Commerce challenges charity: Sacramento sues Loaves & Fishes ministry

National Catholic Reporter, March 28, 1997 by Kathryn Casa

But according to Emily Katz, vice president of development at the non-profit California Emergency Foodlink the demand for services in Sacramento far outpaces the ability of agencies like hers to provide them. "For every availability we have in our job-training programs, we have at least three applicants. So the notion that people don't want to work is not our experience.

"Maybe supplementing the service of providing food with other kinds of support, especially oriented toward jobs and job training, would be a service," said Katz, "but you can't cut food and provide jobs. A hungry person can't work, and they can't learn to work."

Ironically, it is the support services at the charity that are being targeted by the city's litigation. Aside from the meals it provides, the Loaves & Fishes campus is also home to a 40-bed shelter for women and children and a daytime reception area where women can get housing referrals, take a shower, make and receive phone calls and use the daycare center.

Also neatly packaged into the campus are other housing and labor referral centers; payee services for people unable or not allowed to handle their own money; a health clinic and a mental health screening and counseling program that offers daily Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous meetings; and eight tiny cottages rented to the homeless for $200 a month.

There is a brightly painted playground; a liaison office for prisoners; a daytime teen center for runaways; a library; and even twice-monthly pet care donated by veterinary medicine students at the University of California, Davis. Two small cottages house the Mustard Seed School, attended by a handful of homeless and "motel kids," ineligible for public instruction because they have no address.

"Loaves & Fishes is a great place. I consider them as having saved my life," said Brian Michaelson, who was homeless for about 6 months starting in July 1995. A well-spoken Sacramento native, Michaelson said that after being laid off from his job, he sold his car to pay rent. When that money ran out, he found himself first in a Salvation Army shelter and then on the street. He now lives in a single occupancy room in a hotel downtown.

"There was dignity there," he said of Loaves & Fishes. "The respect they're treated with makes people there feel like they're human. A lot of times when you're homeless, you don't get that."

Michaelson said he found particular solace in the Loaves & Fishes library, an airy, sunlit corner of the warehouse that local architects volunteered to redesign as a reading room. One morning there last week, a young man in a black sweatshirt, jeans and work boots pored over the local classifieds at a reading table. Others read books, perused magazines or dozed in the sunlight filtering in from skylights. In a cubicle near the wall, an electric typewriter purred beside a typing instruction book. Above it, on a bulletin board where artwork and poetry of the guests is posted, was a verse signed "Brian Ziolkowski '95." It read: "Protagonists in our games of greed/A reflection of our times/Amidst the struggle/And the need/Some are left behind."