When Miriam’s Kitchen was founded in October 1983, we served only breakfast. But after seeing the same individuals in our dining room year after year, we recognized that serving meals was not enough. Today, from meals to housing, Miriam’s Kitchen plays a critical role in the fight to end chronic homelessness in DC. Our direct services help our guests increase their income, improve their health, and obtain housing. And our advocacy work addresses root causes of homelessness, seeks enough housing resources for all who need it, and pushes for city-wide change so that we can end homelessness as we know it in our community. 

Many guests say their path to housing started with a meal at MK. We serve breakfast and dinner every weekday. Our professional chefs supervise volunteers to serve nearly 300 meals a day (about 75,000 meals annually). All of our healthy meals are made from scratch with fresh ingredients. Thanks to generous donations from local farmers’ markets, grocery stores, and even local restaurants. Each six-item meal costs less than 50 cents.

Each year, MK provides basic, urgent social services to about 2,500 individuals experiencing homelessness – from clothing and toiletries to obtaining ID documents. We also work more intensely with over 1,500 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.

MK’s Street Outreach Program means we no longer have to wait for guests to find us. Instead, our outreach workers go out to find individuals who are sleeping outside and are isolated or under-connected to assistance. We build relationships with individuals, offer basic needs items like blankets, connect people to health care services and income, and help them on their road to housing as quickly as possible. The 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. As part of the DC Department of Human Services’ Comprehensive Street Outreach Network, the MK Outreach Team covers nearly half of the District, including Foggy Bottom, Georgetown, areas surrounding the State Department and National Mall, and most of Northwest and Northeast DC north of downtown and Rhode Island Ave.

MK 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 95 organizations and 5,000 individuals pushing for an end to chronic homelessness in DC.

MK provides housing support services to over 215 individuals so that they are quickly housed and do not fall back into homelessness. Once clients are matched with housing, MK serves as a coordinator and advocate between clients, their landlords and service providers. Case managers also support clients’ goals for returning to an active, more self-sufficient life in the wider community.