Since receiving a summer mini-grant from Interfaith Sustainable Food Collaborative, Sonoma Untied Methodist Church (UMC) has set up an information table weekly at the Tuesday-night farmer’s market in Sonoma to help people learn more about SNAP/CalFresh (aka “food stamps”) and to set up a meeting with a county eligibility worker. The grant allowed them to hire a bilingual Spanish-English intern to assist congregants with SNAP outreach to those who speak Spanish. In the first six weeks of tabling, they helped nearly 20 people sign up for CalFresh.
Sonoma UMC’s pastor, Matt Pearson, shares these reflections: “Feeding the hungry is a Gospel imperative. One way of feeding people is giving them a meal, another way is connecting them with the resources they need to feed themselves. Both are important.”
Sonoma UMC came to the campaign following the economic downturn of 2008 by perceiving a descent into poverty within the middle class generally and within the middle class in their church particularly. They went from the idea of a middle class “we” helping out an impoverished “they” to a dispossessed middle class “we” helping out a broader “we”. Having come to that understanding, they decided they were called on to do something. They discovered that half of those in the state who qualify for CalFresh aren’t getting CalFresh and decided to focus on that. They reached out to an eligibility supervisor in the county’s Human Resources Department, who came to the church and trained church members to pre-screen prospective applicants. Now the county is sending an eligibility worker to Sonoma one day a week to sign people up. The eligibility worker splits her day between the church in Sonoma and La Luz Center in Boyes Hot Springs. La Luz is reinvigorating its longtime CalFresh program, and intern Yuliana Camarena is working with the church’s Spiritual Action on the Plaza.
As they move ahead, they are reaching out to other congregations in the area to help expand the project.