Elise Hale-Case acknowledges that running a meal program for the needy was not even on her radar screen when she graduated from Mount Holyoke College three years ago.
But last April, when St. Vincent de Paul and Sacred Heart Church were looking for someone to oversee the Queen Anne Food Bank, located at 205 Second Ave. N., in the basement of the building adjacent to the Catholic Church’s sanctuary, the Seattle native jumped at the job.
“It was the social service aspect of the job that interested me,” said Hale-Case, 24. “It was in a field where I wanted to work and it felt like an exciting opportunity.”
Exciting may be an understatement for Hale-Case’s experience with the one-time struggling program. Barely six months into her job, the food bank was scheduled to shut down at Thanksgiving due to a lack of funds and interest.
Various media outlets, including this newspaper, ran stories about the program’s plight and the result surprised everyone.
“I told the church that I would stay on through December to clean up, but when I got back from Thanksgiving weekend, the message machine in the office was full and I received all these emails from people willing to donate money.”
Hale-Case even posted one of the reports made by a local television station on the program’s website, queenannefb.org. That spurred friends, family and total strangers to donate money from across the country. She said people have sent in money from as far away as New York City and Salt Lake City. Hale-Case estimates it costs about $50,000 a year to run the program and her goal was to collect enough money to cover the budget for two years.
“I think we will make that goal,” she said.
The program was scheduled to reopen its doors on Tuesday, Feb. 21. But there will be some changes. St. Vincent de Paul will no longer be helping to fund the project. It will now be overseen by Sacred Heart’s Father Binh Ta.
Hale-Case, who is the program’s only staff member, works with volunteers to collect the food from donors and local grocery stores, make the meals and distribute them to the needy who line up at the building’s back door.
Hale-Case said she usually has soup or some other hot food and a sack lunch for those that show up in the morning. She estimates that she serves between 80 and 150 people a day, depending on the time of the month.
“We always get more people needing food toward the end of the month because that is when their money has run out,” Hale-Case said.
She admits to being unsure how many needy she’ll receive on the Tuesday morning that the program reopens. Hale- Case has tried to alert the needy with fliers at the local shelters and word-of-mouth. But she still said it might take awhile to get the numbers back to where they were.
She gives a quick tour of the small rooms where she stores and prepares the food for the meals. Inside one room where food is stored are various religious pictures on the walls. Hale-Case rummages through the boxes that hold everything from bananas and apples to large cans of tuna to huge bottles of Tabasco sauce.
“People donate all sorts of items,” she said. “We have people who will bring in a couple of things and then recently we had a woman come in with a couple of hundred pounds of food.”
The program also gets food from the Metropolitan Market in Upper Queen Anne and the local Safeway. Through Food Lifeline, she receives food from Lower Queen Anne’s Metropolitan Market and the nearby QFC.
“They’ve all been really great, Hale-Case said.
But she stresses that the program still needs people to donate food, money or even their time.
“We need volunteers and not just to make sandwiches,” Hale-Case said. “But we need help from people with other skills, such as working with computers, bookkeeping and fundraising.”
When asked what her goals are, Hale-Case said she wants to make sure the program is sustainable for the long term. But she acknowledges working at the program has changed her outlook.
“People come here every day and I hand them a hot cup of soup and they say, ‘Thanks, I’m really cold and this means a lot,’ ” she said. “To think that these people are sleeping out every night is incredible.”
Hale-Case said she hopes to help people feel the plight of the homeless and not ignore it or intellectualize it.
“I want to make this a program of social change as well as a program of social service,” she said.
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