In 2005, with facilitation by Community Resource Exchange, Neighbors Together’s board and staff engaged in a thorough strategic planning process in order to assess how to use our strengths to better empower our community. We spent six months conducting brainstorming meetings of the board of directors and staff, formal and informal surveys of more than 100 clients, a Community Needs Assessment produced by students from the Milano Graduate School of New School University, and conversations with funders, supporters, and colleagues in the anti-hunger/anti-poverty field.

Some key themes emerged:

• Neighbors Together’s strength lies in the intimate nature of our organization, which allows us to build significant relationships with our clients.
• Our clients are the most marginalized and challenging to engage. While they all struggle due to our society’s lack of respect for and lack of opportunities for low-income people, most of them have additional personal struggles (mental illness, addiction, depression, physical disabilities) that make it extremely difficult to achieve stable, engaging lives.
• The facility we were renting was far too small and did not allow for any growth.

Based on all of our research, the board and staff decided that Neighbors Together should build on the strength and demand of our three major programs by moderately expanding each of them in order to deepen our impact on the lives of our current clients.

Specifically, we planned to:

• Expand our Emergency Hunger Relief program by becoming the only soup kitchen in our area to offer an evening meal four days a week in addition to lunch six days a week;
• Expand our Kitchen Assistant Training Program by increasing the number of unemployed local residents receiving on-the-job training from 2 to 4 individuals.
• Expand our Homelessness Prevention and Empowerment Program by adding a full-time social worker who can develop therapeutic relationships with clients, expand our case management focus, and coordinate extended opportunities for client growth through workshops and support groups;
• Expand our Community Action Program by adding a full-time community organizer who can provide more consistent empowerment opportunities for our clients to get actively involved in improving their community;
• Our strength lies in the supportive community we create with our clients, so we will expand this by opening our dining room as a community space for congregating before, during, and after the meals we serve.

We have begun to serve our dinner meal and filled all four Kitchen Assistant positions, and have secured funding to hire the social worker. We are well on our way to implementing our plans, and look forward to evaluating our progress in the spring.