Transcription of Katie Wallace & Katie Brown for the show Kids, Community & Coffee #280
Lisa Belisle: This morning I have with me two Katies who are doing very important work in the world. The first is Katie Wallace, she is the president and founder of the Locker Project, which works with Southern Maine schools to create programs for providing students with healthy class-time snacks and take-home food. Katie Brown is another founder and also the executive director of the Locker Project organization, and it’s really great to have both of you in the studio with us today.
Katie Brown: Thank you. I’m really glad to be here.
Katie Wallace: Thank you.
Lisa Belisle: From what I understand, Katie Wallace, you have a now sixth grader named Ava at King.
Katie Wallace: Yes.
Lisa Belisle: She was sort of your intro to the issues that you have been trying to address with this program.
Katie Wallace: Yeah. When she was in kindergarten at the East End Community School, I volunteered in the classroom, and the time that I happened to volunteer was part of math and then into snack. I was really, really shocked to sit there during snack time and look around and see that half a dozen of our friends were just sitting there watching their friends eat. I spoke to the teacher about it afterwards, and she said that that was completely normal, that not everybody had the ability to bring snack, but her school had a grant in place that provided fruits and vegetables for snack time three days a week, so it was really just a problem two days a week. It seemed like something that myself and my friends in the neighborhood could actually fill that need. We could get snacks into all the classrooms, 24 classrooms, for twice a week. Just like a bag of pretzels or a box of crackers, and then it just grew and it grew and it grew and now we have 19 schools.
Katie Brown: 20.
Katie Wallace: 20.
Lisa Belisle: It continues to grow it sounds like. Katie Brown, what is your connection? How did you get interested in this?
Katie Brown: Well, I was following Katie’s progress at the East End Community School as a friend, and at the time I was serving on the board of the Munjoy Hill Neighborhood Organization and writing little articles here and there for the neighborhood newspaper, and one time I wrote a little blurb for her asking for support and donated foods. So many people ended up donating not just a lot of food but some money, which I know helped take the burden off her own cash flow that she was always investing into her program. Then one day, we just met for coffee, and she was talking about the pressure from other schools to grow the program and pressure from potential donors to become a non-profit so that they could donate tax-deductible donations. We just kind of looked at each other, and I said, “Well you know, I could start the non-profit. I’ve had a lot of experience with that.” We sort of had chills for a few minutes and decided to go ahead and do it, and I said, “You could move to the board and be the board president and keep the vision, keep us steered forward with your vision, and you won’t have to spend your own money anymore.”
Lisa Belisle: What was your experience with non-profits in the past?
Katie Brown: Every time I’ve tried to get out of the non-profit field, it’s like The Godfather, I get pulled back in. I’ve always been very mission-driven, and so I’ve worked for, it feels like a dozen, different non-profit organizations over the 20 something years that I’ve been in Portland. They’ve really ranged from more hands-on social work type organizations to more board development, Portland trails, et cetera, et cetera.
Lisa Belisle: Katie, you have kind of an interesting background yourself. You actually work at the Blue Spoon.
Katie Brown: Yeah, a server.
Lisa Belisle: Up on Munjoy Hill, and you’re an artist in addition to being a mother. How did you feel when somebody said, “Hey, why don’t you do this non-profit?”
Katie Wallace: I felt really overwhelmed and I was already burnt out. I had been doing it at that point, it was my fourth year, and putting snacks into the classrooms when April was in kindergarten grew because we got a grant from Morgan Stanley to create a pilot program through Good Shepherd. We went from being able to put snacks in the classrooms to being able to supply students and families with groceries for the week. It really changed over those four years, and I got some press on Thanksgiving one day as ten Mainers to be thankful for. People started reaching out to me to be like, “How is this single mom waitress doing this? We need this at our school.” One of my customers at Blue Spoon, Angela Adams, who is an amazing human being, reached out to me, and she wanted to have a meeting with me to talk about this. I was thinking, “Oh, she wants to donate.”
What she said was, “I can see this being a business,” and I was just like, “Ah,” because I was so overwhelmed. I was doing this with one other mother, Allison Gray-Murray. We were doing it every week. We had just finished delivering turkeys, groceries for the week of vacation, all the fixings for a turkey dinner to 32 families that this school had identified, and I was just so burnt out that when Katie Brown and I met for coffee that cold winter day, I looked deep into her eyes and I was like, “I don’t want to do this.” She looked deep into my eyes and she said, “I should do this.” We just had this moment where we’re like, “This is amazing,” because it needed to happen, and I didn’t want to do it. I was so burnt out, and you were ready to go.
Katie Brown: It was perfect timing. Angela, by the way, joined our board immediately, too, when we formed and she designed our logo.
Katie Wallace: She’s our vice president. I think branding is really important because there’s so much of a stigmatism and shame to poverty, but in our schools, our students aren’t embarrassed. They’re not ashamed anymore. We show up in this really cool looking transit van designed by Angela Adams, and we hand out really good looking produce donated by local farmers and….
Katie Brown: Hannaford and gardeners and….
Katie Wallace: Hannaford…. Yeah, it’s amazing. Not only are we able to get food to food-insecure students and families, but we’re able to destigmatize the shame of that.
Lisa Belisle: Why is it called The Locker Project?
Katie Brown: That was just one of those driving down Route 1 after a party, still trying to come up with a name. We had to register as a corporation and initially was tossing around Food for Thought as the name for the organization, and one morning on NPR, I heard a story where Jeff Bridges was in Arizona at the ribbon-cutting of an organization, I think a school backpack program, food backpack program, called Food for Thought. I decided, “Okay, well it’s not going to be that.” I started really thinking about what is it that we do, and one of the things that Katie and some of the other staff at the East End Community School would do was to put food in the lockers of the kids that they knew really needed it. I just kept thinking about the lockers, and then just Locker Project popped into my head.
Katie Wallace: We were really mindful of not letting the kids be embarrassed by this, so we had a list compiled by the school social worker, the school nurse, the teachers, and even some of the parents themselves of students that could really benefit from this. We had their locker numbers, and while no one was in the halls, we would go and put the food right in their lockers, in their backpacks and zip it up and no one ever had to see it until they got home. The pantry that we kept the food in for the kids to access we kept in the nurse’s office where it’s pretty confidential anyways, so if they needed food for a crisis or emergency or they wanted to be able to pick the food themselves, they could just go down with a teacher or get a pass for the nurse’s office and go get whatever they needed and get some groceries for their family and pack it up, and no one needed to know. It was a very private, respectful way of doing it.
Lisa Belisle: What year did you start?
Katie Brown: Well, you started your program in what, 2010?
Katie Wallace: 2010, and then we got our grant in 2012.
Katie Brown: We started The Locker Project in 2014, so we’ve really been around for just about two and a half years.
Lisa Belisle: What do you think it is about this particular issue that people want to get behind?
Katie Brown: I think that certainly people have a huge heart for those who can’t help themselves and those who can’t defend themselves. Maine loves our children, animals, and seniors. It’s also I think that so many people identify with hunger. So many among us that you would never suppose have either recently experienced it or are very familiar with it from their own childhoods. One out of four children in Maine are food-insecure, and it’s been like that for generations. Statistically, probably one out of four adults among us have experienced childhood hunger.
Lisa Belisle: Now, you talked about social work and the social cause and being mission-driven. What’s your background?
Katie Brown: Mine is just a very loose sort of liberal arts college educated jack of all trades kind of background. I have tons of interests and hobbies and what not, but the one place I’ve really focused so much of my energy is towards mission driven projects.
Lisa Belisle: Why do you suppose that is? What is it about the mission of this or any of the projects you’ve worked on that’s really spoken to you?
Katie Brown: It’s almost like a vacuum. If somebody is in need, I can’t stand for that not to be addressed. There’s always a solution, and when a solution isn’t being found or acted upon, it’s like it makes me crazy.
Lisa Belisle: It’s interesting that you had somewhat of a similar response, Katie, other Katie, Katie Wallace, when you saw that this child or other children in your daughter’s classroom, there was that vacuum. There was that there were no snacks, there was nothing for them to eat. It’s almost like you couldn’t let that go by.
Katie Wallace: They were her friends and her peers and I just…. Once you see something like that, you can’t unsee it, and you can’t ignore it. I have a lot of resources, even though I couldn’t always pay for it myself, I could get other people to pay for it. Everyone wanted to chip in. We have a really amazing community in Portland, and anytime there’s a problem, people are ready to act.
Lisa Belisle: It’s an interesting thing, though, because if people are feeling shame because they can’t feed their children or they’re feeling shame because they are a child who doesn’t have enough to eat, then unless somebody helps you identify this, you can’t really work to help them.
Katie Brown: It’s true. Yeah. So many people grow up not knowing how to ask for the resources that are there. Especially if they don’t know what the resources are. So much of a large component of our work in schools is the real hands-on social workers and nurses who clue into the fact that a child may be hungry, and typically we’ll start to offer a child like that some food and have it confirmed that, indeed, that person needs some, and then that child will start to regularly access our pantry and snacks and take food home to the family and whatnot.
Lisa Belisle: My daughter, who’s in high school, she is a sophomore, and they have worked on hunger as an issue at their high school, and one of the things that they have found is that even though there may be a food pantry that is available to people, it is incredibly difficult for someone to overcome the need to go to that pantry and actually get that food. It’s interesting that this starts even as younger children, where it’s hard to be the one who doesn’t have enough.
Katie Brown: One of the things that we do that has really helped with that and other programs in Maine have too, this is with the encouragement of Good Shepherd Food Bank, is that we set up regular produce tables at a lot of our schools and invite anybody who’s walking by to help themselves. They do, and we don’t screen anybody. We even encourage teachers to take food home. That is so destigmatizing, and it helps people get in the habit of taking fresh, available food so that it’s not wasted. Through those opportunities, we can talk more openly about the pantry that’s also available in the school. You know we have this in the nurse’s office, too. If you ever want to stop by and grab some and take some home, we just don’t want it to get wasted, so please do. That spirals, and so kids feel more confident about taking food that is offered to everybody.
It’s true that as students get older, they’re more stigmatized. We are always challenged at the high school level on how to empower kids to be able to take food home, and so many of the kids are just opting to be hungry, which is such a difficult time in their lives to be hungry, when they’re trying to fit in, not feel so isolated, and focus on their studies for that final push into adulthood. It’s really heartbreaking. A lot of us are brainstorming ways that we can help empower high school age students to help themselves.
Lisa Belisle: What grades do you actually reach now? You said you’re in 20 schools. What grades do you catch them?
Katie Brown: We’re preschool through 12th grades.
Lisa Belisle: This is all within the Portland area?
Katie Brown: Greater Portland. We have ten pantries and ten schools now in Portland, including… we support the intercultural support programs at the Center for Grieving Children as well. We have five pantries in South Portland, just opened a pantry at the Westbrook High School in Falmouth, Saco, and many discussions with other schools throughout Cumberland and York Counties.
Lisa Belisle: That’s interesting that you have a pantry in Falmouth because some people would assume that Falmouth has got one of the highest median incomes in the state, and yet this is a town that obviously has need, not unlike other high-median income locations. Did that surprise you?
Katie Wallace: It’s the real school.
Katie Brown: Yeah. There’s no town in Maine that doesn’t have people who are experiencing food insecurity for some reason. It affects all people, or can potentially affect all people. I know in Cape Elizabeth, for example, there may only be a couple of students at the high school who are ever experiencing food insecurity, but what the folks did there did for those students was they created a snack room and made snacks available to any kid who wandered into school hungry that morning. Plenty of high school students skip their breakfast, and then an hour into school, they’re hungry. These snacks are made available for everybody, and it makes those three or four kids comfortable going and helping themselves.
Lisa Belisle: what type of food did you start with, Katie Wallace, when you first were giving this to the limited classrooms?
Katie Wallace: The very first day, I brought homemade muffins and clementines into Ava’s classroom. The next week, something similar, and it got to the point where the kids in our class would see me in the hall and they’d be like, “What are you bringing tomorrow?” Then I’d be like, “Well what do you want?” They all had input, and they started calling me the snack lady in the school, but what I put in each classroom would be Cheez-Its, pretzels, shortbread cookies, popcorn, and specific classrooms would start finding me and they’d be like, “We really like the Cheez-Its. Could we have Cheez-Its again?” And I’d be like, “Yeah of course.” The whole class had input on it, and it was always on hand for the teachers. Some classes needed three boxes to get through the week. Some classes didn’t need any at all. It was really catered to each classroom, and for myself, Ava stopped eating the snack that I was packing her and she started eating the classroom snack and I would be like, “Ava, that’s not for you. You have a snack.” She’d be like, “No, everyone else is eating it. I want to be like everyone else.” I think that echoes what Katie was saying about how when everyone participates, it destigmatizes it, and it takes the spotlight off the few kids who actually need it.
Lisa Belisle: Food is such an inherently social activity that we all…. If somebody is hanging out, having a snack, then why wouldn’t we want to sit down and have a snack with them?
Katie Wallace: Right.
Lisa Belisle: Now that you’ve grown through the years, what types of food are you providing to these 20 schools?
Katie Wallace: Our mission is focused on nutritious foods, so we really make an effort to get as much fresh produce as possible. We just got a warehouse space, and we’re having a refrigeration unit built out, so we’ll be able to provide more produce, but we have canned produce as well. There’s always rice and beans and pasta and sauce and….
Katie Brown: Certainly a lot of the food that we’re stocking in our pantries is filler food, but that’s important, too, just to keep bellies filled, and a lot of that food is easy to prepare. We have, especially in the last year, provided more and more pop top canned goods like Chef Boyardee raviolis and whatnot because we have kindergartners and first graders who can’t use a stove yet, and if they don’t even know how to use a microwave, they can at least out of the can. Unfortunately, that’s a reality for a lot of people.
Katie Wallace: We also have a lot of students who are actually homeless in the Portland area.
Katie Brown: Actually all towns.
Katie Wallace: The shelters are at capacity, and they have vouchers to live in motels, so they don’t necessarily have access to a stove or refrigeration, so when we shop for them, we shop specifically for things that don’t need to be stored, they don’t need to be heated, and they don’t need a can opener to open. Chef Boyardee isn’t necessarily the best thing to give someone to eat, but it’s something.
Lisa Belisle: You’re sort of starting where they are, rather than coming in and saying, “I’m going to give you some jicama and a mango because those are healthy for you.”
Katie Brown: Exactly.
Lisa Belisle: You’re going to give them something that they can actually use and eat with the hope that you can continue to build on that foundation perhaps over time.
Katie Brown: Absolutely. Every week, we go to the Hannaford in Falmouth and pick up produce that they would have otherwise had to throw out or compost and take it to a number of our schools. I remember that when we first started doing this, when Katie first started doing that at the East End Community School and I would help out occasionally, maybe a child would take an apple, maybe an orange, but everything else, they would just kind of look at and then walk away. Now, the food gets bagged so fast by the students and disappears so quickly, it doesn’t matter what we have, they’ll take onions and avocados and jicama and things that we have to look up on the internet to find out what they are. It’s amazing.
Lisa Belisle: You’ve spoken about Hannaford, and you’ve spoken about a grant that you received from Morgan Stanley at one point. Who are some of your other partners?
Katie Brown: We’ve had many. We’ve been really blessed by some wonderful foundations and businesses. More recently, Androscoggin Savings Bank….
Katie Wallace: Camden National Bank.
Katie Brown: Town & Country, Coffee by Design, they’ve been such great consistent supporters. I don’t want to leave anybody else… Morgan Stanley has gotten re-involved, Offices of Joe Bornstein, Portland Rotary.
Katie Wallace: The Wilkinson Foundation.
Katie Brown: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Lisa Belisle: You spoke about Angela Adams as being on your board. Who else do you have on your board that really seems to care about this project?
Katie Wallace: Everyone on the board cares so much. We all work really hard.
Katie Brown: We really have a great diversity of backgrounds on our board, both professionally and in terms of personal interests, and they’re just a force to be reckoned with.
Lisa Belisle: Bringing it back to the original prompter for this, Ava’s now in sixth grade at King.
Katie Wallace: She is.
Lisa Belisle: She’s been with you throughout this journey and seen what it means to actually put the food in the classrooms and in the lockers. How have you noticed her evolving?
Katie Wallace: Oh my god, that’s such a funny question. She’s the opposite of me. I actually learned at an event that Bissell Brothers through (inaudible 25:15) where we made a lot of money, and they completely filled our new warehouse space with a food drive. I learned at that event from a teacher at King that King was really struggling to set up their own food pantry because we weren’t prepared to yet enroll them, and Ava hadn’t told me about it at all. It was student-driven, so they were bringing food, and when I talked to her about this, I was like, “Why haven’t you brought any food in? Why haven’t you told me?” She was like, “”Because I knew you would get involved.” She didn’t want me at the school embarrassing her. She thought I would be there all the time, and this is her time to become independent and break away from me.
Lisa Belisle: That sounds about right for a middle-schooler, really.
Katie Wallace: She would rather see her peers go without just so I didn’t embarrass her.
Lisa Belisle: That could be just a phase she’s working through. What is it that you hope to get out of your work with the Locker Project? You said you’ve now been a non-profit for two and a half years, and you’ve been doing this work for significantly longer. What do you hope to see out of this organization?
Katie Brown: We won’t be able to do it ourselves, but by a growing number of collaborators, we really hope that that statistic of one out of four food insecure children in Maine starts to really shift over, especially, the next ten years. When I first moved to Portland, Maine had one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the whole nation and I remember in the 90’s there was a real concerted effort among legislators and social workers and media, et cetera, to try to shift that, and a couple years ago, there was a statistic announced that now we had one of the lowest rates in the nation. I sort of feel like we’re poised to do that with hunger in Maine as well. There are so many people attuned to this issue at the moment and putting their efforts together, and I really think we’re going to see that shift.
Lisa Belisle: How about you, Katie Wallace?
Katie Wallace: For me, I would like to see poverty go away entirely, but if that’s not happening any time in the future, what I hope is that these children grow up feeling really cared for by their community, and they’re able to connect to people and not harbor that stigmatism of shame, and they get to grow into these fabulous adults who remember where they come from and that people were helping them and that’s who they become in the world, people who are able to look around and see their neighbors struggling and ask their neighbor, how can I help you? That’s what I’m hoping for.
Lisa Belisle: I will second that hope and that wish, and I encourage people to learn more about the Locker Project. I encourage people to donate to the Locker Project, or if they need food from the Locker Project, then I’m sure that they can connect you with one of the schools in the area.
Katie Wallace: Absolutely.
Lisa Belisle: I’ve been speaking with Katie Wallace and Katie Brown who are the president and executive director respectively of the Locker Project, they’re both co-founders of the organization. It’s really been a pleasure, and I appreciate all the work you are doing here in the Portland area.
Katie Brown: Thank you.
Katie Wallace: Thank you.
Katie Brown: Thank you Lisa.