Benefit Yard Sale

Help Feed the Hungry!
Beans and Rice Benefit Yard Sale
Saturday August 28th 8AM-1PM
Radford

Office Furniture
Apartment Furniture
Electronics
Great stuff !!!!

                                                     

                                                     

                                                                  

                                                            

                                                                          

                                                                   

Food Fairness August 14th Farmer's Market:Duck Lottery

One of the activities we are sponsoring on August 14th at the Food Fairness event is a "duck lottery."  This is meant to be fun, educational, and a bit of a fundraiser. We are floating a flock of ducks in a wash tub with the names of food on their bottoms.

These plastic ducks are perfect for the job. For a dollar folks can pick two ducks. If the foods on the bottom of the ducks go together to make a meal, then the player gets to choose a rubber ducky from our great variety of duck personages.

Aren't these just the cutest and don't you want to come play.  Winning combos include:

• macaroni and cheese
• peanut butter and jelly
• pasta and sauce
• beans and rice (of course)
• soup and crackers
• tuna and tuna helper

The idea is that these foods can make a whole meal with little or no additional food. Too often people give food that is not very usable.  These  folks mean well and what they give is totally OK food, it just does not provide a meal.  Our fave example of foods that are not very helpful are black olives, cranberry sauce, pumpkin puree, and (the biggie) marinated artichoke hearts.  These scream leftover from a holiday meal and they also need a lot of other foods to make them work.  Another set of faves is cans of green beans, creamed corn, and peas. Yes they are good foods. Yes at holidays churches and other groups ask for these to round out holiday dinner boxes. BUT, on a day to day basis, most people would not open a can of green beans, a can of creamed corn, and a can of peas for lunch.  Finally, the all time winner are those little cans of tomato paste.  Wow, do they need help to make a meal.  When you are hungry is this what you would eat or is this what you want your grandma to be taking out of the cupboard for dinner since that's all there is. If you wouldn't eat it, then why expect others to eat it.

So come down to the farmer's market on the 14th prepared to play.  We'll love seeing you and you know you want a rubber duck. 

Noah and His Women

 Noah with his women at the fire house

In back, left to right: Vicky Collins and Laura 

Row two: Heidi, Kendra, Jamie, Valerie and Kayla

Front: Noah and Geena

All are Beans and Rice staff except Vicky (Director of Radford City DSS) and Noah.

 
Rob and Fay Solomon (long time supporters of Beans and Rice, thank you, thank you) have a son Noah who is about to have his bar mitzvah.  As part of his service project he has been volunteering with Beans and Rice on Monday and Friday. He also plans to donate any monetary gifts to three organizations and we are one of them (again, thank you, thank you).  Noah is a a great help. We all love him.

Food Fairness August 14th Farmer's Market

You have got to agree that this is a way cool poster and its for a way cool event that will be sooooo much fun and sooooooo interesting.  Beans and Rice is a co-sponsor. We'll be there.  I hope you will too. BTW, the poster is the work of Zetta Nicely aka Mizz Bozzy Pantz who is in charge of pulling this together. Zetta is in the Psy.D. program at RU and also is at the Farmer's Market every Saturday. Get to the Farmer's Market and check it out and talk with Zetta about this event.

Busy, busy, busy !!!!

                   Office looking east.                                          

                                                                                                          

Office looking west

Ok. We are finally set up in our office. If you put the two pix together you get the total front of the office. Check out our sign, our big pot of flowers and the black bags which hold some of the tomato plants from our container gardening project. 

Container gardening project
We dove into this in mid May during the move and of the 30 families that signed up to grow vegetables, 21 actually participated. We have been going back every two weeks. A few plants had to be replaced, but most of the plants are thriving and growing. Some families actually expanded the project on their own to more plants. We'll keep you up dated on the ultimate success of this. But I can say that the total cost was $1,331.77 for bags, fertilizer/soil, and plants.  If we include our demo garden (the equivalent of three households) the cost per household is $55.49.  Not bad for a whole summer project, I say.   Yes we could have done it cheaper with dry wall mud buckets (suggested by master gardeners) but this would not have worked nearly as effectively. First of all, low income families do not like getting  what they see as castoffs, which is exactly how they would have seen the dry wall buckets. Secondly, the whole pre (cleaning and drilling holes) and transportation/storage (we had 90 grow bags, think of 90 buckets) would have been really challenging. 

New Staff/Old Staff
We also have been maxing out at food distribution.  Our record day is now 105 households. The average for June was 75 households per distribution.  Fortunately we are joined by three AmeriCorps VISTA Summer Associates.

This Heidi (Valerie is in the background) who has graduated from Tech and lives in Blacksburg.  

Jamie is a senior at RU and will be graduating in social work. She was an intern with us in the spring. Once again that is Valerie in the background. Hey, Val what's up with the background shots.

This is Kendra. She's an RU grad and will be staying with us as an AmeriCorps VISTA starting in August.

This is a great crew and they have really dug in.  Of course there is also our existing AmeriCorps VISTAs. 

Valerie has been with us for two years and will be finishing up her time with us in July. She has been in charge of the After School Program at McHarg.

Laura has been with us for the past year and will also be moving on in July.  She was in charge of our Willow Woods programs.

Kayla has been with us for the past year also at McHarg which she will be taking over for her second year. She comes from Laurel Fork and is the person who hooked us up with the Society of Saint Andrew and the Hillsville Farmer's Market.

Backpack Project

We are moving into another project as a partner, the backpack project which will send home food to the most needy children for the weekend. Radford Rotary has applied for a district grant of 50/50 local and district funds of $6000.00.   Since we are trying to target 100 children this would provide only $2.50 per child for a weekend. We really, really want to make this more food than snacks, and as nutritious as possible.  We hope to triple our funds.  Our other partner is Radford University students.

Expansion to Belle Heth

We are also working to expand our after school program to third and fourth grade at McHarg.  Right now everyone is on board with this, Rob Graham the acting Superintendent, Jack McKinley, the principal at McHarg, and Lenore Wilson, the school food services supervisor.  What we need to make this happen is a bus driver.

Summer Program

In partnership with Belle Heh, McHarg, and RU we put together an summer program Monday-Thursday at Belle Heth after summer school in the AM.  RU's graduate program in special education under Kenna Colley provides interns who do practice teaching in the AM and then partner with us to provide educational experiences from noon until 3PM. This is a big event and leaves staff pretty exhausted after a few days. 

ME

Finally, its that time of year.  I have been spending every spare minute on the preparation for the annual audit.  Phillip Martin our CPA is great to work with but the gathering together of records and invoices, etc is tedious and time consumming. Phillip now has everything and I can take some time to do the fun stuff like work on the blog :) 

More on the Radford Move to 1608 W Main Street

Today I finally finished getting everything out of my old office and giving it  a quick clean.  There was really no way to clean clean this place because it suffered from multiple problems, including mold and mildew on the walls.  The only reason I ended up with this as the main office was that we had set up a computer lab in the space on one side and our Youth Leadership program in the space on the other side. This meant we had a package deal for rent making the whole thing fairly inexpensive.  When we shut down the other two programs there was really no place available for me to move to that I could justify the expense for just my office. So I stayed despite the smell, lack of heat, bad wiring  (half the time the lights did not come on), truly screwed up telephone lines (half the time the phone didn't work) leaking ceiling, and hole in the floor.

The old office, aka the troll cave.

This picture made it look brighter than it actually was in that the door was open so there was enough light to get the picture.

Last fall I decided that this simply could not go on and started looking for something for myself.  I signed one lease but that wasn't working out and time dragged by while the owner of the property I had agreed to worked on something else.  Then, wow!!!  The little building that used to be a bank and currently  was a flower shop opened.  The rent for the whole building was $800.00.  We could have the whole building with off street parking.  If I closed the program at Willow Woods and moved the staff down from there, it would mean a net saving of $24 in rent plus only one utility bill, one phone bill, no cable cost, and all of us in one building, making for better supervision.  We had been talking about whether keeping the programs at Willow Woods going was cost effective. But, we also had an obligation to Willow Woods and its manager who had really supported us in the early days.  I took this to the executive of the board and the decision was to consolidate the offices and close Willow Woods. Although economically this was the best move, I did not feel good about abandoning Willow Woods and I dreaded telling Jennifer Collins, the manager.

I talked with her the week before May 1 which was not only the deadline to tell we were going but also when I was leaving for two weeks.She talked with the main office and we agreed to shrink the program back down to one apartment and they would pay the electric and the internet access. We would keep the food pantry and the computer lab there as well as adult education classes. YES.

The week of the 17th we got serious about moving. That Thursday the Willow Woods staff moved all of their offices down into a large common office area. The following Sunday with the help of Drew Dodson, a board member, Sam Hemsley, from the Pulaski staff, and my husband Chris, we got the bulk of \my office furniture moved.  Thank you, think you Drew, Sam and Chris.  All week I had been talking a car load of stuff whenever I went up or down main street. Then Friday and today Chris and I got out the last. I had kept a small computer stand and chair there since both the phone and internet were still accessible there.  

In the new space we have about 30 feet of large plate glass windows facing the street, ten foot ceilings, and lots of space. I have a two room suite with a largish "library" behind my office and then the office. 

As you can see I haven't even gotten the painters tape office the drawers.  Tomorrow for that while I wait for the Verizon man.  I have a wall of three windows  8' X 4' . No more troll cave.  Mr. Chapman,the new landlord and really nice man, is closing up the archway into my office with a locking door (15 lite) and a wall.  He's just about done with that. 

We have space for a conference table (anyone have a conference table and chairs they don't need?) and we are setting it up with a large dry erase  board and screen. We'll have a media cart with laptop and portable projector. Two baths. A utility room. A room for food storage with freezers and frigs. And, the large staff room.  What a huge difference.

You all better come see us and see how great this is.

Beans and Rice is on the move.

I've been off on vacation for two weeks and have come back to gearing up to move our main office and consolidate our Willow Woods offices all into one building.  We're moving to 1608 W. Main Street. The new building will be all our with off street parking behind the building. We all working like fiends to get this done by the first of the month.  More as we make the move and get our new container gardening project going.