Food Security Begins at Home: on the Front Lines at Martha’s Table
FrontLines - October 2009
By Kerry Byrnes
|
Doug Ball, director of the Office of Regional Sustainable Development in the Bureau for Latin America and the Caribbean, dices onions for soup in the Martha’s Table kitchen.
|
For the past year and a half, dozens of USAID staff members have focused much of their working
hours on developing a U.S. government strategy for a global food security initiative. Yet, after so much talk about global food security, it was a welcome break, on a recent Friday morning, with a wisp of fall in the air, for nine USAID employees to embark on the shortest TDY (temporary duty) of their lives—a 15-minute
bus ride to the headquarters of Martha’s Table in Northwest Washington, D.C.
This unofficial TDY proved a brief respite from the daily grind of emails, interagency meetings,
and fiscal year-end funding obligations for the staff from the Agency’s Office of Regional Sustainable Development in the Bureau for Latin America and the Caribbean.
Martha’s Table is a self-help operation geared to meeting the needs of the community’s poorest—
whether the need is feeding the hungry, providing day care for children so mothers can find a job, or helping low-income residents obtain a dress suit to help make the best first impression
at a job interview.
While Martha’s Table has a small core staff of full-time employees, the key to the operation’s
success is the network of hundreds of volunteers mobilized each day to carry out key functions,
including donating food, cooking and packing meals, working in the day care center, tutoring older children, or selling donated used clothing in the store.
Martha’s Table manager Dominick Musso provided us with an overview of the organization’s
history, mission, and services provided to the community,
and, most importantly, detailed the immediate tasks that the USAID team would need to complete to ensure that hundreds of meals would be ready to deliver that evening to the community’s poor.
After working shoulder to shoulder with community residents
who had come in during our shift to help out, dozens of bins of food were filled. Team
members agreed that it felt great to have made a direct, tangible contribution to helping D.C.’s hungry.
Shortly after 1:00 p.m., Dominick told the team to finish
their tasks, as a new shift of volunteers would be coming in later to distribute the food to the community.
Unlike many places overseas we focus on at USAID, our D.C. community does not suffer from a shortage of food, but it still suffers
from deep-seated poverty and inequities. Martha’s Table helps to break this cycle and provides an excellent opportunity to volunteer in the areas described above.
For more information, contact Dominick Musso at 202-328-6608, or see the Martha’s Table Web site at: www.marthastable.org.
★
FrontLines is published
by the Bureau for Legislative and Public Affairs
U.S. Agency for International Development
To have FrontLines delivered
to you via postal mail, please subscribe.
Material should be submitted
by mail to Editor, FrontLines, USAID,
RRB, Suite 6.10, Washington, DC 20523-6100;
by FAX to 202-216-3035; or by e-mail to frontlines@usaid.gov
To view PDF files, download
the Adobe
Acrobat Reader.
Back to Top ^
|
