LOAVES AND FISHES MINISTRIES, INC.

Organization History & Description of Programs

For over twenty years, Loaves & Fishes Ministries has been an independent non-profit organization that serves residents of the Asylum Hill neighborhood. We have grown tremendously in this time, and our focus has moved significantly from serving emergency food to creating long-term solutions to poverty that enable individuals to move towards financial independence. However, these programmatic changes and growth have for some time necessitated greater physical space: we found that we were no longer able to provide existing services, and to plan for future programs, at our rented space in Trinity Episcopal Church.  In 2001 Loaves & Fishes Ministries moved to new rented space in the Immannuel Congregational Church and at 360 Farmington Avenue.

Organization Information:  

Loaves & Fishes Ministries, a tax-exempt charitable organization, provides human services in Hartford, CT.  Our basic programs revolve around our soup kitchen, started two decades ago on Asylum Hill.  We serve an average of 130 meals each day, Monday through Friday.  Our related programs have developed in response to changing client needs.  Our mission is to provide the means for motivated individuals to move themselves out of the cycle of poverty and addiction into sober, responsible lives.  This starts with providing nutritious food to those in need.

·         Morning Program: provides information and education about legal issues, HIV/AIDS (prevention and blood screening), housing opportunities, literacy information, substance abuse, and employment counseling.  Charter Oak – Rice Heights now offers weekly HIV/AIDS blood-pulls and counseling with a trained representative.

·         Pantry Program: provides weekly bags of groceries to families who must meet verifiable requirements (residence in Asylum Hill, dependents in the household, poverty level to low-income).

·         Catering Program: trains selected clients in catering, nutrition and menu planning.

·         Sewing Program: offers women the chance to acquire sewing and tailoring skills which are in great demand from area dry cleaners.

·         Opening Doors Program: the program introduces individuals to the Department of Labor and their large job bank.  We also provide training in English as a second language and training in computer, keyboard and internet use.  We hope to increase awareness of employment services in Hartford and fill in gaps needed to make the client a viable employee.

·         Business Initiative$: an extension of job training that implements the possibility of self-employment. This microenterprise program combines business training with opportunities for access to capital in a fourteen-week business training course, with personal development sessions to develop the business owner, and the opportunity to apply for a loan following the successful completion of the course.

Loaves & Fishes maintains constant direct contact with our clients in order to ensure that our programs meet changing client need.  We created our Sewing Program after extensive job-training questionnaires and follow-up conversations with the women in our client population, who overwhelmingly asked for the chance to learn sewing as an employable skill. Similarly, the Aetna Food Service Training course was planned after thorough research into what clients were interested in that would also provide gainful employment in Hartford. Business Initiative$ was created to answer the growing need for entrepreneurial training in all of Hartford attested to by community financial organizations and prospective clients.

The role of volunteers at Loaves & Fishes remains essential to our operation.  Meals in the soup kitchen are prepared and served by local volunteer groups (under the supervision of our kitchen director) from businesses, churches and synagogues, community groups and schools.  Over thirty groups are involved, each on a cycle of monthly service.   Since each volunteer group consists of approxi­mately twelve members, close to four hundred people from the community and surrounding towns are involved with helping feed our clients. This noon meal is vital to the func­tioning of our overall pro­gram, because it draws many clients to our facility who are in desperate need of many of our other services.  Often, these individuals are not aware of the opportunities available at Loaves & Fishes Ministries, and after eating here and becoming comfortable with our staff and our programs, they will on their own initiative seek further help.  See Demographics for more information.

Loaves & Fishes is unique in its holistic approach to services, offering programs that allow individuals to move towards personal responsibility.   We work extensively with other agencies to offer counseling, education, and healthcare to our clients.  We continue to offer motivated clients the chance to learn skills for viable employment in order to move themselves off welfare.  Our holistic approach means that we are able to impact many aspects of our clients' lives, and they are able to utilize various programs which meet their changing needs while having the continuity of a trusted staff who knows them. 

In addition to our noon meal, CIGNA,  Prudential Financial, St. James's Church, West Hartford, St. John's Church, West Hartford  and the Veterans Administration in Newington provide clients with bagged meals and sandwiches several times a month, so that clients often have weekend meals. These volunteer groups bring over 250 sandwiches each, on various days throughout the month. Our clients take these individual bag meals with them as they leave the dining room. The volunteer groups buy, assemble, and deliver the bagged meals to our facility.

The Pantry Program continues to serve families (individuals with proof of dependents living with them for whom they are responsible) every Tuesday. We have recently adapted our Pantry guidelines in light of changing client needs, and now accept families who receive State assistance or who are living at the poverty/low-income levels as defined by the State. This modification allows us to reach individuals with families who are now off of welfare but working minimum wage jobs that often pay less than their former assistance.

Our Morning Program offers education and information on legal issues, HIV/ AID­S, and sub­stance abuse. Clients are given access to various kinds of help, but the impetus for action must come from the client: the service is designed to offer much needed opportunities which the client learns to take advantage of to better herself.

Our Direct Aid   assists with emergency needs of clients.  We can help with bus passes, school books, clothing needs for work, medical prescriptions, etc. Our office helps clients make connections with other area human service agencies for shelter, food, and clothing.

Our Mental and Physical Health Counseling services continue to be an attempt to remedy the great lack of health care of all types now available to the poor and homeless. We offer connections to mental health counseling with outreach psychologists from Hartford Community Mental Health Association and Capitol Region Mental Health Center, who will meet individually with clients in need of psychiatric help. Nancy Guyette, nurse from Charter Oak/Rice Heights attends our facility every Monday and Wednesday during the mealtime.   She sees any and all clients who have a particular health problem, or who need medical advice, a blood-ressure check, or a sympathetic ear.  Her numbers indicate that she sees an average of 110 clients each month.

Our Catering program offers low-cost, high quality fare to a variety of clients, from individuals to State agencies. In the past year we again catered the Harriet Beecher Stowe House birthday celebration (with cake for 500), we cater West Middle School monthly PTO meetings, and many smaller meetings and luncheons. This program has come to serve as an example to us of how to offer entry level job skills for clients responsible enough to successfully com­plete a training program. Our Foods Service Training Program continues in hiatus, due chiefly to a changing economic situation at the Aetna. At the present time, as the Aetna lays off employees, they do not have space in their food service program for trainees. We will continue this program as soon as such space presents itself. Representatives from the Aetna and Loaves & Fishes remain firmly committed to the program. Our Foods Service Training Program continues to be the ONLY paid training course in the city of Hartford, helping employees learn food preparation and presentation, nutrition, as well as the daily responsibilities of holding down a job.

Our Sewing Program has continued its contract this year with the West Hartford Women’s Exchange. All money from sales of sewn goods go to the women in the program; Loaves & Fishes does not benefit monetarily. In addition, the women in the program have helped to decorate our new office space with new curtains. Officially designated a "Welfare to Work" program in 1998, this offering continues to help women develop sewing and interpersonal skills. Margrete Olsen is our sewing program instructor.

The Sewing Program was the impetus for our comprehensive business training program, Business Initiative$, which began business training courses in October of 1999, and has now completed eight successful sessions. The ninth session will begin September, 2004. This program offers many components of a traditional microenterprise program combined with elements tailored to best fit our clients and the needs we have discovered through daily interaction on Asylum Hill. We now have 43 graduates of the program, and several are in the process of preparing their loan applications. In our new space, we now can offer a business reference library and computer area for students and graduates of this program.

Contact us for more information