BFC In the News 2021

I’ve been working in healthcare for over 15 years now. Rolling my sleeves up next to my peers, providing quality healthcare to my D.C. neighbors as a nurse has been an important investment. An investment into myself, into my family and into the very folks that I care for. And I’ve actively chosen community work because more than not, the folks I serve have represented people that look like me and want a reflection of themselves in the care they seek.

The Free Breakfast Program serves as an enduring model for numerous initiatives that address food insecurity, such as D.C.’s Bread for the City, FrontLine Farming in Colorado, Harlem Grown in New York, and the Interfaith Food Shuttle in North Carolina.

“They never build something from the ground up that includes the immigrant community in D.C.,” says Allison Miles-Lee, a managing attorney with Bread for the City.

“Oftentimes when these new sites open up you still see disparities playing themselves out, but at least I think the government and certainly the providers are trying to be intentional about reversing those kinds of patterns,” George Jones said.

THRIVE is a partnership among Martha’s Table, Bread for the City, the Far Southeast Family Strengthening Collaborative, and the 11th Street Bridge Park.

"When we were vaccinating residents who signed up via the D.C. portal, only 22 percent of our vaccinations were given to Black individuals. Two weeks after we opted out of the portal, that number rose to 75 percent," said George Jones in his Op-Ed.

“The city realized they had made a mistake,” says Dr. Randi Abramson. “And they quickly said, ‘OK, you are not getting any more people through the portal right now and you can go ahead and use all your vaccines to vaccinate your patients.’”

George Jones, CEO of Bread for the City, joined the Joe Madison Show on SiriusXM to explain how technology led to a biased, mostly white response to getting the COVID-19 vaccine.