Austin, Texas Group Aids Homeless
Mobile Loaves and Fishes Feeds Chronically Homeless and Poor
Mobile Loaves and Fishes provides food and essentials to the poor by traveling to where they live. The group plans to expand in 2008 to provide housing as well.
Volunteerism tends to surge during the holiday season, but Alan Graham, president of Mobile Loaves and Fishes, said his organization is “a 365-day-a year operation.”
Mobile Loaves and Fishes is a faith-based 501c3 with chapters in four states. (Locations include San Antonio, New Orleans, Providence, RI and Nashville, Tenn., as well as the Austin, Texas headquarters.)
Habitat on Wheels
The volunteers who participate in the program prepare meals and serve them out of catering trucks to homeless individuals. The group plans to expand its vision in 2008 with Habitat on Wheels, a housing initiative. It has purchased 23 trailers to accommodate the homeless in “a radical departure from other efforts to house homeless people,” Graham said.
“The city has offered us a tract of land. It’s like a KOA campground for the chronically homeless,” Graham said.
Calling for change in a unique way
The difference between his organization and others that serve the chronically homeless, said Graham, is this: “We go to where the homeless are-we don’t ask the homeless to come to us. Wherever the homeless or working poor are, that’s where the trucks go.”
Graham and his volunteers in Austin have a holiday feast planned for the Friday night before Christmas Day. On the holiday itself, they will be on the streets of Austin by 8 a.m. with trucks loaded with food, coffee and essentials like toilet paper.
“We go out and spend two or three hours on the street loving on people, spending time with them,” Graham said. “The world is changed one person at a time.”
It was this philosophy that led him to start Mobile Loaves and Fishes in 1998 out of the back of a green minivan. The organization that he began with five other volunteers has grown to 9,000 volunteers nationwide. The group served its one-millionth meal in October.
To celebrate this milestone, volunteers in Austin staged a day of reverse panhandling-they stationed themselves on a street corner typically used for begging and gave plastic bags full of items most needed by the homeless to pedestrians and drivers of passing cars.
It is campaigns like these that Graham hopes will draw attention to his cause. He uses the “Don’t Mess with Texas” anti-littering campaign as a model.
“The government got notable Texans to go on these commercials and say, ‘Stop throwing crap on the highways. Dispose of it properly.’ Now, our highways are some of the cleanest in the country. That campaign transferred the responsibility from institutional government care to individual responsibility,” Graham said.
Contact is key
Graham believes the direct connection volunteers experience with those they help is the link to alleviating the hardships the homeless experience.
“We have to come out of the bowels of our respective communities to meet their material, spiritual and social needs,” he said. “It’s human beings adopting other human beings in spite of the dysfunctions they may have. (Volunteers) are going out and choosing to be with their brothers and sisters out there. With that comes a happiness and joy…that has a direct impact on the human receiving the service.”
To get involved with your local Mobile Loaves and Fishes chapter, or to make a monetary donation, visit www.mlfnow.org.
