Mormon food bank a private welfare system
Unemployed for a year and with an ailing wife at home, Mike Hammer stepped out of his truck in a Concord strip mall and walked into the heart of one of the most sophisticated private welfare systems in the country.
Here, in a plain white box of a building, Hammer and other Mormons come to get groceries - everything from produce to meats, much of which comes from Mormon-owned farms and cattle ranches.
Others come for counseling, employment help and a self-canning facility, where observant Mormons can up to a year's worth of food supplies in the event of an emergency. All services in the building, known as a Bishops' Storehouse, are intended to promote Mormon self-sufficiency.
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"They're damn sophisticated people, for sure," said Rodney Stark, professor of sociology of religion at Baylor University and the author of "The Rise of Mormonism."
What makes the 110 storehouses around the country remarkable is that they are part of a system run almost entirely by volunteers. They grow the food on Mormon-owned farms, and package it at the storehouses. Volunteers drive trucks and deliver the food to distant wards - what Mormons call their sanctuaries - if recipients live more than 30 miles from a storehouse. As the recession has deepened, the church says it has seamlessly kept up with demand that increased 20 percent over the past year. But the intensely private church declined to say how many people or how much food that represented.
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She said what they get from the church goes beyond food. Their landlord, who is also Mormon, has let them do work instead of paying rent. She said he told her to "pay what you can, but pay your tithing first."
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/03/07/MNP1168NEP.DTL