Homeless People Achieve Victory

[Article by Zachary D. Lyons]

Photo - Courtesy of FareStart
FareStart graduates express exuberance upon graduation.

Combining culinary arts training with homeless people wanting to better themselves, brings out the indomitable human spirit in community donors, the homeless and the people doing the training.

When a community gets behind something it believes in, it carries the seeds to change the world. And that is what FareStart, with tremendous support from the community, is doing.

On any given night, there are 8,000 homeless men, women, and children in King County, Washington, home to the city of Seattle. Some 2,500 of these people can be categorized as chronically homeless, by federal standards. Homelessness seems an endless dilemma – one that transcends our ability to overcome it, but FareStart, a Seattle-based organization seeks to do just that.

FareStart began as a program to make nutritious and culturally appropriate meal-service available to homeless people around Seattle. Originally called Common Meals and operated as a for-profit business, it was founded by chef and entrepreneur David Lee. As the program grew, Lee got the idea that it could also train homeless people to be able to fend for themselves. He thought of the adage, "Give a man a fish, and he can eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he can eat for a lifetime." Common Meals evolved into a not-for-profit organization FareStart in the mid-1990s and started training Seattle's homeless for jobs in the foodservice industry.

“When I first came on board, I was one of only three employees, said Tom French, who served as FareStart's first executive chef and operations manager after it had transitioned to being a nonprofit from Common Meals. "We looked at them (homeless people) as good people who were eager to learn. Then, overnight, we picked up contracts to prepare meals for Head Start and the Early Childhood Education and Assistance Program after their service provider suddenly went out of business. It saved FareStart financially, gave the organization a lot of credibility, and it was a great fit. Because we were a nonprofit, we could operate within the reimbursement levels of these two programs, and these two contracts set the stage for FareStart to develop other partnerships within the community at large."

To learn more about FareStart, buy the March/April edition of Touch the Soil magazine at a retail outlet or subscribe online.