Guest blogger Tim Cosentino, coordinator at CKSLU, writes about poverty of relationships and how CKP can feed the whole person.

The coordinators of our nationally staffed Campus Kitchens recently had a conference call where we learned about a DC Central Kitchen program called First Helping. First Helping is a street-level outreach program that uses food as a tool to establish trust and build relationships with homeless and low-income individuals. From serving the food the idea is to be able to build relationships with people to be able to establish a connection with them and encourage people to received services when appropriate. It is a really neat outreach that DCCK does, not only because people are receiving healthy and hot food but also because it is building relationships with people.

It is easy to talk about poverty in a material sense, and solutions to it. A person is hungry–well, give them food. A person is homeless–well, give them shelter. What isn’t talked about is that because a person is hungry and homeless, and often bouncing around the city, if not country, they are also lonely, sometimes very lonely. Sometimes they are so ill that the reason they are homeless is because maintaining relationships is so difficult without medication that they are pushed away from anyone who cares about them.

What isn’t talked about is possibly the most numbing and dehumanizing poverty of all, poverty of relationships. The sheer lack of relationships in a person’s life is an incredibly painful thing, which is why the real outreach of First Helping is relationship building, not serving food.

To bring this closer to home for Campus Kitchens, we only have to look at our clients. Most of our clients have a roof over their head and at least something to eat, but many of them are still suffering from a poverty of relationships. This is why the Campus Kitchen Project is not about the food, but rather, it is about the people, student and client alike.

At CKSLU we take our deliveries very seriously, because it is our only connection to real people. We have delivery shifts that sometimes take an half an hour or even an hour longer because our volunteers lost track of time while talking to clients. The difference that I always tell my volunteers is this: if we are going to people and giving them food and leaving, we aren’t treating them like people. We are helping to feed them for that night, but only that night.

But if we are going to people and giving them food and sharing stories and talking with them, we are building a relationship between people. It doesn’t matter if it is a fifteen second interaction or a fifteen minute conversation; the intent of it was to build a relationship. We are not only feeding their body, we are feeding their whole person.

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