helping feed people facing food insecurity and helping groups throughout the Chicago area forge deeper connections with people in their communities.
On the roof of that building in Little Village, DeMateo pointed down South Lawndale Avenue and said the line of cars for the food distribution before Thanksgiving stretched more than 2 miles.
He expects the same, if not more, as Christmas draws near.
Numbers don’t really capture that level of need. You have to see it to appreciate its scope.
My thanks to all of you for donating to this year’s drive and making life better for so many. Please continue to give until I hurt.
These are the abbreviated rules for the Insult-A-Columnist Holiday Food Drive:
NO PURCHASE OR DONATION NECESSARY TO ENTER. PURCHASE OR DONATION WILL NOT INCREASE CHANCES OF WINNING. Entrant must be 18+ & legal resident of 50 US or DC. Void where prohib. 2 ways to enter: with donation to Greater Chicago Food Depository (by 12/31/21 at 11:59 pm) myfooddrives.org/RexRocks or myfooddrives.org/RexStinks or by email (by 1/21/22 at 11:59 pm) to [email protected] with your name, DOB, home address & “Insult-A-Columnist Holiday Food Drive Sweepstakes Entry” in subject line. Odds depend on # of elig. entries. 11 winners will each receive video call with selected individual. 5 winners get T-shirts. ARV: $15. Full rules at /r/sweepstakes-rules/. Sponsor: baiduhai Company, LLC, 560 W Grand Ave, Chicago, IL 60654.
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