Podcast Episode 156

How can congregations cultivate fruitful partnerships with nonprofits that promote human flourishing and abundance? We talk with Mahogany Thomas, chief program officer of Bread for the City, about building partnerships to meet the needs in your community.

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Announcer: Leading Ideas Talks is brought to you by the Lewis Center for Leadership of Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, DC. Subscribe free to our weekly e-newsletter, Leading Ideas, at churchleadership.com/leadingideas.

Leading Ideas Talks is also brought to you by Healing Fractured Communities, a book written by alumni of the Lewis Center Community Leadership Fellows program. Each chapter paints a picture of the work of healing fractures like racism, education inequality, and poverty. Each chapter also includes takeaways to inspire healing in your community plus questions for reflection. All proceeds support the Dr. Lovett H. Weems Jr. Scholarship Fund. Learn more and order now at churchleadership.com/books.

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Jessica Anschutz: Welcome to Leading Ideas Talks, a podcast featuring thought leaders and innovative practitioners. I am Jessica Anschutz, the Associate Director of the Lewis Center for Church Leadership, and I am your host for this Leading Ideas Talk. Joining me is Mahogany Thomas, Chief Program Officer at Bread for the City. It has been said that “her passion for service and community knows no bounds.” Thank you, Mahogany, for taking time to speak with me about nonprofit partnerships with congregations.

Mahogany Thomas: Thank you, Jessica. It’s good to be here.

Jessica Anschutz: Before we jump into our topic for the today, Mahogany, I want to invite you to share a little bit about Bread for the City and your role as chief program officer.

Mahogany Thomas: Of course. So, my name is Mahogany, and I work at Bread for the City, where we try our best to serve people here in the District of Columbia. We focus on a full service, radical hospitality sort of orientation to this work. And so, we provide food and clothing, advocacy, social services, legal clinic, a medical clinic to all of those who are living in poverty right here in the District of Columbia. Our mission and vision is rooted in this idea that we can meet the basic needs of folks living right here in the District; their basic need for survival so they then can not have to worry about that and can think about and be present to all of the ways that they can galvanize their own power and agency to determine their own future.

My work as the chief program officer here at Bread for the City is a new role and it’s a really exciting position because it means that I get to focus on all of those external, client-facing initiatives and programmatic work that we do. So, I get to spend time in the food pantry and work with clients and staff to talk about “how can we make it better?” We just did some work recently with expanding our hours. So, we used to be closed during the lunch hour and we know that people needed services during the lunch hour, especially in the food pantry. And so, we worked really hard to minimize the line. And so, we’re now open Monday through Thursday from nine to three in the pantry where folks can come and shop as they need. And so, things like that, I get to work on each and every day. And I get to work across all programs, so, food, clothing, medical, legal, social services, advocacy. You name it. Those are all the things I get to do every day. And here at Bread for the City, we have three buildings, but we run out of two facilities: one in Southeast D.C. off of what used to be Good Hope Road but it’s now Marion Berry Avenue, and then we have another location off 7th Street, which is where I get to speak to you from today, and it is in Northwest D.C. in the Shaw neighborhood.

Jessica Anschutz: I am inspired by all of the work that you’re doing to meet the needs of the people and the ways in which you’re really working to make sure that the work that you’re doing is meeting those needs in the best way possible. What a great example of expanding those food pantry hours. As we’re talking today and looking at community partnerships, I’m wondering if you can speak to, sort of, how community partnerships help you in your work and can help our listeners in their ministries to do this work to make sure no one is left behind.

Mahogany Thomas: Yeah. Community partnerships are essential to the work. Our origin story is one of my favorites. We started 50 years ago, and we started as two actually distinct organizations that eventually would become one, the Bread for the City that you know today. But our first iteration was the Zacchaeus Free Medical Clinic, and it began as there were doctors here in D.C. that realized that people were uninsured, and didn’t have healthcare, and weren’t able to have access to doctors. And so, they came together just kind of like an ad hoc way to meet the need and be present. They built a partnership among themselves. And so we had our Zacchaeus Free Medical Clinic, and then two years later a group of churches came together in the area, right here in The District. These churches are still along today, and they said we need to feed the hungry and clothe the naked, and so, they started Bread for the City. Eventually these two merged into the Bread for the City that you see today, but it started because of partnership work. It started because faith-based communities came together and said, “hey, there are people right here, our neighbors, and they need something, and we can be present to that.” And it started because there were doctors who said, “I have skills and that there are people who need us, and we could be present in that way.” And so, to this day, we are not a faith-based organization, but those faith stories really are, they’re our origin stories. They are the beginnings of who we became, but to this day, partnerships are the reason why we do this work and how we do this work.

So, our food pantry, we partner with a lot of orgs. We partner with Capital Area Food Bank, and we partner with black and brown farmers here, we partner with Dreaming Out Loud. And that’s just one of the many, many, partnerships that we have. And that’s just on the food side.

As a federally qualified health care center, we partner with other FQHCs, other medical centers, to make sure that we can provide the support that’s needed. And so that work will often happen, and it happens both intentionally and organically. And then we have other partners, right? Along the way, we have congregations that partner with us, foundations that partner with us, corporate folks that partner with us because that’s how we do this work. Our work runs off of volunteers who so graciously give of