ALL ARE WELCOME "Run For Your Lunch" 5.5K fights hunger in Middleboro, MA

Fighting Hunger in our communities is important as too many in our own towns and cities deal with hunger on a daily basis.

One woman in Middleboro, MA is making a big difference "one meal at a time"

Road race benefits Middleboro community kitchen

Taunton, MA — Taunton Gazette 01/20/13

More than 200 participants in the second annual Run for Your Lunch raced five and a half kilometers before dining at the finish line on Sunday.

It was all to help All Are Welcome community kitchen in Middleboro, which is a type of restaurant with a policy of asking its patrons to pay what they can afford for a meal.

“I think it’s fabulous for everyone to come out and support us,” said Karen Cook, who founded All Are Welcome last year, opening it in March 2012 using funds from the inaugural Run for Your Lunch Race. “I have friends in road race community. It’s a fun thing to do. To put the community kitchen work and the running together is a lot of fun. We’ve got a lot of community support.”

Each participant paid at least $20 to run the road race and to have a lunch of clam or corn chowder, along with freshly baked bread and desserts. The race was based at the North Congregational Church.

All Are Welcome operates twice a week inside Middleboro’s Episcopal church, the Church of Our Savior on Union Street. On Thursdays a community meal is offered at lunch time, featuring soups, salads, sandwiches and special hot dishes, while breakfast is served on Saturdays.

The concept of the community kitchen is to provide restaurant-quality service while relieving hunger, Cook said. More fortunate guests pay what they feel is is a fair price and more if they wish to contribute additionally to the cause, while those who are fairing less well financially can pay what they can or volunteer.

Cook said the model has been working well since All Are Welcome opened.

“We are starting to see the need of the community and are starting to reach the community who needs us,” she said. “Whether you’re poor or not, you should be made to feel welcome and should appreciate the meal. We serve in a church, but we are definitely a restaurant. We are not a soup kitchen. We try to provide a restaurant atmosphere. For the most part, it seems to be working.”

For Paul Nickerson, of Middleboro, it was his first road race. Asked how it felt, his one-word response was “tiring.”

Nickerson said he knows for sure that the 2013 Run for Your Lunch was for a good cause, because he has eaten at All Are Welcome and said the food served there is excellent.

“This race was a good time, and there’s a sense of accomplishment,” Nickerson said. “The community kitchen is a good cause. I’ve had breakfast a few times and it’s good stuff.”

Sunday’s road race was also dedicated to Mary DuPont, a member of the board of All Are Welcome who died of pancreatic cancer on Nov. 11. All Are Welcome pledged to donate $1 to the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network for every pre-registered entrant in the 2013 Run for Your Lunch race.

Runners like Adam Petti, 15, of Raynham, said he knew DuPont’s story and that everyone was wearing orange in honor of her.

“It’s good when a community comes together and helps different causes,” Petti said.

One of the youngest participants in the road race was Raynham’s Gregory Melusky, who is 10 years old. Melusky said he was proud to help out All Are Welcome.

“The race was tough and it felt longer than it really was,” Melusky said. “I think the All Are Welcome is a great cause. I like to support it because there are some people out there who don’t have any food to eat. Raising money here is giving those people an opportunity to have a lunch and breakfast.”

 

Supporting the Troops.....more than just a slogan

BRAVO ZULU to Ms. Kayyem for putting this issue on the radar screen for those who don't have a family member who has served and for anyone else who needs some perspective.


A soldier’s money
From health care to finances, we should protect those who protected us
By Juliette Kayyem - Boston Globe
July 25, 2011

LAST WEEK, 650 troops quietly left Afghanistan, beginning the long slog home as part of President Obama’s drawdown. At the same time, General David Petraeus, the architect of the surges in both Iraq and Afghanistan, formally resigned from the military to take over as director of the CIA. The timing was coincidental, but not without meaning: The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are now simultaneously moving to a close.

Petraeus handed his Afghanistan command to Marine Lieutenant General John Allen, who will oversee further troop departures. He also symbolically handed over some measure of responsibility for those troops’ future well-being to his wife, Holly Petraeus, who represents a rare growth industry in government: protecting and providing to our returning service members and veterans.

As a nation, we are simply unprepared for the numbers of returning troops we now face. The wars of the last ten years have created over 1.1 million veterans; another 2.4 million men and women are on active, National Guard, or reserve duty. This class includes soldiers who have served in combat longer than any in US history. Of the nearly 400,000 who have seen combat duty, more than 13,000 have spent at least 45 months - nearly four cumulative years - in combat.

We know so little about the magnitude and the depth of the issues they will be facing in health care, employment, and education. All they want is to go back to normal lives. And that too is a challenge.

Holly Petraeus will help wage a small piece of this upcoming war. She runs the Office of Service member Affairs for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the entity conceived and established (but not to be run) by Elizabeth Warren. Her statutory mission, authorized to begin just last week, is to provide financial education for service members. Many are “young and inexperienced, with twice-a-month guaranteed paychecks, who move to areas in the country where they have never lived before and try to make ends meet,’’ she told me in an interview. Outside many military installations in the United States are strips of storefronts offering too-good-to-be-true deals: buy this, buy that, pawn this, cash that.

Service members are stressed, in difficult situations, and money is often tight. A survey of US military personnel showed that 25 percent have over $10,000 in credit-card debt; only 50 percent have any sort of rainy day fund for financial emergencies.

Today, the number one reason for a service member to lose security clearance is not loose lips, or drugs, or espionage. It is failure to show good financial standing because they simply can’t get ahead of their bills.

The blame isn’t just with shifty car dealers and pawn brokers. Earlier this year, JPMorgan Chase violated the Servicemember’s Civil Relief Act, which gives mortgage relief to deployed personnel, by overcharging thousands of clients and even foreclosing on 14 houses.

Financial woes may turn out to be the least of returning service members’ problems. At the highest levels of the Pentagon, there is a dawning recognition that we as a nation have no idea how the impact of excessive redeployments and the guerrilla nature of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will affect soldiers and their families. The end of war has been marked by celebration in the streets, as in World War II, or a hurried helicopter ride, as in Vietnam. This time, it must be marked by a much greater effort to adapt to the needs and aspirations of those returning home.

We are now ending the longest volunteer-only military effort since the American Revolution. And because there has been no draft, the divide between the US military and citizens who were asked to sacrifice little has grown. “Supporting our troops’’ has become a cliché with no meaning. We have learned to love our troops - often for selfish reasons, such as avoiding a draft - without really knowing them. Service members represent just 0.8 percent of the population.

In the months and years to come, we will be welcoming home and into society a population the likes we have not seen in our lifetime; the sheer numbers who have seen combat over and over will change the nature of the moral duty we owe those who fought voluntarily. And it will begin to change us. Ask Petraeus. Either one.

Juliette Kayyem can be reached at jkayyem@globe.com.