With a weekly hot meal program at Keefe Community Center ending in two weeks, a local nonprofit has a plan in place to build a full commercial kitchen to address food insecurity in Hamden.
New Haven-based Community Soup Kitchen (CSK) has served a total of around 8,200 hot meals for Hamden families every Wednesday since June. Joshua Watkins, executive director of New Haven-based Community Soup Kitchen, said the program will end after Oct. 13.
However, Watkins said the CSK will still be providing food to the food pantry at the community center, while looking to build a commercial kitchen within the next 6-10 months to bring the program back on a more permanent, daily basis.
“We’re not completely abandoning Hamden,” Watkins said. “We can go way beyond just the one day we were doing as an organization, we can now start feeding for seven or so days.”
Watkins said the CSK is shifting its focus to New Haven as there is a large population of homeless people. He said the CSK needed to figure out how to provide 3,000 meals a day to New Haven while also serving Hamden.
Because Hamden families are more likely to participate in the food pantry program, Watkins said, the CSK decided to end the hot meal program and increase the amount of groceries it sends to the food bank.
“We decided that we want to feed beyond a meal,” Watkins said. “Somebody can get a meal, but still that next day, they’re still going to be hungry.”
Everybody involved with the CSK works on a volunteer basis. Volunteers portion out hot meals, talk with families seeking meals and deliver the meals from the CSK’s kitchen in New Haven.
Barbara Johnson, a Hamden resident, began volunteering on Wednesdays to keep herself occupied during her retirement.
“I love serving people, helping people and knowing that people have something to eat,” Johnson said. “I needed something new. You need to keep moving around and walking … so I started working here.”
The hot meal program started because the CSK wanted to help with food insecurity in Hamden, Watkins said.
“It went from providing food to the pantry to starting a farmers market,” Watkins said. “They were also like, ‘we’re here anyway,’ none of our staff actually works so we decided to volunteer on Wednesday to help provide the meals.”
Justin Farmer, Hamden councilman from District 5, grew up in Hamden as the son of a Jamaican family. He spent a significant part of his childhood at the Keefe Community Center and wants to be a part of the discussion around addressing food insecurity in Hamden.
“I want to figure out how we can [continue the hot meal program],” Farmer said. “If we do get a commercial kitchen, we need to figure out how to do it in stages because this building probably needed to be remodeled when I was a kid if not completely redone. So now, 20 years later, how do we continue a program like this and envision beyond this? Because this Keefe Center cannot serve the future.”
Farmer thinks that the biggest cause of food insecurity in Hamden is expensive housing.
“The average person is paying more than 30% of their income for housing,” Farmer said. “With that, things like food become very expensive. Nickels and dimes are very important. The town working on having housing and social housing is important … There’s no such thing as affordable housing.”
Beyond the Keefe Community Center, Farmer believes that more solutions are needed to help solve the food insecurity problem in Hamden. He said that wider-reaching social programs to address poverty and more diverse hiring by the local government, would also help.
“If I have SNAP for the grandson, grandma can’t get Medicare assistance, because, you know, ‘we don’t want people using the system,’” Farmer said. “It makes no sense. Poverty is generational.”
Sean Duffy, executive director of the Albert Schweitzer Institute and a member of Hamden’s Food Security Task Force, said food-based programs are all “emergency food distribution systems,” not the long-term solution to address food insecurity.
“It’s supposed to be temporary,” Duffy said. “One of the things we’ve struggled with in the Hamden Food Security Task Force is trying to think about the structural elements about how [to] address the underlying causes of food insecurity and why there are so many people who can’t make ends meet and get enough food on the table.”
Duffy said the task force is looking into structural things such as raising the minimum wage. However, he said it’s not easy for the town to make such a change as it has to come from the state level.
The task force is also trying to think about a way to encourage more affordable food sources in south Hamden, which is something that can be done at the town level.
“You may have heard the term ‘food desert,’ which is starting to go out of style now in in favor of that an alternative, ‘food apartheid,’” Duffy said. “I think it more accurately reflects the fact that there are no affordable grocery stores in that part of Hamden. It is not an accident.”
Duffy explained it’s an effect of the town’s system that favors the wealthier parts of the town when it comes to locations of businesses.
While Hamden’s Food Security Task Force hopes to enact long-term change, the potential expansion of the CSK’s hot meal program in Hamden would provide short-term aid to those who need it.
“[The Hamden hot meal program] is something that brings people together,” Farmer said. “This is something that says we are proud of our community … We can hand out food, bring people together, bring in the community and deal with the stigma [of food insecurity]. That is important.”