Instant mashed potato burns are the worst." Worse than the burns from steamed green beans or turkey casserole at the Thursday night soup kitchen. Worse than being splashed with the hot tea. After ten years serving dinners with the University City Hospitality Coalition (UCHC) soup kitchens six nights a week, Nikki Draud is an expert. Nikki's also a baseball expert. "Do you like the Mets?" she asks. "No? Good." She's protective of her Phillies. But right now she's not focused on baseball. Right now she's just intent on not getting burned by the dreaded instant mashed potatoes.
Nikki has seen legions of Penn students cycle through the soup kitchens on and around campus. The dinners serve close to one hundred of Philadelphia's hungry six nights a week and on any given night the UCHC soup kitchen will also have between three and thirty-three volunteers from Penn, the University City High School, and other area schools.
Behind it all, coordinating every side dish, every casserole, every dinner roll, and every cup of tea is her step-mother Lee Ann Draud. Lee Ann reports to duty at half past four, Nikki in tow. Dinner is served at six, but the Drauds have a lot of cooking to do before the volunteers arrive to set up and before the guests arrive to eat.
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Lee Ann has been with the UCHC since 1990. She came to Penn in 1967 from Florida to work on her PhD. in Anthropology. When her advisor died, Draud abandoned work on her dissertation; however, by that time she'd had already fallen in love with Philly and has lived here ever since.
When she began volunteering at the soup kitchens it was only for one night a week. But slowly her responsibilities grew and she'd pick up shifts for other UCHC volunteers. Soon, Lee Ann found herself in charge of cooking dinner multiple nights a week.
Today, she's the sole cook. Six days a week. Twelve months a year. She's the first to admit that "it's not healthy for an organization to rely too heavily on one person," but with no one stepping in to take over there's nothing much she can do.
Rick Hamilton, the current president of the UCHC board, has "been worrying for years what will happen without Lee Ann." He explains that "she does not want an assistant or intern so we're pretty much left doing lots of praying." It's unclear who will succeed her, but for now she's nowhere near ready to step down.
For one week each summer, it's Lee Ann's turn for a break. Sometimes the pain of finding replacements is almost not worth the vacation, she admits. Yet, still, for the third week in June, she and Nikki head to Coaster Con, the annual convention of American Coaster Enthusiasts.
As for Nikki, she's just a regular eighth grade girl. She always has her iPod Nano and Razr in hand. From her perch behind the soup kitchen counters, she tries to squeeze in some homework. Lee Ann doesn't force her to volunteer; Nikki chooses to do it on her own. Except, she adds, when she has too much homework. So does she tell her classmates about the soup kitchens? She gives me a look. "They'd think I was strange," she says. Her friends at St. Francis de Sales don't like homeless people. It's as simple as that.
Soup kitchen guests and volunteers have watched Nikki mature. Raffi Cohn, a Penn senior, has been volunteering on Sunday nights for the past four years. "Nikki's all grown up now." He chats with her about baseball, they stay updated on her high school search and extra-curricular activities. She's no longer the four-year-old who hung around Lee Ann's ankles. After ten years of volunteering, she can now serve dinner blindfolded. Lee Ann admits that Nikki sometimes gets frustrated with the Penn students who can't find their way around the kitchen, but she would never speak up. An eighth grader in a sea of college students, she'd prefer to keep quiet.
The soup kitchen doesn't usually wrap up until seven o'clock on a good night so Nikki and Lee Ann are often stuck eating something quick at home. But Lee Ann confesses that she likes to cook at home, and on Tuesday nights she finally has the chance. Nikki pipes in, "In the summer we go to baseball games."
When she mentions baseball, Nikki has a smile on her face. Her eyes light up. A normally quiet girl, Nikki can talk about the Phillies for hours. ERAs, RBIs, HRs. She throws acronyms right and left. She's a fount of baseball knowledge. But right now her attention is on the sweet potatoes, meticulously measuring just the right amount of maple syrup for each pan. It's her favorite job, week after week.
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Dinner is in a different location six nights a week. Each one has its own flavor, a different style. There's always a dinner guest playing piano on Friday nights and sometimes on Wednesday nights, too. If you didn't know better the schedule would sound like a rundown of Penn's religious communities: Penn Hillel on Sundays, the Newman Center on Mondays, and St. Agatha/St. James Church, St. Mary's Episcopal Church, and Woodland Presbyterian on Wednesdays through Saturdays. Though a weekly church-goer, Lee Ann describes herself as spiritual, not religious.
She doesn't question anyone's motivation to volunteer. Some are here to fulfill fraternity community service requirements; some are politically motivated to bring about social and economic change in this poverty-stricken neighborhood; some feel compelled by God.
Wednesdays at St. Agatha/St. James Church on 38th and Chestnut are UCHC's busiest. These nights the soup kitchen plays host to student volunteers from many of Penn's professional schools. Medical students set up a free clinic on the north side of the dining room. Law students assemble near the west wall, paperwork in hand and ready to practice their skills filing taxes and helping with tenant/landlord disputes. Along the east wall sit dental students with free toothbrushes and toothpaste next to social work students eager to help the dinner guests navigate the insurance system, find placements in homeless shelters and deal with housing issues. They offer support for substance abuse and can refer guests to counseling. But not everyone's happy with their arrival, jokes Allison Klugman (SW '07) as she points to the bag of candy on the table and quickly glances over to the dental students three feet away.
Lee Ann shushes everyone at 6 p.m. on the dot. "Welcome to the Wednesday night soup kitchen at St. Agatha/St. James church. This week we're on our regular schedule; tomorrow's dinner will be at St. Mary's Church." She asks someone to say grace.
Lee Ann has already assigned jobs to the volunteers: food servers, tea pourers, tray carriers. She is focused on the task at hand, catching up with the guests as they get their food, but keeping chitchat to a minimum. She doesn't like to pry. She's sad to admit that she's seen many of the same guests over the years. But sometimes she's optimistic when she doesn't see someone for a few weeks, hoping they've found a job, or a more stable salary. Often, though, that's not the case.
The majority of soup kitchen regulars aren't homeless. Many are vets; some just don't have enough money to both pay for rent and buy food. She doesn't ask questions, she's just there to provide a warm meal.
When Lee Ann started volunteering, "homelessness was big." People then viewed homelessness and poverty as a "temporary glitch in the economy." She pauses during a lull at the Sunday night dinner. "But we now know that it's a complex problem that's not easy to address."
Attention has since shifted to "more rewarding" issues, sexier causes. Literacy's hot now; soup kitchens are not. "As a volunteer, you don't see big results. You give them a good meal and know that they're not going to starve. But their problems don't go away."
While serving turkey ham ("just turkey, no ham," Lee Ann reassures the guests) Lee Ann acknowledges that some critics claim that soup kitchens do little to alleviate poverty directly. They simply feed people and send them back out into the cold.
But hungry people can't solve their problems if they're constantly searching for food. Someone's got to feed them until the deeper problem can be solved.
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It's 5:33 on Wednesday night. Lee Ann just walked in; Nikki's close behind her. Lee Ann's job at Elsevier, a medical publisher in Center City, grants her flexible hours. Tonight's dinner is a turkey-rice casserole, canned vegetables, sliced loaves of whole wheat bread, and cookies. All month long Lee Ann juggles the various food pantries, food distribution centers, and government agencies to plan menus for dinner each night. What she can't get from Philabundance, the Federal Surplus Food Program, and the Archdiocese she buys on her own.
It used to be much easier to get food, Lee Ann mentions one night. Before Aramark came to Penn in 2002, the dining halls would give her their extra food and their leftover baked goods. In short, they had a friendly relationship. The dining staff would store its leftovers in the Stouffer Commons and Hill dining halls; Lee Ann could pick them up at her convenience. "But when Aramark took over, all that stopped," Lee Ann confides. Eventually they offered leftover sweet rolls, but only at seven p.m. - right in the middle of soup kitchen. With no one available for pickup, the Aramark offer fell by the wayside.
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The UCHC was founded in 1984 after a cold winter night when a local homeless man froze to death on 38th Street. The original founders of the UCHC were students and West Philadelphia residents who also thought homelessness was too big a problem to ignore.
The UCHC is now a federally recognized non-profit organization made up entirely of volunteers. The board consists of a representative from each dinner site, medical students from the Wednesday night free clinic, neighborhood residents, and active community members.
The partnership between the UCHC and Penn is tenuous. As Lee Ann sees it, the University likes to take credit for the good but blames the UCHC for the bad. For a while the soup kitchens and Penn coexisted peacefully. Only Sunday night's dinner was actually on campus, at the Old Hillel building on 36th and Walnut; the others lay just outside the official campus boundaries. But the University worried about the increased presence of panhandlers on campus and asked the UCHC to move off campus completely, Lee Ann recalls. Luckily students stood their ground and the Sunday dinners continued, moving with Hillel to its new building on 39th Street.
Glenn Bryan is Penn's Assistant Vice President of Community Relations. As the Penn official most directly involved with the UCHC he praises the work that Lee Ann and the soup kitchens do. "They have been valiant with their efforts in terms of feeding and providing ancillary services to the individuals that come in for food." At the same time, he's quick to mention that Lee Ann and her team are an independent organization.
But in light of President Gutmann's Penn Compact with the West Philly community, does Bryan see Penn reaching out to the UCHC in the future? "Sure there's room for greater involvement ... and food is a definite service," but Penn's focus is elsewhere: medical care, dental care. They are easier services to provide, easier problems to fix.
The informal network of supporters seem to be serving the UCHC well for now. A Wharton Management 100 group hosts a large benefit for the soup kitchens each year that raises the bulk of their funds. Raffi Cohn from Sunday nights helps organize a drive for new hats, gloves, and scarves during the winter. Jessica Weisz raises money with Insomnia Cookie sales. The Archdiocese of Philadelphia lends them their van to use for food pickup.
The volunteers cycle in and out of the soup kitchens. Their commitment ebbs and flows with the cycle of schoolwork, finals and school vacations. Some stick around for a few years. Others last for just a few weeks. Penn's community service fraternity, Alpha Phi Omega, is a constant presence, but its representatives change from week to week. Greek life also supplies a constant stream of brothers and sisters looking to fulfill philanthropy requirements, but their presence is erratic too. But Nikki and Lee Ann are there every night, raring to go at half past four, and there with a broom in hand to clean it all up at seven.
But Nikki starts high school in the fall, and four years after that she'll be in college - a big city, she says, and a liberal arts school. Penn? "Definitely not, too close to home." But Chicago's on the short list. By the time Nikki leaves for college, Lee Ann will probably want to cut back her hours.
A longtime volunteer summed it up best when he explained one Thursday night: "People call it a soup kitchen, but really it's a community meal." The dinners are a charity for both the guests and volunteers. They connect, they chat, they enjoy each other's company. The community pitches in, willingly and energetically, but sometimes only piecemeal and sporadically. But hopefully they're grooming the next generation of Lee Anns and Nikkis.
