I recently attended a fundraiser for one of our clients,Compass Community Services, and was not surprised to hear that more and more families are struggling to find stable housing in this difficult economic climate. Staggering numbers of people struggling to feed and care for their children means our work continues to be a crucial service to children, families, and seniors living in disadvantaged situations. Over the past three years, we have worked hard to create a curriculum that is effective, culturally competent, and flexible enough to handle the incredible diversity of our workshop participants. Our impact continues to grow stronger, and we're confident that we're creating positive change to people that need it most.

This winter we completed a pilot for the San Francisco Food Bank, where we worked with their Food Pantry program to provide nutrition programming and food samples to their clients. We're now developing a second series of workshops that targets this same population. The Food Bank has unparalleled success bringing food to hungry people; we are so thrilled to have the opportunity to increase the depth of their fabulous work for the people of San Francisco. We also added another new client recently, A Home Away from Homelessness. This fantastic organization supports children living in shelters by providing safe, structured afternoons with recreation, homework help, and healthy meals.

Looking ahead to summer, we're now hiring facilitators for adult and children's nutrition workshops in Carlsbad, San Diego, San Marcos, Irvine, and Santa Rosa. If you're in that area and interested in becoming a facilitator, please apply here.

I have this happen every year - I feel as though I have plenty of time for the holidays, plenty of time until next year and then all of a sudden, here I am - staring down Christmas, frying latkes (we celebrate Chanukah and Christmas in our house!), and starting to plan for January workshops.

We have some exciting opportunities in January.  In addition to our usual crop of BRIDGE Housing sites, we're adding three sites in partnership with the San Francisco Food Bank.  These sites are an outgrowth of the work we did at Valencia Gardens over the summer - an effective but rather chaotic attempt at running nutrition programming concurrently with Food Pantries sponsored by the SFFB.  The plus side is obvious - residents are already there getting food, why not take a minute to talk with our staff or attend a cooking demonstration?  As some of our facilitators know, large attendance is hard to come by at evening workshops targeting families of young children.  But these sites have their own challenges.  People are wary of us, they want to grab their food and get home, or they have concerns we won't be able to communicate in their language.

So, as I put together my team to do these Food Pantries, I'm putting "bilingual volunteers" on the top of my wishlist to Santa.  These sites are basically unfunded, although the Food Bank is pitching in with supplies and some food, so we're going to try and scrape these together as best we can.  Our potential upside could be huge - if these workshops prove to be worthwhile for the residents, we could be doing a lot more of them (hopefully with some funding!)

So, Happy Holidays everyone!  If we don't have a white Christmas here in SF, at least we'll have a wet one.

I'm very excited to get started on a new project. Without giving away all of the juicy details, we're looking for people to get involved with a new workshop format right here in San Francisco. Instead of our usual seminar, we're going to be experimenting this summer at a housing site in the Mission.

We're on a tight budget (what's new) so we're hoping to involve some volunteers as well as paid facilitators on this one. We'll be running "bite-sized" programming during a Food Pantry day. This means that the residents are already participating in a great Food Pantry program on Wednesday afternoons sponsored by the San Francisco Food Bank. We will set up shop doing cooking demonstration, activities for kids, info and resources for adults and seniors. I think it has fabulous potential and I can't wait to get started!

Interested in getting involved? Apply here.