Bread for sale!
Announcing September’s donation partner with a personal story
There is one particular conversation that I’ll never forget having with a high school student here in Madison. I was 26 and had only lived in Madison for three years at the time. I had recently signed up to be a volunteer tutor in the schools. I was new to tutoring, but was not new to the classroom. After all, I had originally gone to college to be a teacher, so I had some experience with student teaching during undergrad.
I signed up to tutor through a great program that the Urban League coordinates with MMSD called “Schools of Hope”. You may not know that a tutor can wear different hats. At that time, in that classroom, my role was to be more of a classroom helper and less of a subject matter expert. I enjoyed that role because it let me walk alongside students in a less formal way.
One of those students was Anthony*. I remember that semester we worked together on a class project, I got to teach him how to get comfortable looking words up in the dictionary, and he asked a lot of questions about what I do for work. But what we never seemed to do was homework. In fact, Anthony only occasionally seemed to have his backpack. The backpack thing puzzled me enough that I eventually asked him about it.
“Ant. Where’s your backpack today?”
That would be met with a shrug.
I’d go on to ask that same question 3 of the next 5 times I saw him. I wasn’t trying to nag him about it. But he was a smart kid, and from my perspective, bringing your backpack seemed like a basic part of the process of showing up ready to learn.
He never seemed upset when I asked, but he ignored the question. We had a good relationship, but when I asked this question he’d act like he didn’t hear me. Until one day he decided to answer me.
“It’s at my mom’s boyfriend’s house… but we don’t stay there all the time. I ended up at my auntie’s place last night.”
Anthony had answered me for the first time. It was a direct answer. And yet somehow I found myself with so many new questions.
At that time I didn’t have much context for this answer. You see – I grew up in a suburb about 25 minutes southwest of Chicago. It was a tight-knit community in a working middle-class neighborhood. Growing up I knew classmates who lived in houses, apartments, and mobile homes. But I don’t recall ever knowing a classmate who was routinely stayingwith someone besides their parent/guardian.
I was caught by surprise when I found out that Anthony didn’t have a consistent place where he laid his head down each night.
Homelessness is often hidden and is experienced in many different ways. Families and students may be staying in homeless shelters (both family or youth shelters), doubled up with friends or family, living in cars or hotels, on campgrounds and/or on the street. Many people are piecing things together day to day in our country. And that is certainly true for many families right here in Madison.
So knowing this, what can we do?
Well there are a lot of things that we can do about it. One simple step is buying (and eating!) bread that makes a collective impact. As a reminder, Bread & Justice is a philanthropic enterprise. 100% of the profits from the sale of bread are donated to organizations working toward building a more just society. Starting this week and throughout September, we’ll be donating to MMSD’s Transition Education Program (TEP) Fund.
This TEP fund is maintained by the Madison Public Schools Foundation, and exists with the explicit goal to reduce barriers to school enrollment, attendance, engagement, and achievement. It exists to ensure that children from families who are experiencing homelessness have a “full and equal opportunity” to succeed in school and their community.
Anthony tends to be on my mind more during back-to-school season. During the last weeks of summer, we are buying all sorts of school supplies. The school supply lists include not only items for our children, but also basic need items for their classrooms (e.g. tissues, markers, snacks). This phenomenon is a reflection of the fact that classrooms are tragically underfunded. Even with all these extra school supplies, there are so many basic items that students experiencing homelessness could use.
The TEP program uses donations like ours to buy school supplies and basic necessities for students who need them.
Homelessness can be hard to spot, but MMSD reports that there are roughly 1,000 students experiencing homelessness in our schools. There are about 25,000 students in MMSD. So just by the numbers… in every classroom, there might be one child experiencing homelessness. A child who, just like Anthony, may not know where they’ll lay their head to sleep tonight after school. That feels really heavy.
But it is an honor to be part of a community that will hear that reality and take some action to ease the burden and work towards a more fair and just society.
Donating to TEP might feel like a small drop in the bucket… but I believe that being the type of person who moves towards hard realities and takes some action to lighten someone else’s load is always worthwhile.
So, as I’m getting back to baking bread consistently, all of the profits from weekly bread this month will be donated to this TEP program.
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Did I just announce weekly bread?!?
Yes! Many of you may recall that for the first couple years of Bread & Justice I was selling bread every week. The purpose of building this micro-bakery in my basement was to have the facility necessary to be able to get back to sustainably baking each week.
Bread pickup will occur on Saturdays. I’m taking orders right now for bread pickup tomorrow.
This pre-order announcement email is going out on a Friday, but I’ll try to send these out on Thursdays in the future. It will help me more comfortably manage the quantity of dough that I’ll need to fulfill weekly orderks.
Anyway… here is the link to order bread. If you haven’t ordered bread in the past, the way it will work is as follows:
In this email, there will be a link to pre-order bread for pickup (here you go)🥖
The time, location and all logistical details get emailed to you once you order
On Saturday, you’ll come to our cottage bakery (aka our house on the west side) to get your bread
When you arrive during the pickup window (11am - 2pm on Saturday) you’ll see your bread will be labeled with your name on it.
P.S. Bread sometimes sells out. If you made it this far into the email, I’d encourage you to click this link and place an order now if you want some bread tomorrow :)
Cheers,
Mo
*name changed to respect the student’s identity