today i have the honor and the

privilege of, again, welcoming you all. and just also talking about this great book, the foo with alex alex more so again support the reason why this is important to me it's because you know poverty, and hunger is a real thing and want to join an organization that truly gave back. and when i joined board a couple of years ago with mike, the team, i mean really warm my heart. the difference that they make continuously, not only to the staff but the and also just the people joined this group. it's a difference maker. it's a game changer to end poverty and as well as home and hunger for job creation and just a path kind of going forward to truly make a difference to the community. so with that being said, i want to welcome a person who has been a near and dear friend in my life. he's also someone i worked with for many years. his name is thomas penny and he is the president of donohoe

hospitality, and he is going to talk about his journey and what he's done within dc central kitchen and also what it means to kind look at this expanded version and this revised version of the history of, the kitchen, you know, this first version, celebrate the first 25 years written in 2014. and now we've added ten years, which includes a lot stuff. so in 2024 at the celebration, 35 years of what we've done and what we will continue to do at the kitchen to truly be community people and difference makers. so thank and help me welcome thomas penny. president dan house thank you. yeah, well, the one thing i know for certain is it's happy hour and folks have wine in their hands. so i am going be incredibly brief. i just want to start by obviously acknowledging mike curtin, the leadership team as well as all of those that make d.c. central what i believe to

be the best workforce organization and hunger fighting organization in the city. so let's give a round of applause to the entire dc security team. i also want to acknowledge all the board that are here. obviously your service. letitia, as board chair, she's going to do amazing for the kitchen so just want to acknowledge the board but really why we're here is to really celebrate 35 years of service dc central kitchen it has been serving an important population in this city before the term returning citizen before term returning citizen was even coined, the term dc kitchen was providing service. those who were returning home from prison who really needed someone to help them transition from a workforce development perspective and an perspective. and over the last 35 years, from

an perspective, running a hotel, leticia and i have benefited from the enormous talent that the has produced and one fond memory is the first obama election. you know inaugurations normally is a busy time in dc, but no one anticipate to just how busy the obama inauguration was going to be. and so i reached out to the kitchen. gerald thomas, who had been here for a long time, and beau and and these guys, they and brought a whole army and we were able to service all of those who were there to share in the historic moment of the obama inauguration, as again, as a result of the kitchen. but before i make one final statement, i also just want to acknowledge i don't know if the list is silverman is here. melissa silverman, a long time member and friend of the kitchen she was instrumental in the city

deploying resources to the kitchen around the move and so let's give her a round of applause. even if she's not here. and then i'm also i was also told that mariane ali's family is here some. most you i'm sure know mariane, ali, and had the privilege of meeting her. but i always define her as the soul of the kitchen. she represented the soul of the kitchen. whenever would come in the building, she told me what to do. she told me what's going on and all of us, we listen to mariane and mike curtain and the entire team, alex and the whole team and and to lisa silverman again, we had alyssa.

here she is. let's give you the list around third. so alyssa made certain that the city issued a proclamation in honor of mariane ali. and not only did she make sure the city issued a proclamation, joined us at mariane ali's house to present it to her in person and mariane ali. everything in the kitchen is in large part because of her. let's give her one more round of applause. and and so the last thing i want to say, you know, jonno killens had a saying. he said each quote, each generation has a responsibility to document its times because we are future will make mistakes. the hope is that they make them on a higher level thanks to. alex moore and and him really chronicling and adding on to the

initial 25 years we now have a rich history of the success of the kitchen some of the challenges the kitchen face and so as a result of this history being chronicled, this book the kitchen is now set up for the next 35 years. and so i just want have us all to celebrate and give a round of applause. alex more. but without further do, i'm going to turn it over to the fearless leader, the kitchen. mike curtin. so we probably could have left it there and just brought alex up, but i, but i'm going to, i'm going to go ahead. so first welcome everybody. this so awesome to see so many friends and family. i could spend the rest of the evening just thanking people, calling people out. i can't do that. thomas, thank you for calling out marianne's family. and those of you who don't know why we keep referring to marianne allie, there is one way that you can find out you can read alex's book, joe.

so please, please do that. so this is the beginning of the celebration. the real celebration is when you read it. so if you had read the first part about the first edition of alex's book, you would know that he joined us over 18 years ago for the first time in 2006, 2005, 2006 as a college, probably a starry eyed or idealistic young guy who had read our founder robert eggers book and was drawn to the innovative, sometimes irreverent ways that we went about our business fighting hunger differently and trying to break the generational, the destructive generation cycle of our cycles of incarceration, addiction, violence, abuse, homelessness hunger, and ultimately poverty. and alex came to us and spent a semester here working off of his office or what. we also many people refer to as a box in a chair with, you know,

three of the it had at least three legs, i think alex and we were pretty good at that point in time. and alex back to academia came back and forth, toggled back and forth, working a little part time at dc central kitchen, doing some grants. and finally i think just sort of gave up that hope that he might do something, that his parents might wanted him to do and and came to work in that basement, that shelter basement on second street. and he's been here ever since. and his. his contributions have been immeasurable and without a question incredibly important to each and every step that we've taken in iteration that we've made in evolution, that we've experienced he started as a grant writer moved into a leader ultimately the director of development job when our long time development head brian mcnair left.

and then became our chief development officer several years ago. and in that title, we often overlook titles or use them without really thinking why thinking much about them. but that title is very important and it speaks to the role alex plays in the kitchen in the philosophy of leadership that we have here. alex is not just a director of development grants and leading our communications and our marketing efforts. and he does an amazing job of that with with that the amazing team and and why don't we before we get too far why don't we say all dc central kitchen people stand up and say hello and get get around all the one of us and yeah these these are amazing amazing passionate compassionate folks who do this incredibly

hard work every single day. and i get to sit here in front of you beautiful people and talk about it, and that's not terribly fair. but that's that's way the world works now. but i get to do it because of the amazing work that they do. and alex has led his team incredibly over the years, but he is the chief development officer because he he sits within our c-suite and is part of every strategic decision, discussion that we make. and again, that was very purposeful. and alex earned that position and continues to serve incredibly in that position today. and alex took it upon himself, as you would also know, if read the first edition of the book to describe nicole the history of dc central kitchen. when robert was 13 years or so ago now, there was a concern that some of that that oral history that made us who we are

might disappear. and now it's wanted to make sure that we captured that. and he did that beautifully and lovingly and accurately in that first edition. and took it upon himself to double the number of pages for only ten years, this time for 25 years. and don't think he really knew what he was getting into. but we've crammed a lot of -- in ten years. i got to, you know, so we've done we've done some pretty cool stuff in the last ten years. sorry, but my parents, everybody but, but. what this book ultimately does in addition to the history is is explain or try to explain the why. we often say that why we do what we do is so much more important than what we do. and with this book, you get the

why you understand, stand why we say we fight hunger differently. why we say we're not going to feed our way out of hunger, why we have to focus on liberation and not redemption. that's at the heart of dc central kitchen, and that's what alex has laid out again brilliantly and beautifully in this book. so i hope you all read it. enjoy it, relish it, come back and ask questions about it. but for right now, i'm going to ask alex to come up and tell us about it and read it himself. it's been an incredible honor through the years to work with mike and thomas penny on so many events where we're sharing ideas, we're thinking about what message we can convey, what message our community needs to hear. and normally really sync up. right? we want to make sure we hit all the right notes, but we didn't do that this time. i figured we could wing it. and you guys took all my remarks top to bottom, but at least that

means this can be shorter. i want to start with a couple of thank you's. i can thank every single person here individually here tonight. you represent so many chapters of the kitchen and of mine, but we want to keep our bartenders busy. i will do that. but i do want to make sure i are tonight's speakers latisha, thomas and mike for those incredibly kind comments about the work, the kitchen, the book and of course, my my small role in that. i want to thank my dc center kitchen colleagues who worked so hard for over a month to put tonight together across so many teams. thank you. thank you for making this. i want to recognize we have three of our culinary job training students who volunteered stay late today and help make tonight a success. thank you to all of you for being here. represent that continued progress. i want to thank our restaurant partners, dc center kitchen in so many ways is the charitable arm unofficially or officially, of dc's restaurant and hotel community. so i want to thank rosa rest, captain cookie and the milkman wegmans premium distributors and

district. incredible contributions tonight. thank you. i also want make sure i thank my family, my folks john and marsha are back in maine tonight. huge advocates of this book. my father in law, tom beck, is here tonight. that's him with the beer. my mother in law. barbara also came down from pennsylvania, but she's home with our three kids so we can be here. so let's shout out, barbara. we all know the childcare struggle is real. and my beautiful, incredible wife, katherine, is here tonight as well. thank you, honey, for everything. i. i promised i wouldn't or something to keep it moving. and i want to thank another family in my life and that is the dc central kitchen family this book is mike said is in many ways sort of an oral history of remembrance says of of so many perspectives of the kitchen and so this story my name is on a near the book it is your current colleagues past colleagues friends partners champions advocates policymakers

your insights your courage really is the story of dc central kitchen. mike shared a little bit of my story and a half years ago i came here as an unpaid undergraduate intern and we're big on hierarchy, but that that is the bottom. i think if we're out that way. but but what i found here was something i could not i couldn't and believe me, i tried to finish that down doctoral degree. i really did. but what i found in this place was the one story that's only ever resonated. it takes so many forms, but an improbable empathy protagonist facing odds and defeating. right? like that's it. that is the story that we've told around campfires for thousands of years. and that's the story of the kitchen. it's it's the micro story of every graduate who overcame incredible personal and systemic challenges be open to a different path and. it's the story of dc central kitchen, that macro story of there is no more improbable little band of unlikely gooders that you could possibly draw up

in dc central kitchen, and yet, here we all are. ten years ago, as founder robert egger and in the interest of full disclosure, like robert officiated our wedding. so i'm kind of in the tank here. i'm not impartial here. but when robert left to go west, just over years ago, i didn't want to lose that institutional memory. and i wanted to make sure that the all the people who worked with robert in his early days could have their stories told. and i wanted to disrupt those traditional ways we talk about nonprofits, right? think about the stories we tell about charities in america right there. either charity cases, they sort of simply listed transactional relationships. it's a story of a visionary founder who had a great idea and everything worked great that no offense to robert, but that's not how things work. right? or charities get in the news when they do something wrong. right. they don't use other people's funds or trust. well, and i looked at the story of the kitchen, these improbable heroes, and saw a narrative that hit all of those things with a brick. right. and the real story of a successful nonprofit is people,

individual people of all backgrounds, all experiences choosing to take that grand vision, those core values, enduring principles to the little small choices we all make every day from putting on our pants in the morning, coming to work on time, saying, yep, another 650 meals, yep. we'll find a way to do that too. right? it was those purposeful applications of these big ideas that made the kitchen special to me and a story i couldn't couldn't help but write. i only wanted to write the -- thing one time. i really i was done and. yet this fall i kept hearing the sort of drip, drip, drip in my life. that said, maybe you got to go back and do this again and there were a couple of reasons for that, but. one was that the challenges and the ups and downs of the last ten years, i felt there was more more things. if anybody seen rocky balboa. right. the last rocky knight. rocky original, the sixth one where he talks about having stuff in his that he had to get out there. i had stuff to get out. and i thought, this is going to be two chapters that turn into

six chapters. so apologize for the extra length. but i saw much courage and in an age where truth no longer seems trendy. we needed to talk about how things like a pandemic impact the work of a direct service nonprofit, right? what cuts at local and federal levels actually mean in people's lives when an insurrection on capitol hill means defeating a shelter on capitol hill, we can't forget that stuff. those are the stories we need to stack and keep telling. but one of the things that really pushed me over the edge was this place you walk this place and see people like this, who want to be part of the work of the kitchen. and people said with love in their hearts, i always knew you could do it. i or hey, can i come and spend three days in dc central kitchen? no one wanted to spend three days at dc central kitchen before this place. right. but can i spend three days with you and look at all your manuals for free. or they would ask, hey, this is great. this is great, makes tons of sense. can we get this in ten more cities like next year and all that was said with love and care and vision and energy, but

missed the enduring point of dc central kitchen. in this book. it's not about the model, it's not about the manuals. truth be told, we don't have many of those. it's about the minds set, this mindset of relentless, of fighting, hunger differently, of making our work more about the liberation of the receiver than the redemption of the giver, revealing possibility and potential everywhere, and especially in the places where stereotypes and lies tell us those things don't exist. and so one of my final primary motivations in revisiting this book was that it gave me a chance to go back and revisit some stories that were told partially in the first one, and nobody was better at revealing possibly in potential in our city than marianne allie. and for those of you who don't know, mary and i let our culinary job training program for two decades after bringing two decades of hard fought life experience to that work to relate to her students

authentically with purpose, with love and care, to expect their absolute best and love them at their lowest. and so i'm honored that her family has chosen to be here. as another example of the way you've shared marianne with us and her legacy us and allowed us to be part of her story and so many of marianne's students are still here. i'm certainly one of them. raise your hand. if you were a student of marianne. there's a lot of us right. and so thank you. and so i thought it was only fitting since i have to read aloud from the book and believe me, i like this less than all of, all of you to tell the story of one of marianne's students that just felt right. and so the couple of words means to describe marianne the phrase that i've always circled back to is our north star. and if marianne was our north star, our rock is mr. john.

center is john and john it. so this mercifully brief reading a couple of pieces of context, right? this piece comes towards the end of the book. we've come through the ravages of the pandemic. we're very nearly completion of building. we're thinking about how to consolidate our longtime headquarters in that shelter basement downtown in our school food kitchen nutrition lab up in northeast d.c. and this piece references a few classic long kitchen hands. so if you hear a name you don't recognize it read the book. okay. and now a reading from the foo fighters. the kitchen secured its certificate of occupancy at the end of 2022 and waged a war of attrition against the lengthy punch list of about 400 items that its contractors still needed to resolve in february, with the punch list nearly half complete, mike curtin declared

it was time to start occupying the center for jobs and justice for the better part of two months. the kitchen staff, through an enormously complex soft opening, first came the culinary job training program, eager to leave behind the claustrophobic setting of the main kitchen and turn its chef instructors loose in the new training kitchen bearing marriott's name. next, the team at the nutrition lab transferred their operations during a late winter in the school calendar. administrative fundraising staff posted up in offices and cubes upstairs, though it would take time for the natural rhythms of office conversation and collegiality to take root finally came, the stalwart staff of the main kitchen who had to pick up and move without ever missing a meal we started people over from the main kitchen two or three at a time, says curtin, sounding like he was running a

refugee evacuation program. that was why i felt intense pressure and frustration as that punch list dragged on. i knew people were still back at that god awful kitchen and as close as we were to getting them out, it wasn't moving fast enough. one of those people was, john fenner. fenner, had never attended the job training program, but he the spirit and mission of the kitchen as well as anyone who held that certificate i was tore up from the floor up, he told the kitchen interviewer. in 2022. drug addiction had cost him his marriage and home before marrying, ali recruited him from a recovery program in 1999. he had never dishes before, but he found that he liked it. he never left. for more than 20 years. fenner was the kitchen's indomitable dishwasher turning down any promotion?

robert egger, mike curtin, andy fink brought his way and setting every attendance record the organization ever had. john fenner is the happiest man i know, says curtin. he is always here, always smiling, always positive. he takes his vacation in the summer and around the holidays and never calls out in between. when the pipes and systems of the shelter had begun to fail, fenner was the undaunted leader of efforts to get the space cleaned and reset. so meal preparation could resume safely and finding a job he enjoyed fenner eventually got his wife back, maintained his sobriety and became a homeowner.

after two decades of percentage based increases, fenner was also something of an annual puzzle for human resources department, as they had to continually reset pay standards for the entire organized. edition. as fiona's hourly salary grew ever higher without any complaint, kitchen leadership like other charities chasing buildings, the kitchen had gladly promised to name numerous parts of its facility. after those making major contributions to the project once opened, visitors to the r klein center for jobs and justice would pass the craig newmark studio for zealous communications and world welcome desk on their way to the co bank volunteer zone. mary culinary job training kitchen and even presented by share fund. we sold the bathrooms bathrooms, the kitchen's intentions did not stop with donor recognition, however, it was just as important to use the space to tell the story, the kitchen, and ensure that first time visitors,

particularly incoming students and new staff, knew that they were joining something bigger than a free training program or traditional nonprofit in the kitchens. most trafficked area, one of the immovable square pillars was wrapped in more than 300 names. but it's it's at one those names do not belong to million dollar donors. but two longtime employees devoted, volunteers, unheralded foundation staff, dedicated guest and nonprofit leaders, inspired and aided the kitchen in tough times, these pillars of the community were permanently listed on an edifice no one could buy their way onto along the parade route designed by zigzag architects or zee jefferson like guy ought to yell thank you, man. the kitchen compiled a detailed timeline. they called the history walk the splashy visuals, the high watermarks, high profile and close calls of the previous

three decades in hopes of provoking conversations among volunteers and serving as a visual aid for guided upstairs conference rooms of varying sizes bore the of marianne all the dorothy bell glenda, avik and duane arrington. while larger meetings were slated for the sara tyree boardroom in the farthest corner of the facility home to the nation's largest commercial food service by joe digester, transforming all of the kitchens, food scraps into greywater and some truly staggering of encrusted pots and pans was the john center dish room. in the moment when he approved the decision to name the functional heart of the new kitchen after center curtain was still typing away in his tired old office at the main kitchen, not quite sure of what lurked in his ceiling tiles.

he waved in center who as usual, was just on the other side of curtains only window which looked onto the dish room saying that window was regularly covered in dripping suds noisily up by center in his endless pans. curtain of the plan, and asked his permission to order the vinyl sign bearing his name then his eyes welled with tears, remembers curtain and he embraced his ceo with the massive wingspan of his six foot three inch frame, then thinner, something he had never done in all his years with the. he asked if he could clock out early. my wife is never going to believe this, he said, with curtains, chuckling, approval he rushed home to tell her the news in person.

this idea of doing something in person. i think has taken on new meaning for all of us over the last four years. i can't overstate what it means to have so many friends, champions, partners, teachers here tonight on a tuesday in august. i hope this book is educational. i hope it's a fitting testament to devotion and courage. my colleagues. and above all, i hope it can be a source of encouragement at a time when so feels uncertain. i think it's being a food fighter means anything. it's showing up, especially when times are uncertain. and the food fighters and d.c. kitchen have shown up for 30,000 consecutive days for this. i am incredibly grateful that you all chose to show on this one. thank you so much for being here. let's keep the bartenders busy

and i'll happily sign your book. thank you, everybody.