Juan Reyes waits in the parking lot of the Ortiz Center on N.E. Killingsworth St. with his wife on an early Thursday morning in July. They watch as volunteers pull boxes of food from a truck and start unpacking them for the Mercado, a monthly marketplace offering food to working class families whose income does not cover their needs.
At 10 a.m., Reyes and his wife get in line. More than 150 people have come to the Mercado to get the extra food assistance they need. Reyes’ hands are full of reusable shopping bags to collect food to bring home to his four young children. About 20 minutes later, somebody calls his number. He eagerly makes his way to the bins of food to fill up his bags.
“It really helps at the end of the month,” Reyes says. A few minutes later, his four bags are completely filled with fresh mangoes, lettuce and tomatoes. A volunteer hands him an entire box of Dave’s Killer Bread.
Money is tight at home. For the Reyes family, the Mercado makes a big difference. Their story isn’t unique, either. The family is just one of the 153 different households who came to this month’s event. The uniting theme? They’re all experiencing food insecurity.
The Mercado is a monthly event hosted by Bienestar de la Familia, a program under the Department of County Human Services’ Schools Uniting Neighborhoods (SUN) Service System. The goal is to provide nutritious food to communities in need of extra support on the first Thursday of every month. Many of those individuals come from neighborhoods with high levels of poverty and poor access to healthy food options.
To serve this population, Bienestar partners with the Oregon Food Bank and a host of other organizations to stock the Mercado. The Food Bank provides the Mercado with fresh, seasonal produce. Franz Bakery also helps by contributing fresh loaves of bread.
“We really have been working on offering services to underserviced groups,” says Kate Benedict, the community food program coordinator for the Oregon Food Bank. She works with the team at Bienestar to organize the monthly Mercado event as a part of their Harvest Share program. “We want to get more fresh produce to areas that might need it,” she says.
The Mercado is just one of the programs Bienestar offers low-income communities. At the Ortiz Center on N.E. Killingsworth, Bienestar offers a variety of classes on things ranging from parenting and employment to tutoring and English. They also work with partners in the community to help their clients with other issues such as applying for housing, paying bills, or achieving citizenship.
Virginia Salinas is a program coordinator for Bienestar. Her job is to work directly with community partners to bring more services to the community. She is also the point person for domestic violence situations and police matters.
“I never know what scenario is going to walk into my office,” Salinas says. “There’s a great need, and we’re here to help.”
Salinas has been working on what would eventually become Bienestar since the beginning in 1996. Back then, the program was more like a loose collective of people. They convened in the laundry room of the nearby Galaxy apartment complex. At the time, they met to discuss the needs of the Hispanic/Latino populations living in the apartments. They created a program called the Hispanic Initiative to work with families to help them access social services.
“We realized there was such a great need out here for families for social services,” Salinas says. At the time, families needed to take two to three buses just to reach a county office, and as a result, “They just didn’t go.”
That’s when Salinas and Raquel Aguillon, now senior case manager for Bienestar, joined with Hispanic Initiative members to identify key areas where families needed assistance. They brainstormed ways to help families with issues ranging from domestic violence and education to food security and employment. They also worked to connect with apartment landlords and ensure a safer living environment.
A few years later in 1998, the Hispanic Initiative transitioned to Bienestar de la Familia, funded by Multnomah County. And in 2000, they got a facelift, moving into a new building called the Ortiz Center. It was a huge change from the patchwork of apartments, county offices and temporary sites that they operated in before.
They haven’t looked back since.
Throughout the years, the program has evolved to serve a broader age group and provide more services in a culturally responsive way. Still, their core social services have remained consistent.
Nabil Zaghloul is the manager of the Bienestar program. He’s seen the change happen firsthand.
“Originally, the goal was to meet the needs of Spanish-speaking communities,” Zaghloul says. “Now, we see diverse clients with different needs every day.”
And the Mercado is a reflection of that changing diversity.
Julie Preciado has been overseeing the Mercado program since early 2010. She has seen an increase in demand, and shifting demographics. “We want to embrace the growing diversity of the area,” she says. “And work to make other community members feel welcome here.”
This July, almost half of the Mercado participants were from Asian communities. Only 50 households, roughly a third, were Spanish-speaking. To serve those communities, the Mercado has a dedicated group of volunteers to help get the food set up and ready to serve to clients.
Some staff are Multnomah County employees. Some are Bienestar clients themselves, looking to give back to the communities they are from.
“They say ‘I really want to help. How do we help?’” Zaghloul says. “We couldn’t do this work without our volunteers.”
One of the big roles the volunteers serve is to figure out how much food each family can take home, so everyone gets a fair amount. If there is still food once everyone has taken a turn through the Mercado, people can return for seconds.
Xochitl Alvarez is an office assistant at Bienestar de la Familia. On days when the Mercado takes place, her job is to sign up participants. Her favorite part of the Mercado is seeing people’s faces as they leave with bags of healthy food in their hands.
“I feel like we’ve done a great job,” she says. “We get people in and out with the food they need and more.”
Looking forward, program administrators want to expand core services to include more classes, groups and opportunities for their diverse low-income clients. They’re also planning to hire more staff to provide more culturally-specific services and meet the increasing demand.
Aguillon says it’s a lot of hard work. But to her, the reward comes with helping clients and their families succeed.
“The need is out there, and it’s huge,” she says. “Bienestar is in a really good place to help people get to a better place.”
