Riverwest Food Pantry’s executive director, Vincent Noth, shares his vision for a Milwaukee with less poverty through a mindful, interactive community food center. Since the late 1970s, the Riverwest Food Pantry has served hundreds of patrons each week from its bases at St. Casimir Church and Frederick J. Gaenslen School. It recently updated its mission to focus not only on food distribution, but on supporting its patrons through mentorship programs and an interactive shopping experience. Off the Cuff sat down with Vincent Noth to learn more about the Riverwest Food Pantry’s vision of alleviating poverty in Milwaukee.
What does it mean for the Riverwest Food Pantry’s mission to go beyond just food?
The idea is that we need to have a bigger conversation about the power of food as a public good, as a way to foster public health and community well-being. So, a huge thing we do is use food as a means to have that conversation. People get to shop for their food here, and we organize all of it by its health content. We have an urban farm that grows thousands of pounds of fresh produce, and we rescue produce too. Then, we have chefs come and do cooking demonstrations. We really try to engage as many community members as possible in the process of prepping the food.
But, even if we give them great food, there’s still no path to stability, right? So, one small thing we do in that regard is our mentoring program. We partnered with a couple schools of social work to train volunteers to become helpers in people’s lives. We also do advocacy training. A lot of people think poverty is about individuals making bad choices, but that’s actually not true. When you look at Milwaukee—at segregation, the school system, neighborhood safety, the cost of rent and the struggle to access well-paying jobs—you see that poverty is more structural than it is personal. So, we train thousands of volunteers a year to be spokespeople for the fact that we will not fix hunger or poverty in Milwaukee until we address these bigger structural issues.
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Does the number of people you serve fluctuate at all with the holiday season? Are you more in need of help during this time of year?
Actually, those have two totally different answers. Yes, it fluctuates, yes, it’s cyclical and you can predict some patterns. Our busiest months in terms of shoppers are always October and November, and the summer is pretty busy as well. But, as far as us needing help, the irony is the time we need help the least is the holidays because so many volunteers want to help around then.
So, how can people get involved?
We actually have a tremendous need for volunteers at our farm. What we’re most in need of is people who are able to pick up a slot—say, someone who’s able to come in every Friday morning to sort produce. The other thing we really want people to do is become a mentor. We want volunteers to come with the pathway in mind that maybe they could really walk with people in their crises, in their struggles. We need people to experience that firsthand, because that produces that hunger for advocacy and makes people say, “Wait a minute, this has to change.”
Any messages to potential volunteers who might be reading this story?
Well, one thing I’d say is that we love Milwaukee. We love this community on the North Side. People will read this, and the mission will draw them. People come and stay for the community. There’s this wellspring of generosity that comes when we realize that no one’s so materially rich that they don’t have profound needs that this community can meet, and no one is so poor that they don’t have profound things to offer. There are riches in our poverties, in our struggles and our vulnerabilities. And so, that spirit of generosity is who we are.
