Similar to a cafeteria at a public school, the volunteers of our Daily Bread feed their guests on plastic lunch trays from behind a wall of plexiglass on November 10, 2023. Established in 1985 and founded by Ruth “Cookie” Vogelpohl, Our Daily Bread is a soup kitchen designed to help the homeless community in Cincinnati Ohio. Their dining room is opened Monday-Friday from 8:30 am to 11:30 am, but a home cooked meal is just the beginning of what they offer.
Our Daily Bread is located in Over the Rhine next to Findlay Market, a collection of stores that opened in 1855 selling anything from fresh spices to unique furniture. Our Daily Bread is Cincinnati’s largest soup kitchen and serves over 500 meals a day where 100% of the food they serve is either donated or rescued. “Every person in the Greater Cincinnati community has sufficient access to food, essential social services and a safe place of belonging,” is the vision of Our Daily Bread. While their Mission of the organization is “to provide stability and hope to guests in need of offering meals, hospitality and services in a safe, respectable environment in Over the Rhine.”
The dining area at Our Daily Bread is quiet and ready for their morning rush. Our Daily Bread’s dining room is often packed with a line of guests waiting to get their home-cooked meals. In 2022, Our Daily Bread served 28,081 dine-in meals alone and 99,739 “on-site hot meals.” These meals are prepared in the kitchen and then served to the guest in the kitchen or through their takeout window. Often, the main food is rotated 3 times a day to keep up with the steady traffic of guests that come to Our Daily Bread on weekdays. Guests are encouraged to revisit the line as many times as they need.
Hidden at the back of the bright yellow building, you can find Our Daily Bread's back door, which serves as the drop-off location for all their donated or rescued food. This door is accompanied by a painted mural and a doorbell, which is used to notify staff that a donation has been delivered! With 70% of Our Daily Bread's guests identifying as homeless, a hot meal is the ideal place to start, and donations are the key to it all.
One of the many donations given to Our Daily Bread on November 10, 2023, were bags of bagels which will soon serve as meals for the customers. At Our Daily Bread, 100% of the food that they serve is either donated or rescued food. In 2022, they served a total of 145,006 meals which came from the 187,878 pounds of donated & rescued food that they received. The donated food in 2022 totaled in at a value of $515,341, which was a part of 2,952 food donation drop-offs. When comparing the amount of food that was donated in 2022, Our Daily Bread had a 16% increase from 2021.
With so many possible meals to serve and a variety food, the pantries and freezers are used to store canned and boxed goods and to keep mostly fresh goods useable for longer periods of times. Our Daily Breads prides itself on the rescued and donated food that it repurposes and serves to its guests. Donated food can come from churches, organizations, restaurants etc. Rescued food is usually from restaurants and is donated because it is close to its expiration date, it was prepared for an event, or they had excessive leftovers or bits and pieces that were cleaned off but still edible!
In the busy kitchen of Our Daily Bread, you can find numerous people hard at work, some being Our Daily Bread’s multiple head chefs who work alongside staff members and volunteers. Something important about Our Daily Bread is that they make a large amount of their food in the kitchen instead of just heating it up. Staff members and volunteers can be found preparing, serving, organizing, and storing food, which will all be set to serve their hundreds of guests.
While giving a tour to three new volunteers, Kathy rests on the outside plexiglass that divides the kitchen from the crowded dining room. Kathy Schickel has been at Our Daily Bread for 20 years and now serves as the director of operations. Her job is to manage, train, and organize the frequent changes of their roster of volunteers. In the 20 years that Kathy has worked at Our Daily Bread, one of the biggest changes she has noticed the organization facing and has worked to solve is the amount of food. When Kathy started, there wasn’t enough food donated, and the organization had a budget; they were allowed to spend on food they would serve to their guests. With gratitude, Kathy reflects on the change the organization has seen over her 20 years there. “Now we get to pick and choose what we take.”
With rising numbers of volunteers, it is a key part of Kathy’s job to give orientations, a clock-in QR code, and a name tag to every new volunteer that comes to their organization. In 2022, Our Daily Bread had 5,776 volunteer shifts and 14,310 volunteer hours. The volunteers work in the kitchen serving, preparing, organizing, and boxing food. Compared to 2022, Our Daily Bread had a 19% increase in volunteer shifts and a 23% increase in volunteer hours. Volunteers are a key part of Our Daily Bread as they help the organization run and serve the homeless community of Cincinnati.
The volunteers at Our Daily Bread truly make it what it is, with 14,310 volunteer hours in 2022 and a whole team of staff members working daily to provide meals and care to their guests, Our Daily Bread's main goal is to provide. The shirts pictured in this image represent their main goal “To feed people” and can be seen being worn by their volunteers. While volunteering is accompanied by that great feeling that comes with helping people, it also has its difficulties.
difference. At Our Daily Bread, that is one of the most rewarding parts for the volunteers as they serve food to the people who need it the most and watch them grin as they sit down with their warm home-cooked meal. Rewarding and all, Kathy tells the new volunteers during their orientation that “the hardest part is the communication with our guests because you can’t hear very well with the plexiglass. I always suggest eye contact and body language.”
Also found in the kitchen is a touch that most people won't think about, which is the plates they use. At Our Daily Bread, they strive to make their guests feel like they belong and that they are taken care of, which can be a big challenge for organizations serving the homeless community. Something that guests experience when they get served at Our Daily Bread is that all of their meals are served on glass plates with real silverware, plates, bowls, cups, mugs, and anything else that others may take for granted. Our Daily Bread pays attention to the details that mean the most to the community that they serve, which is why Our Daily Bread offers more than just a dine-in option.
Our Daily Bread has a convenient feature of offering a takeout window. At the window, the guest has the opportunity to grab a hot meal, sandwich, fruit, or even a hot coffee. Johnna Britten is a worker at Our Daily Bread who has been there for 2 years In February; she works the walk-up window and greets everyone with a smile, which seems to make all of the difference. On her right is volunteer Mariama Lukulay, a second-year medical student at the University of Cincinnati. Through their takeout window, in 2022, Our Daily Bread gave out 36,925 snack bags and 128,656 sandwiches, which is a 34% increase from the number of sandwiches they made and donated in 2021. The takeout window allows the guests to stay outside away from a crowd, and they have simple options compared to the lunchroom-style line that Kathy says is “a little bit slower; they can see what the food is, they can make their choices.”
Spread amongst the table you see upon entering, half-colored Thanksgiving turkeys and an assortment of Crayons are offered to the guests of Our Daily Bread. The vast majority of guests that participated in coloring the turkeys were adults, which reflects on the age of the homeless community in Cincinnati, where approximately 77% of homeless are adults according to strategiestoendhomelessness.org. Along with receiving a warm meal, a safe place to rest, and a community, Our Daily Bread offers a variety of resources. One being that they offer small things like arts and crafts to give guests a chance to take a minute to just color and connect with their inner youth.
In charge of scheduling all of these events is Keyvetta Cunningham, the director of social services at Our Daily Bread. Keyvetta has worked at Our Daily Bread for about a year and a half. Her main job is to find resources for the guests, such as rental assistance, job assistance, housing, jobs, and so much more. Some of the people and events that are planned could be Narcan distribution, housing options and resources, addiction service, insurance, and additional resources. Keyvetta is also a safe place and familiar face to all the guests that visit ODB, just like a lot of the staff. Keyvetta notices the apparent difference in their guests as they leave after eating a home-cooked meal and getting the rest they need at Our Daily Bread; it's very apparent to her that “A lot of the guests just want to talk.”
Found in the office of Social Worker, Keyvetta Cunningham, Our Daily Bread has a loaded calendar featuring multiple resources coming in every week to talk to the guests. “On Mondays, we have addictive services. We have the Salvation Army here to help people find housing and jobs, on Tuesdays, the free store is here, and Wednesdays we have QRT, which is our quick response team, and on Thursdays the PATH team comes, and they help people with drug addiction and mental health departments and we also gonna have wound care here on Thursdays as well. On Fridays, we have VA come here for our veterans.”
17- Taking up all of the space on the wall at the exit of Our Daily Bread is an assortment of significant frames, some of which are in honor and remembrance of the founder, Ruth “Cookie” Vogelpohl. Cookie passed away at the age of 75, and Our Daily Bread honors her work with a wall of their accomplishments as you walk into the building. Cookie was working in a part of Cincinnati called Over-the-Rhine when she noticed a man searching through the trash for a meal. Cookie then decided to make a change when she started a meal program at St. Francis’s school kitchen that was hosted two times a week. After her numbers of attendees grew from 9 to 200, Cookie realized that food was a great start but not enough. She then made the effort to create the safe place that Our Daily Bread prides themselves on today. She started the project with less than $1000 and opened the doors to Our Daily Bread less than a year later with 10 people showing up to be served on opening day. The tradition has continued until today with the numbers rising every year.
A man sitting outside of Findlay Market with his takeout meal placed in front of him. He is organizing his takeout box, sandwich, and belongings as he looks down the street of OTR. Sitting in one seat and his life in a bag in the other. This story, although new to some, is much too familiar to others. Lining the streets of Cincinnati, you can find dozens of homeless people. Our Daily Bread's mission to feed people affects the city of Cincinnati greatly and can be seen here. Sitting just 20 feet away from where he received his food but possibly not confident enough to go inside, a warm homemade meal makes a bigger difference than we can imagine. Like the founder, Ruth “Cookie” Vogelpohl once said, “Twenty years ago I looked at the “face” of poverty in Over-the-Rhine—an elderly man rummaging through the garbage cans in search of half-eaten sandwiches. It’s one of those moments that stick with a person. My response was Our Daily Bread.”
