Need to feed

Andrew
Stankevich is as big as his job. Nonchalantly chain-smoking Newports and
guzzling coffee, he cheerfully confronts non-stop adversity head on. And
there’s plenty to go around when you’re responsible for feeding the poor.

            A nervous chuckle escapes as
Stankevich’s 24-foot delivery truck dies a slow death, steadily bleeding
coolant out of a crack in its block. Stankevich shrugs off stress whenever city
inspectors scrutinize the Friends Helping Friends warehouse he runs for strict
compliance or the slightest infraction. He smiles despite the fact his job is
borne of want and desperation. FHF operates in the red, but Stankevich happily
perseveres.

            FHF’s new, expansive location, a
warehouse at 367 Lyell Avenue, stands unassumingly in one of Rochester’s more
desolate industrial enclaves. It’s flanked by worn brick buildings with
boarded-up windows. A run-down topless bar sits across the street. The whole
scene looks war-torn and bleak. But inside the warehouse — though it’s heated
exclusively by a small, overtaxed space heater — things are humming like
Santa’s workshop.

            The 6,000-square-foot space is
sparsely decorated with random pieces of furniture and various garage-sale
rejects. In the meeting area, an empty magazine rack stands by a 10-inch
black-and-white TV with a jury-rigged antenna. Several shade-less lamps provide
garish illumination. The far wall of the meeting room has been haphazardly
painted an odd, deep azure — the color of blood if it were blue. Fitting.
It’s freezing in here.

            Stankevich’s responsibilities pull
him from one end of the building to another. The phone never shuts up. Pausing
briefly, he crushes his cigarette butt in a “#1 Mom” coffee mug, and perches
his linebacker build on the edge of one of the worn couches to discuss it all.
There seems to be no end in sight.

            “We’re struggling right now,” he
says. “We’re not making a lot of money. But I’m happy to work for less than I
can get because I like the organization I work for, and I see the tremendous
potential.” Potential in the new building, for instance.

            It’s clear that Stankevich, 26, is a
multi-tasking fool. Busy as hell, he still manages to keep cucumber cool. The
ever-present smile on his flushed face threatens at any moment to turn into a
laugh.

            And it’s Stankevich who hesitantly
— even reluctantly — accepts the role as FHF’s mouthpiece. He’s not so much
evasive as he is steadfast and focused on the job at hand. It’s never about
him. And that is precisely why this story is about him.

Stankevich
grew up in
Fairfax, Virginia, and wound up living in Rochester by accident.

            “I was visiting my brother at RIT
and my car broke down while I was here,” he says. So he stayed, eventually
starting the Rochester chapter of Food Not Bombs (now known as Friends Helping
Friends) in August, 1998.

            “I’d worked at other Food Not Bombs
chapters around the country. When I’d go to a new town, I’d go to Food Not
Bombs and hang out,” he says. “I guess that’s what got me into it. I liked what
they were doing.” And he saw a need here.

            “What really motivated me to do this
was seeing that there was an enormous amount of waste as far as perishable
groceries,” he says. “With our program we deal with stuff no one else will
take.”

            FHF willingly handles perishable groceries in large quantities — up to 10,000
pounds a week — and distributes them to people in need.

            “We serve between 300 and 500 homes
a week,” says Food Not Bombs board member Mary Miller, who speculates that
“about 30 per cent of Rochester is not eating properly.”

            The majority of the food comes from
FOODLINK, a local food bank associated nationally with Second Harvest. FOODLINK
gets food from supermarkets after they can’t sell it, serving as middleman to
organizations like FHF.

            FHF recipients experience zero red
tape.

            “There’re people who’ve and just
fall down crying because they went to other places that wouldn’t accept them
because they don’t qualify,” Miller says. “Their zip code isn’t the same or
they don’t have an address, so they won’t give them food and they walk away. We
have no problem accepting anybody and everybody.”

            “One-hundred percent of people eat,”
says Jan McDonald, program coordinator for Politics of Food. “One-hundred
percent of people need to eat. And it shouldn’t be based on how much money you
make. Everybody should be able to eat healthy, nutritious food, no matter what
your income. We have the right to eat.”

            Stankevich has no tolerance for
bullshit, either.

            “If we see people that are screwing
up the system, we bounce ’em,” he says. “We don’t have the paperwork but we can
tell who’s who. If someone comes in high on drugs we tell them to get the hell
out.”

Nor does he concern himself with stats when it comes
to the hungry and needy. He’s too busy feeding them, closing the gap between
haves and have nots.

            “People have this whole focus on
people starving,” he says. “‘How many people are starving in Rochester? How
many people are going to bed without dinner? How many babies do we have with
puffed-out stomachs?’ And that’s not really the issue. Some of the people we
are distributing to are starving, and
others are really hurting. But the issue is the unequal distribution of
resources.”

            “If perishable food is being thrown
out, it’s obvious there’s an abundance of food,” McDonald says. “It’s not that
there’s a lack of food. If we are growing food that is then being thrown away,
there’s something wrong.”

From the crack of dawn to late at night,
Stankevich and other workers and volunteers toil endlessly to fix up the new
location. Smatterings of spackle, cement dust, mud, and odd colors of paint
cover their functional, mismatched clothes. Operating jackhammers to put in new
toilets, dismantling a donated 12-door refrigerator in order to transport it
and re-assemble it, installing a hood over the spacious kitchen area, building
an enormous walk-in cooler you could play hockey in… Stankevich works until he
collapses.

            Though FHF is thrifty and relies
heavily on donations of time, equipment, food, and money, somebody’s gotta grab
the reins. It’s Stankevich who leads by example, working shoulder to shoulder
with his constituents. Throughout the course of the day the guy gets spread
pretty thin. So does the cash.

            FHF keeps its motor running thanks
to various charitable foundations, individual donations, grants, and “an
abundance of faith-based donations,” Stankevich says.

            FHF recently received $20,000 from
UPS (the first donation they’ve received over $10,000). Starbucks has pledged
$25, 000 as well.

            And though Stankevich isn’t
outwardly opposed to federal funding, it often has strings attached. So FHF
relies on the kindness of strangers who don’t necessarily want their donations
mistaken as support for a particular political ideology. Hence the name change.

            FHF Rochester has slowly found
itself growing apart from Food Not Bombs nationally. And Stankevich feels many
of these groups are somewhat caught up in the rhetoric of their own ideals.

            Food Not Bombs began in the
mid-1980s in Boston as a grassroots protest to nuclear proliferation. To
Stankevich and the 10 other FHF board members, there are more immediate
concerns.

            “We feel that we’re not connected to
the Food Not Bombs movement,” Stankevich says. “We’re different. Most Food Not
Bombs chapters are small groups of people kinda running around serving a free
meal here and there. I think we’re going in a different direction. We want to
be more of a business, more professional as an organization.”

            So in February, Rochester Food Not
Bombs officially changed its name to Friends Helping Friends. Politically, this
may have pissed off a few punk purists, but in the long run Stankevich says it
stands to make legit businesses more willing to help.

            “We’ve had a lot of people who have
said ‘We don’t want to do business with you,'” Stankevich says. “‘We don’t want
to fund somebody’s personal political projects.'”

            Miller doesn’t see the literal
“bomb.”

            “There’s children killing children
in the city,” she says. “And that’s the bomb. That’s not a gun. It’s a bomb going off. So it’s food against bombs.”

            Stankevich nods in agreement, but
his primary focus is simply to do a good job.

For
Stankevich, being effective is more than simply putting a Band-Aid
on the problem; it’s healing as well. It’s empowering.

            “We let the people who receive the
groceries in the program run the program,” he says.

            FHF volunteers are often former
recipients, like Tanya Deoca.

            “I’m the original volunteer,” she
says proudly. “I originally started out as a recipient, then six months
afterwards, I decided, well, I wanted to get more involved. Anything Andy
needed, I did.”

            Deoca’s first-hand experience shed
light on the plight of those who now come in for help.

            “I was unemployed and on Welfare,”
Deoca says. “And Welfare doesn’t give you doodly-squat. They don’t. My two
children would never get the produce that they really needed. Produce in stores
is way too expensive. This gentleman here [Andrew] helped me out in so many
ways. My kids ate fruit, vegetables.”

            “After I saw about six months of
what they were doing, I was like, ‘I need to get involved in that,'” she says.
“I saw the way the people were looking after they got their food, the way their
faces lit up. Your heart just fills. You can’t explain that feeling. I would go
home crying sometimes. I couldn’t believe that people were trying to do so much
good.”

FHF is breaking into the
mainstream and making a dent despite its humble grassroots background.

            “The only reason we were ever
underground was just because we didn’t have the resources to be a full-on
agency,” Stankevich says.

Part of this underground appeal has been FHF’s close
association with young hardcore and punk bands.

“Food Not Bombs has always had that youth-driven,
counter-culture feel to it as an organization,” Stankevich says. “A lot of
times bigger punk or hardcore bands — Green Day in San Francisco, Avail in
Richmond — will do benefits for Food Not Bombs. It’s a nationwide thing.”

            Likewise FHF has hosted various
all-ages punk multi-bills to raise cash. Bands like The Breaking Project and
Building on Fire have played Food Not Bombs and FHF shows at St. Joseph’s House
of Hospitality on South Avenue. Once FHF works code logistics out with the fire
marshal, Stankevich hopes to hold shows at the Lyell Avenue location.

            So things are still tight, but the
FHF crew keeps coming up with plans. The new warehouse offers great potential.
Miller would like to see a sit-down eating room in the main building. She has
also spearheaded a performing arts program for kids called “Express Yourself”
through her Strong Arms Productions that began in January.

            “We are doing a program which
consists of music, art, poetry, and drama,” Miller says. “The children are
doing their own CDs, making their own music. They’re making their own plays.
We’ve got theaters within the city that are going to open up spots for us to do
plays, sell tickets, and make profits so the kids can do after-school programs,
take trips, things of that sort.” Starbucks has also volunteered to host these
events.

            Stankevich, encouraging recipient
involvement, would like to see some type of food-service job-training program
implemented. This is something McDonald refers to as “teaching to fish.”

            Stankevich concedes that hunger will
always be an issue. His work will never be done. He’s clearly not concerned,
proudly attacking one situation at a time. He’ll brag about the program and its
accomplishments until he’s blue in the face, but uncomfortably deflects all
praise, including that from Deoca and Miller, who refer to him as a “teddy
bear.”

            “It’s his dedication to the people,”
Miller says. “Because Andrew knows how it is. He’s been there. And that made
him want to be what he is now. He knows hunger hurts.” Still, Stankevich shyly
yet sternly won’t get into it.

            McDonald may not fully understand
Stankevich’s motivations, but she applauds his fervor and success.

            “Prior to Andy starting this program,
most perishable food was thrown away into a Dumpster,” she says. “The fact that
he’s out there on the streets giving food to people who fall outside what is
considered eligibility, he’s able to meet people who may not have the
paperwork, the address; people who fall outside that scope of the system and
how it’s been set up so far.”

            “I consider myself a non-profit
entrepreneur,” he says. “But the program’s not about me. It’s about the work we
do.”

            Stankevich constantly leads by
example, never telling anyone directly to do anything. He always seems to ask
them to help him with a given project and they all tackle it together.
Stankevich is clearly the leader, but he’s democratic to a fault.

“It’s
about everyone in the group,” he continues. “We’re doing good work, that’s what
it’s about. People respect that. People respect an effective program. A lot of
the reason we can get funding while other non-profits can’t is we’re out there
and we’re doing the work. And we’re for real.”

Friends
Helping Friends distributes food Tuesdays from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at its Lyell
Avenue location, and Sundays at The Friends Meeting House, 84 Scio Street.
254-5490.

This article appears in Feb 18-24, 2004.