A kitchen for Hope’s Corner

For over five years, a church in downtown Mountain View has been dishing out free meals to hundreds of residents who would have otherwise gone hungry. Whether they are the homeless, the elderly, the disabled or the unemployed, volunteers at Hope’s Corner say the doors are open to everyone who lines up each Saturday.

Hope’s Corner, aptly named for its location on the corner of Hope and Mercy streets, has turned into a one-stop shop for homeless and low-income residents who need a meal, a shower, clean clothes or all of the above. It’s one of the only soup kitchens in northern Santa Clara County, and the number of families it serves each Saturday morning has more than tripled since 2013, despite the booming local economy and record-low unemployment.

“Just because the tech economy is booming doesn’t means there are jobs for people without the right education and skills,” said Leslie Carmichael, board president of Hope’s Corner. “And even if you are housed, it’s not an easy time if you’ve got a low-wage job.”

Leaders of the nonprofit are seeking donations for its capital campaign, which would bring much-needed upgrades to the kitchen at Hope’s Corner and enable volunteers to serve meals more than once a week, plugging gaps in the region’s schedule of free meals. The capital campaign, which runs through May 15, seeks to raise the final third of the roughly $1 million required to upgrade the facility.

Feeding all those hungry mouths hasn’t been easy. The small kitchen at Hope’s Corner, which lacks a commercial-grade oven and has no stove, is hardly able to handle the kind of meal prep required to serve upwards of 200 people on the busiest mornings. All the food has to be prepared, chilled, cooked and transported to Hope’s Corner from a satellite location at the Los Altos United Methodist Church, Carmichael said.

The menu has to be adjusted accordingly. People can choose from potatoes, hard boiled eggs, yogurt, fruit, cereal and hot drinks, as well as salads and a variety of donated food from local caterers. But food that would need to be cooked on-site is out of the question, and something like soup can be tough to transport when it’s sloshing around in the car on the way from one location to another, Carmichael said.

An upgraded kitchen would result in far less time spent on logistical planning and a lot more time focusing on extending the frequency of the nonprofit’s services. A similar venue in Sunnyvale called Our Daily Bread operates Mondays, Wednesday and Fridays, meaning that Tuesday and Thursdays are “holes” that Hope’s Corner could fill for residents who need a meal, Carmichael said.

Hope’s Corner has played an increasingly important role in the community since its founding in September 2011. County estimates show that Mountain View’s homeless population has grown from 37 people in 2011 to 276 in 2015, statistics that are borne out in Hope’s Corner’s weekly head count. In two years, the nonprofit went from serving 77 people on a Saturday to serving as many as 249 people. At the same time, so-called “food insecurity,” or the inability to pay for groceries on top of rent and other expenses, has become an acute challenge for residents in northern Santa Clara County, according to a report by the Community Services Agency of Mountain View and Los Altos.

The number of people served by the kitchen dropped over the course of the recent winter months, likely due to the opening of the Sunnyvale Cold Weather Shelter, which houses 125 homeless people each night and offers both breakfast and dinner. The facility closed last Friday, meaning there will be more hungry people needing a meal from now till November when it re-opens, Carmichael said.

On top of serving breakfast, Hope’s Corner recently completed a bathroom and shower facility adjacent to the kitchen, allowing people to sign up for a chance to bathe on Thursdays and Saturdays. People sign up for 15-minute time slots, and some of the guests show up extra early so they can shower before heading off to their jobs.

Having single-person bathrooms is considered a rare and valuable commodity, Carmichael said.

“Some of the women tell me that they come to our showers because they don’t feel safe,” she said. “Normally there’s other stalls, you don’t know who else is there, and your stuff isn’t locked up.”

The operating cost for Hope’s Corner is only about $67,000 each year, thanks to donated food as well as donated time and labor from a crew of about 80 people who make breakfast happen each week. Volunteers include a mix of older, steady members and a rotating cast of teenagers completing community service hours for school.

Bringing hundreds of low-income and homeless people into the neighborhood each week, some of whom are suffering from mental health problems, really hasn’t been a problem for the Old Mountain View neighborhood, Carmichael said. Not only has the neighborhood been a welcoming community for Hope’s Corner, but there haven’t been a lot of incidents or problems to speak of. In the five-and-a-half years that the organization has been operating, she recalled, there have only been two occasions where police needed to be called because someone was acting “off.”

“The neighborhood has been open to having a use like ours, and include parts of the community besides homeowners,” she said. “We feel very lucky that the neighbors have been able to embrace that.”

More information about Hope’s Corner and its fundraising drive is at hopes-corner.org/donate or by emailing info@hopes-corner.org.