Our community is at a turning point. If you’ve ever wondered about the best, most crucial time to support DC Central Kitchen, it is right now.
36 percent of DC residents faced food insecurity in the past year. Our city leads the nation in senior hunger and is home to the widest racial disparity in employment rates in the country. In our lowest income communities, 30 percent of our young adults are neither in school nor working, setting them up for a lifetime of hardship. In these same neighborhoods, the average life expectancy lags two decades behind DC’s most prosperous areas.
Our neighbors are facing real problems. But we are about to prove this city has everything it needs to solve its biggest challenges.
Today, you can invest in solutions to hunger, poverty, and chronic disease in our community – and have your donation doubled! We are just weeks away from opening the nation’s most ambitious urban food hub, The Michael R. Klein Center for Jobs and Justice in Southwest DC. All donations over $100 will receive recognition in a digital donor installation in our new facility, designed by renowned artist Robin Bell.
In the Klein Center, we will finally have the modern, dignified spaces we need to provide hands-on learning and individualized coaching to record numbers of job training students, serving 250 people per year by 2025. That means we can empower more culinary students like Mykel Toney, a young father who completed our Culinary Job Training program last year and recently earned a promotion on our cafe and catering team.
As we grow, we will also create dozens of new jobs for people like John Fenner, our steadfast, upbeat dishwasher for the past 22 years. Now, with the super-sized John Fenner Dish Room named in his honor, John will have the dignified space he deserves to continue his essential work, helping us more than double our meal production to 25,000 healthy meals a day.
With a new state-of-the-art space and a transformative expansion of our programs, we are ready to do more for our community. More good jobs and healthy food. It’s a simple, powerful recipe. We’ve served it up every day for three decades, and now we can bring it to every corner of our city. But we need your help.