Loaves & Fishes clients pack food for others in need

Sacramento Bee   
May 26th, 2010

By Cynthia Hubert

Inside a warehouse in south Sacramento, dozens of hands fly across an assembly line, filling food boxes and smashing stereotypes.

This is the poor helping the poor.

The hands belong to people like Alton and Holly Ford, who fell on hard times recently and started eating lunch at the Loaves & Fishes homeless complex on North C Street. People like Neal Pierce, who knows what it’s like to live on the streets. People like Rudy Leyva, a parolee looking for a chance at a new life.

They are part of a Loaves & Fishes crew hired by California Emergency Foodlink to pack goods to be distributed to needy farmworkers in Fresno County, which has been declared a disaster area because of drought.

Loaves & Fishes might seem like an unlikely source of motivated, responsible workers, said Foodlink special projects director Chico Chavez. “But these folks want to work, and they work hard,” Chavez said. “They have been a very pleasant surprise for us.”

Each weekday morning, Foodlink sends a bus to the downtown Loaves complex, and 40 men and women who have had their share of misery pile inside. They travel to the giant food bank’s sprawling warehouse in the old Sacramento Army Depot, and they get to work.

They earn $9 an hour, stopping only for lunch and short breaks to rest their legs, grab a snack and sip coffee or water. They will work 32 hours each week for as long as the disaster designation remains in place, possibly through the summer.

Read the full story at the Sacramento Bee

(+9 rating)

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