BANGOR, Maine — If Maine is going to prevent people from going hungry, it needs to do much more than feed them, according to a Bangor native who works to help people out of homelessness in Washington, D.C.
Alex Justice Moore, a 2003 graduate of Bangor High School, returned to Maine this week to talk about a new approach to solving hunger. He spoke to a group of University of Maine students and officials Thursday during the two-day Maine Hunger Dialogue, hosted by the UMaine Cooperative Extension. On Friday, he made his pitch to a group of area nonprofit, municipal and charitable organization leaders during an event hosted by Eastern Maine Development Corp.
Moore is the chief development officer for D.C. Central Kitchen, an organization founded in 1989 by Robert Egger, a nightclub manager. Egger saw inefficiencies in how Washington fed its homeless population — having them line up day after day at shelters and soup kitchens for meals.
“Nothing was going to happen in these folks’ lives that would mean they wouldn’t have to come back for soup the next week,” Moore said.
Egger set up his organization to employ homeless individuals, taking in leftover food from the nightclub or other kitchens, which otherwise would have gone into the trash, and using it to cook quality meals and distributing that to area shelters and soup kitchens. The individuals hired included people just out of jail and people who hit hard times and lost their homes. They made living wages paid by the organization and could move into places of their own. Ultimately, the goal was to get them into food-service jobs and out of the cycle of homelessness.
Essentially, Moore said, D.C. Central Kitchen turned community service into a sort of economic development endeavor.
Feeding off Moore’s talk, Bangor-area homeless shelter, university, municipal and nonprofit officials are planning to put their heads together and weigh how D.C. Central Kitchen’s model might be implemented in Maine.
One potential vehicle could be D.C. Central’s launch grants program, which awards funding to spark offshoot programs on college campuses. Next year’s awards will be focused on rural communities, Moore said. The University of Maine would have a strong chance of claiming such a grant, he added.
Campus programs involve students collecting surplus food from community gardens, restaurants and grocery stores; preparing meals; and serving area adults who are food insecure. There were 36 such campus programs around the country operating during the past academic year, according to the organization’s website.
Today, D.C. Central Kitchen dishes out 5,000 meals each day, but the living-wage jobs are the more important piece of the puzzle.
“Hunger isn’t about food,” Moore said. “Hunger is ultimately about poverty. We’re never going to feed our way out of hunger.”
Follow Nick McCrea on Twitter @nmccrea213.