Bobby Jefferies runs the kitchen at the Veterans of Foreign Wars post every Friday and Saturday evening, filling a niche that Quartermaster Carl Silva had previously struggled for years to keep staffed. He and his kitchen staff are all residents from the East County Transitional Living Center.
The culinary team was assembled as an experimental partnership between the center and the VFW in an effort to simultaneously provide work experience and a small but steady paycheck for center residents, while keeping the VFW kitchen consistently staffed with capable and reliable employees.
The genesis of the program was an April 9 Alpine Chamber of Commerce meeting, where local business owner Chris Wiley and the living center’s pastor Harold Brown facilitated a presentation about homelessness. Silva was tucked at a back table and invited Brown to sit and talk informally after the meeting. By the time the breakfast plates were cleared, the men had a rough plan for how the two non-profits could work together with mutually beneficial results.
Jefferies talks about his personal successes— kitchen manager, grocery store manager, proud father of eight— with revelations about being a methamphetamine addict for 15 years, being homeless for 10 of those years, and how his life changed on Valentine’s Day, 2015, when he stumbled across the living center.
These days, he leads a team of three in producing more than 100 meals each weekend in the small but functional VFW kitchen.
“As a supervisor up here, I’m the only one who can pick up the alcohol— beer for the batter, wine for sauces. I ask every one of my team if it will be a temptation for them. I don’t want to mess up their program… I’ve got to be able to trust them to come up here and stay on the right path,” Jefferies said.
His own path was not originally to a kitchen, but to the Navy; he had enlisted and two weeks before heading off to boot camp, Jefferies broke his leg and was disqualified. The love of food that he inherited from his father, a prior Navy cook, was imprinted on him and he found his way into cooking.
“I’m self-created. I learned from watching cooking shows, duplicating dishes until I got them right… My dream is to have my own restaurant, kind of a mom-and-pop place, Fat Rob’s,” he said with a grin.
Jefferies and his team are not the only ones to benefit from the arrangement the VFW and East County Transitional Living Center have.
“I can’t say enough good things about this arrangement and how much these people have helped the VFW… They are all first class. You know, I never wanted to be a missionary, but I was a drill instructor and the feeling I get, to see them all at the end of the program, it is just amazing. I could not be more satisfied with how things have worked out,” Silva said.
