Kinship Community Food Center is fulfilling Christ’s exhortation to feed the hungry, ending isolation and calling into community in the process.
A booming voice echoes across the crowd of people pushing carts of bread and toothbrushes and carrying baskets of fresh vegetables and meats.
“Good morning, everybody! Welcome to Kinship, where we are a COMMUNITY OF . . .” He waits for the crowd to respond.
“GENEROSITY!” comes the boisterous reply.
“And what is a community of generosity?” The man scans the crowd for a receptive face at 7:45 on a Saturday morning.
Someone, most often an eager child, shouts the well-known response: “It’s a place where everyone has something to give and something to receive!”
Vincent Noth, the executive director of Kinship Community Food Center in Milwaukee, goes on to explain exactly what that refrain entails. While volunteering somewhere like a food pantry can sometimes feel transactional, that is the opposite of Kinship’s modus operandi. Volunteers may come merely to give of their time or donate food, but they leave having received something deeper. Similarly, those coming for their monthly groceries ought not to leave having received only food. They too have something to give that morning. Noth often says, “No one is so poor that they don’t have anything they can give, and no one is so well off that they don’t need anything today.” In this spirit of reciprocal exchange, Kinship brings to the forefront the innate dignity of each person who walks through Kinship’s doors. This acknowledgement of dignity and humanity is what Christ exhorts us to recognize in one another in Matthew 25.
By placing human interaction at the center of its operations, Kinship recognizes and celebrates the profound power of those relationships. This food pantry doesn’t stop at “feeding the hungry”; it also works to feed the soul of each person it serves. In a world where people are becoming more isolated and distant from our closest neighbors, Kinship works to bring neighbors together and to overcome any barriers to the human need for kinship.
Kinship Community Food Center, originally called Riverwest Food Pantry, started in the late 1970s in an old Polish Catholic Church basement in the Riverwest neighborhood on Milwaukee’s northeast side. Through the early 2000s, it was a community resource where neighbors in need could get much-needed groceries. Since Noth came to Riverwest Food Pantry in 2013, the pantry has exploded into a hub for the community, channeling its purposefully chosen name: Kinship.
While the community’s need for food is still great, Noth and his team of dedicated staff have recognized a more profound need on Milwaukee’s northside. In one of America’s most segregated cities, where urban poverty rates far outstrip those of surrounding suburban zip codes, urban high schools significantly underperform, and food deserts abound, yes, people need food, but they need more than just food. People need a community, a social net to support them. As Kinship notes in its programmatic materials:
- Trusted neighborhood relationships protect families from the most harmful effects of poverty, including the experience of food insecurity.
- Social cohesion is correlated with improved mental and physical health, and a decrease in neighborhood violence.
- Lack of socioeconomic diversity harms all of us. Impoverished and wealthy residents report they have a lower level of connection and social support in cities with greater segregation and inequality
- Feeding hunger presents an opportunity for diverse people to meet and develop.
- Annually about 40 million Americans eat and shop in pantries and meal sites, and roughly forty billion dollars’ worth of American “volunteer revenue hours” are hunger related.
Kinship has used this knowledge to create a large-scale hub of community resources. The pantry started by giving away food, reorienting every participant’s mind and heart towards a community of generosity in the process. From there, it grew to host the “Stride” Program, providing a space for community members to walk together in their search for meaningful employment and help with housing, medical bills, or insurance. Kinship has now grown to encompass seven different programs that include the Stride Program, a community farm, community feasts, formation opportunities, its own café that provides meaningful work experience, and other ways to encounter and support neighbors.
Brilliantly, Kinship’s work all centers on our need for nourishment. As Christ’s call emphasizes, we can do nothing without first being nourished with food. And food provides the opportunity, the open door, for relationship. Christ, being fully man and fully divine, knew this human need and chose to give Himself to us through food. Through the heavenly bread of the Eucharist, Christ invites us into a relationship with Himself but doesn’t do it all for us. He also recognizes our own God-given dignity and asks us to provide the bread and the wine that He will sanctify. Everyone has something to give and something to receive.
We see this again in the feeding of the five thousand. The crowd came to be nourished by Christ. They couldn’t tear themselves away from his teaching because they needed the spiritual nourishment only He could provide. Yet, when the time came to eat, Jesus did not call down manna from heaven. Instead, He recognized the God-given dignity of the crowd and asked them to provide something. One boy came forward offering his five loaves and two fish, which Jesus transformed to feed over five thousand people. Again: everyone has something to give and something to receive.
For nearly fifteen years, Kinship has used Christ’s wisdom to heal a broken Milwaukee neighborhood through the entry point of food. And they have seen immense success. The community around Kinship buzzes with kindness, smiles, and a willingness to see their neighbor as their neighbor.
If you’re interested in learning more or about this wonderful community of generosity, see their website here and remember that everyone has something to give and something to receive!