River of Life Mission, which has been offering free meals to homeless and other needy people for some 35 years, on Thursday served up its last dishes at its Chinatown location.
The nonprofit Christian mission, which has often clashed with community members who view the site as a magnet for homelessness in one of Honolulu’s oldest neighborhoods, is moving its meal distribution center to various “mobile” locations across Oahu.
“We’re going to go where people are. We’ve actually been invited to come into homeless camps. … We have acquired and equipped four vans,” said River of Life Mission Board President Rann Watumull.
The initial set of temporary meal-service sites includes Hale Mauliola Navigation Center at Sand Island, the Homeless Outreach and Navigation for Unsheltered Persons at Keehi Lagoon and an area in Iwilei. Also, starting Thursday, River of Life will begin serving lunch at St. Elizabeth Church in Kalihi.
The idea of spreading the operation out to several different locations aims to achieve feeding about the same amount of people, just in smaller batches, said River of Life Mission Executive Director Paul Gates.
While the Chinatown
location has served breakfast, lunch and dinner to about 800 people daily, the organization wants to limit the reach of each new site to about 50 people for each meal service. The mission also plans to work with
Partners in Care and other groups to provide social services and psychiatric care at the sites.
Watumull emphasized that River of Life Mission is more than just a food service program. He said food serves as a starting point for building connections and trust between staff and people in need on the street.
Tracey Robert Walker, who has been going to the River of Life Mission’s
Chinatown location for meals over the past two
decades, was in line to pick up a lunch there on the last day of service.
When asked about the mission’s switch to mobile locations, Walker said, “Downtown is where most of the homeless people are. There’s going to be a lot of irate people” looking for meals, but added that one of the new temporary sites is just a few blocks away.
He said the change of location would not deter him from continuing to get meals from River of Live Mission. “These are lifelong friends of mine,” Walker said, noting that over the years he has gone to River of Life Mission for meals even at times when he wasn’t homeless.
Gates said that when the COVID-19 pandemic surfaced, River of Life Mission began serving meals for some vendors around
Chinatown. “Vendors that were struggling came and got food from us,” he said. “If a lot of people knew that for two years that we fed vendors, I think there’d be a different story here.”
But Chu Lan Shubert-Kwock, president of the Chinatown Business and Community Association, praised the departure of the mission’s food service from Chinatown. “There is an end to this problem that’s been plaguing us for years,” she said.
“It’s very hard to control the clientele. You want to do the good deed of giving meals, but you cannot control where they go … also the sanitation issue. So you just cannot cope with the problem, and a lot of people are hurt by that.”
Mayor Rick Blangiardi thanked the mission for agreeing to switch to the temporary sites, or hubs, under an agreement with Honolulu Hale announced in February. No city funds will be used to pay for the mission to relocate some of its operations.
While the River of Life Mission’s food services will no longer be available at the Chinatown location, its administrative office, chocolate shop and food ingredient pickup will remain. Watumull said it is still looking for a place to permanently relocate.
Blangiardi said, “We want to support this mission in every way they can, as they get out into various parts of the island and actually provide their work in a different way.”
Blangiardi said he would monitor a concern that the temporary locations would simply shuffle the homeless population to other parts of the city. Also, he lauded work done by the new city program Crisis Outreach Response and Engagement, which diverts 911 homelessness-related calls to a special group of emergency medical technicians and community health workers.
