BREAD LINE INC

ISSUE: living with hunger
Bread Line's Aim: feeding hungry people at our Stone Soup Cafe ISSUE: barriers to employment
Bread Line's Aim: culinary job training in the Stone's Throw program ISSUE: community engagement
Bread Line's Aim: Kids Cafe and the Stone Soup Garden Project ISSUE: hunger in our neighborhood
Bread Line's Aim: community collaboration to alleviate hunger

We have four established programs to achieve our goals: our flagship project, the Stone Soup Cafe, which employs a chef and dozens of volunteers to serve hot meals daily; our Stone's Throw culinary job training program engages people experiencing employment issues and empowers them to make life changes, under the tutelage of professional chefs and life coaches; both the Kid's Cafe & the Stone's Throw Community Garden supports community collaboration and keeps our efforts in the public eye; lastly, we have a number of public outreach programs that help alleviate hunger in our community and are a source of earned income.`

We currently have a full service, 100 seat capacity, soup kitchen facility, housed in a building we own, in downtown Fairbanks. We operate a morning meal Monday-Friday that also provides a sack lunch to go. From this same location, we run our Stone's Throw program, with three full-time chef instructors and an administrative assistant. Additionally we lease a one acre plot for our 40 bed community community garden. The food from our garden supplements the Stone Soup Cafe, our Summer Food Service Program and a number of anti-hunger community collaborations. The Bread Line is supported by a robust volunteer program of more than 150 volunteers annually. We also have had great success utilizing the AmeriCorps VISTA program for site-specific projects.

In 2016, we provided 37,940 hot meals to our guests at the Stone Soup Cafe and delivered another 13,938 meals to our low-income neighbors. Our Stone's Throw culinary program graduated eight students with 80% of our graduates successfully employed within 90 days of graduation. We look to increased that to 18 work-ready students graduating in 2018. Our garden has harvested approximately three tons of produce, since it started in 2015. Much of those vegetables went to augment food programs for low-income residents in downtown assisted living facilities. In the future, we look to increase our contract meals with our strategic community partners. We will also be taking on a new AmeriCorps VISTA volunteer to research and implement food-related employment programs. We will also hope to on a licensed social worker to coordinate pass-through social services for our Cafe guests and training program students.