Program areas at Miriam's Kitchen
Permanent supportive housing - Miriam's Kitchen provides supportive housing services to over 300 individuals so that they quickly obtain housing and stay stably housed. 99% of residents remain stably housed after one year. Once clients are in housing, Miriam's Kitchen serves as a coordinator and advocate between clients, their landlords and service providers. Case managers also support clients reaching their goals, including increasing income, improving health, and building social and community networks.
Advocacy - Miriam's Kitchen pushes forward best practices, system improvements and increased resources to make instances of homelessness rare, brief and non-recurring across dc (not just in our dining room). We also helped found, and still provide the majority of the staffing and resources for, the way home campaign, a citywide movement of over 100 organizations and 5,000 individuals pushing for an end to chronic homelessness in dc.
Outreach - Miriam's Kitchen's outreach team takes the quality services that we offer in our dining room to the clients wherever they may be under bridges, in parks or on the streets. The geographic focus areas of our outreach team cover 33 square miles of dc including most of northwest dc including foggy bottom, georgetown and areas surrounding the state department and national mall.
Social services - each year Miriam's Kitchen provides critical social services and basic needs items to over 2,000 individuals experiencing homelessness. We also work more intensely with nearly 1,200 of those guests helping them to increase their income (e.g. Applying for disability benefits or social security), improve their health (connecting them to mental/health care appointments) and secure housing. We do this in partnership with social workers, psychiatrists, doctors, nurses and lawyers from partner organizations to provide a variety of high-quality services all in one place - our dining room.
Meals - many guests say their path to housing started with a meal at Miriam's Kitchen. We serve breakfast and dinner every weekday. Our professional chefs supervise volunteers to serve over 250 meals a day (over 65,000 meals annually). All of our healthy meals are made from scratch with fresh ingredients. Thanks to the generous donations from local farmers' markets and grocery stores, each six-item meal can be offered at a low cost.