Empowering the Masses of Dallas, Tex., serves 1,500 people a month through its hunger relief programs … but the food it serves is not really the point.
The nonprofit’s mission statement emphasizes building stronger communities through vocational training and core skills development. Food plays a role as the “carrot.” It draws people in so staff members and volunteers can build relationships, assess needs, and potentially refer food clients to the organization’s bread-and-butter offerings – their workforce training programs.
“We know that food insecurity is a symptom of a much bigger problem,” said Tammy Johnson, Executive Director and Founder. “And if someone has to visit a food market or pantry, then there’s a deeper issue. And so our goal is to dig deeper into what that issue is.”
Empowering the Masses specializes in medical training programs that give people job skills so they can work in careers with living wages — and eliminate the need to visit a food pantry in the first place. One career track is phlebotomy (collecting blood from patients and preparing samples for testing) via a 12-week program that can lead to jobs paying between $18 and $30 an hour.
Another track provides training to become a community health worker, a job that involves making household visits to provide education, identify disease, and make referrals to nearby clinics. The organization also offers continuing education programs and certifications for those already working in the healthcare or public health sectors.
Since it started offering career training programs to the community, Empowering the Masses has trained about 80 participants annually.
According to Johnson, providing food without addressing the underlying causes of hunger is just a “Band-Aid over a bullet hole.” If people receive food assistance but continue to live in a cycle of poverty, they’re still “bleeding underneath and not healing,” she said.
Even though food is not the main focus of Empowering the Masses’ work, the organization still has put a lot of care and effort into its food distributions. Every Saturday, it operates a drive-through food pantry that distributes bags of fresh food.
In October 2023, the organization also opened a client choice food market in partnership with other hunger relief agencies, including Southern Dallas Thrives and Goodr, an Atlanta-based food rescue group that provides specific items for the community market.
The client choice food market provides each shopper with an ambassador to help them find healthy options for their families. There are few limits based on family size. “People can come in, and they can shop with dignity,” Johnson said.
Alongside the food distributions and job training programs, the organization offers community classes on social determinants of health, as well as one-off events, such as a diabetic management class and a nutritionist-led field trip to a nearby health food store for local seniors.
In the future, Empowering the Masses would like to provide additional certification options and foster partnerships with other organizations. “Our goal is to provide our community with the opportunity to be self-sufficient,” Johnson said.
Throughout all of Empowering the Masses’ work, Johnson said that ensuring programs and services are client-driven is key. Everyone on her team knows that “we’re not the saviors of the community; we’re merely planting seeds for people to be self-sustainable,” she said.
She added, “Always come from a place of cultural humility. I may have the resources you need, but I’m not the expert on your lived experience. I want to serve you from your lived experience and provide you with what you need.”
Johnson’s own lived experience inspired her to pursue this line of work in the first place. “I was in poverty. My mom couldn’t feed us. I wasn’t a traditional student, and I became a teen mom,” she said. “I had to go the route of starting with a trade first before going to college. I’m just providing the opportunity that was given to me.”
A medical professional herself, Johnson said some of her proudest moments at Empowering the Masses have been when graduates of its training programs come back to volunteer. She was also thrilled to see a mother and daughter take the job training program and graduate together.
“The mom and daughter took the program together, and they both walked across the stage. They got the certification, and they both started earning living wages,” Johnson said. “They’re breaking that cycle of poverty two generations at a time.” – Mike Peterson
Mike Peterson is a San Diego-based writer, editor, and strategist who is passionate about finding and telling stories that matter.
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