Elijah’s Promise to kick off music festival

Elijah’s Promise, a soup kitchen in downtown New Brunswick, serves over 100,000 meals a year to its community members.

To help raise funds for this service and awareness about hunger and food justice, the nonprofit is joining with Iguana Music tonight to kick off their first annual four-day Hub City Music Festival.

The festival will include live music and poetry reading events every night until Saturday, each in a different venue. The first will be at Elijah’s Promise, then it will move to Doll’s Place on Thursday night, Tumulty’s Pub on Friday night and finally the Court Tavern on Saturday, said Michael Steinbruck, a band member of Iguana Music.

Michelle Wilson, development and community relations director at Elijah’s Promise, said outside of running the soup kitchen, Elijah’s Promise also offers a culinary job training program, social services and a clothes line project, making the festival an ideal way to raise much-needed funds for their many channels of outreach.

“I think Elijah’s Promise serves a very important purpose,” Wilson said. “Our belief is that everyone deserves good food … and that is one of the roles we serve in the community. It’s a fantastic opportunity to support our work and enjoy a fabulous night of music.”

This belief is one that is shared with Iguana Music, said Michael Steinbruck, long-time supporter of Elijah’s Promise.

He said the festival would serve as an opportunity to foster a connection between the city’s residents.

In producing the event, he said he tried to look at the community’s needs and pair it with the community’s assets. The festival would not only benefit the efforts of Elijah’s Promise, but the musicians and the city’s overall business as well.

“What inspires me is [helping] the community grow stronger by … people having a place to share their gift,” he said. “Everybody has something to offer and there’s reciprocity there. We all need … a place where people can come together and play a part in making for a healthy and vibrant community.”

Aside from a wide range of music performances, author and University alumni, Eliot Katz, said he would be giving a few readings tonight from his poems about issues concerning food and hunger.

Katz, a former resident of New Brunswick, said he was involved with ending homelessness in the city and ran a rotating soup kitchen that would later consolidate and become Elijah’s Promise.

He said he is elated to return to the city to support Elijah’s Promise and be reunited with many of the musicians who will also attend the festival.

“Art plays such an important role in our culture,” Katz said. “New Brunswick has a great long history of being a core site for art, music and poetry and I love the idea that it’s linked to such an important cause to benefit Elijah’s Promise.”

He said he hopes for the event to highlight central New Jersey’s hunger issues while aiding the soup kitchen’s financial needs, since similar places in the city were not easy to start and keep afloat.

“It’s quite an interesting struggle in New Brunswick to get these things going,” he said. “They weren’t something that sprung up on their own … in many cases they were created despite the pressures against their creation from the city government in terms of serving food to low-income families.”

Steinbruck said the musicians and all those involved are working for free, including his ten-year-old daughter, Hope Steinbruck, who will be opening tonight’s event.

He said they are looking to expand and diversify the selection of music for the future, but this year’s music genres will include rock, alternative rock and mantra pop. He hopes to see jazz, country and other genres more prevalent at the next festival.

The festival would be a win-win event, Wilson said, as residents who want to indulge in igniting the city’s rich history in music will be doing so while supporting a worthy cause.

She said this would be a stepping-stone for Elijah’s Promise that will grow in the years to come and assist in sustaining their many different programs.

“Elijah’s Promise [has] been doing such a great and essential job in terms of helping the people in New Brunswick,” Katz said. “Food and shelter are a part of the universal declaration of human rights and people should have access to them.”