A Woman’s Hunger to Help Nourishes Her Food Program

The short, middle-aged ex-nun pauses in her task of handing out food to the poor at a storefront center on South Broadway.

She flashes a wide, engaging grin and admits that sometimes some of the people she serves are not as appreciative as they might be and that she is not always as understanding as she could be.

But then she reflects on the lives of her clients: “I know that sometimes their anger comes from the conditions they live in. In this country, where we have so much, for people to have to live that way and go without food, is a crime.”

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Rita Russo has come a long way both in time and distance from an affluent childhood in San Jose to her middle years on the gritty streets of South-Central Los Angeles. And she has found, after a lifetime of struggling, that there is still not enough money to feed the poor or even to pay her own modest bills.

Russo grew up as an only child in a comfortable two-story house, the daughter of a housewife and a sheet-metal craftsman who owned his own shop.

By the eighth grade, she knew she was going to be a nun.

“I thought that’s what God wanted me to do.”

Still, Russo wasn’t “holier than thou,” as she puts it, and led a normal teen-age life of dates and parties while studying hard enough to earn a B average in high school.

In July, 1959, at the age of 18, Russo entered the convent of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur in Saratoga, Calif., an order co-founded by a French nun who was dedicated to educating the poor.

Russo spent 2 1/2 years in the convent, later earned a master’s degree in education and, from 1963 to 1971, taught as a nun in Catholic schools all over Northern and Central California.

“The thing I thought of most,” she recalls, “was being of service, teaching those kids and working with them.”

Then, in 1971, Russo was sent from Salinas to South-Central Los Angeles. It was there, while distributing Christmas food baskets, that she became deeply concerned about hunger.

“I thought one year when I was working on the baskets that people need food more than just at Christmastime,” she says. “I was aware that people were really hungry and I was coming across kids in my own classroom who were falling asleep because they hadn’t eaten since the day before.”

In 1982, Russo and another nun set up the Seedling, a small food program in South-Central.

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In the first year, the Seedling provided boxes of food for about 25 families a week and operated on an annual budget of about $5,000 donated by Russo’s religious order and raised from garage sales and raffles.

Over the next several years, as Russo put more and more energy into the Seedling, she began to question her role as a nun.

She began to feel that sisters in the convent spent too much time contemplating poverty and too little time doing something about it.

“We spent so much time talking about what it meant,” she says. “But I think there was a basic fear of the poor by some people.”

So after a year and a half of agonizing, Russo left the sisterhood in July, 1987.

But she didn’t leave her faith and she didn’t leave the Seedling.

“I do it because I want to help people,” she says. “The whole biblical thing of feeding the hungry.”

Then she flashes that wide grin and says:

“I don’t do it perfectly, believe me. There must be times when people think, ‘That lady should go to hell. She’s such a crab.’ ”

But clients and the volunteers--who are the backbone of the Seedling and who are themselves poor people from the community--don’t seem to think Russo is hell-bound.

“I think she’s wonderful,” says 73-year-old Dazy Rogers, who helps package food.

“I don’t know anyone nicer than her,” says 74-year-old Maggie Williams, another volunteer. “She’s courteous and she gives you a beautiful smile.”

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The Seedling has grown over the last decade and provides monthly food boxes for more than 1,200 families and has established a weekly program providing food for nearly 100 elderly people. The program distributes an estimated 1 million pounds of food each year.

The Seedling budget, made up of federal funds and private grants, is $180,000 per year. But the funds are inadequate.

The program is out of money to pay fees charged by the area food banks and for the most part must rely on whatever federal surpluses are available.

In September, there wasn’t enough money for Russo to pay her own salary of $1,833 per month and only enough money to pay her two staff members half their $1,000-per-month wages.

Russo was forced to ask personal creditors to hold off on her bills and turned to a cousin for help in making the mortgage payment on her tiny house in Highland Park.

“It was really humiliating to have to do that,” she says. “I get frustrated sometimes.”

But then she flashes her wide grin and says:

“It’ll get better.”