San Francisco Chronicle; Tuesday, February 24, 1998
Ken Garcia, San Francisco Chronicle

A simple, clear idea. A tiny dot in a big picture. A generous leap for mankind.

Brinker had a friend dying of AIDS back in 1985, an architect so ill he couldn't get out of bed to eat, let alone cook. She was a retired bookstore worker, volunteering for Meals on Wheels, when she decided she could do a good service and prepare meals for a few people like her friend.

So there she was, a 62-year-old grandmother cooking away in the cramped kitchen at Trinity Episcopal Church on Bush Street and then driving the food to her grateful recipients. First it was meals for seven people each day. A few weeks later, 15. Then 25. The table was growing faster than a character in a Lewis Carroll story.

But these people were dying. Too fast. Too many. Too badly. She enlisted volunteers and help. And she founded a movement.

Her efforts began a program known today as Project Open Hand, which provides food to people with symptomatic HIV and AIDS. And if there's a greater success story in San Francisco, it's still a secret.

"When we started out, I thought that maybe it would last a few weeks," Brinker told me recently. "But here we are today and look at the size of the program. It's amazing to me, really."

Brinker's mercy mission today translates into 1,200 meals cooked every night for people with AIDS and 400 grocery bags delivered daily. Since she started her free food program, Project Open Hand has served over 4 million meals in San Francisco. And it was the model for nearly 100 similar food programs that have sprouted up from Boston to Berlin.

"What Ruth Brinker started was a love story," said the program's executive director, Tom Nolan. "She is one of the angels of our time."

Two weeks ago, the program directors held a Valentine's Day bash to honor Brinker. They had bands playing under a giant tent, celebrity speakers, cast members from "Beach Blanket Babylon" -- and, of course, free food for several hundred people.

Brinker, a small woman with bright eyes and a swirl of white hair, seemed somewhat overwhelmed and bemused by it all.

"I'm just pleased when things work out," she said. Which is kind of like saying it's been a little wet the past few weeks.

Today the program works out of a new site on Polk and Ellis streets that houses a spectacular kitchen, a grocery center, and a private delivery dock. It is the first time since the program started that all of its services have been under one roof and 1,200 volunteers stop by each month to cook, clean or deliver food.

Brinker started the original program with $4,000 she raised from the San Francisco Zen Center and the Golden Gate Business Association. Project Open Hand, which she named, now has an $8 million operating budget and has raised $6.1 million out of a $7.5 million capital campaign with the help of local foundations, corporations and individuals like The Gap, the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Fund and James C. Hormel.

But mostly it thrives on the kind hearts of its unpaid soldiers. "This program inspires a level of volunteerism that is unmatched in San Francisco or any other city in America," Mayor Willie Brown said during the Valentine's Day ceremony.

Ruth Brinker no longer works for Project Open Hand. She has turned her efforts to a nonprofit, urban agricultural program she started called Fresh Start Farms, which enlists high school students and employs homeless people to raise fresh fruits and vegetables for local restaurants.

"I just get these ideas in the middle of the night," she said. "I like to stay active and I don't dwell on the past. And I'm sure that Project Open Hand would have happened eventually because it needed to happen."

Yet it happened because of Ruth Brinker and her desire to feed a few sick and hungry people. And she pushed it and nurtured it for five years, until, she said, "I couldn't take it any farther."

So the city will honor her with a plaque in Willow Alley off Polk Street, a small reminder of something that started through one person's large and generous spirit. She thinks it's all kind of funny, but then, that's what she thought in 1985 when she had that little idea in the middle of the night.

"I remember those first people I served, and I'm so happy that people like that aren't going hungry anymore," she said. "I feel good about all of it, even though it's bittersweet that we need a program like this. But we do. And I'm glad it's worked out so well."

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