By Rhea Kuhlman, South Bay Food Pantry Volunteer

Church member Adrienne Kaplan wanted to do something for people who don’t have a lot of the material advantages that she and her husband Matt are fortunate to have, so she volunteered to help out at the Food Pantry.  Every Friday morning for the past year, Adrienne has picked up food from a Food for Less market in Chula Vista that would otherwise have been disposed of.  It’s food that may be nearing its “Best By” date but is still perfectly good, or food that is judged to be surplus for a variety of other reasons. On a good day, she reports, she gets lots of frozen meat and chicken, foods which are sometimes in short supply and highly sought after by pantry clients. She often retrieves bread or frozen dinners. At the store, she carefully checks the temperature of any meat or dairy products to be sure they’ve been stored safely, and then checks the temps again as she weighs the food she received that day and stores it safely at the Pantry.  This record keeping is important to comply with state law.  There’s a lot of food available, and some days, she says, food is stacked up to the ceiling in her four-door sedan.
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by Nina Douglass, South Bay Food Pantry Volunteer

A very active and committed South Bay Food Pantry volunteer was surprised to be asked recently how much she is paid for her pantry work.  All who work at the pantry are volunteers!  No one receives monetary compensation for their hours of work, nor reimbursement for the use of their vehicle or gas expenses for trips to retrieve food (though reimbursement for such expenses would be provided to anyone who requested it.)
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by Rhea Kuhlman, South Bay Food Pantry Volunteer.
At the South Bay Food Pantry, we never know until the last minute what kinds of fresh produce we’ll receive from the San Diego Food Bank and Feeding San Diego, or how much meat or bread will be available for our families on Saturday.  But one thing we can always be sure of is that the bags of shelf stable goods the mid-week baggers put together every week will contain good healthy food that can keep a family going, regardless of what else is available.  The SBFB always keeps on hand stores of non-perishable items to supplement the fresh and frozen items we distribute each Saturday

By Nina Douglass, South Bay Food Pantry Volunteer
The parking lot of 907 Broadway is like that of any other Chula Vista strip mall on weekdays.  On Saturdays, however, the lot is transformed by hundreds of South Bay Food Pantry volunteers and clients.  Volunteers arrive by 8am to receive and stage hundreds of pounds of canned and other dry goods, fresh produce and Starbucks bakery items from the big Feeding San Diego truck. By then, many pantry guests are already waiting for the 9am distribution of numbers which serve to organize the line-up for the 11am - 12:30pm food distribution.  The few trees at the site provide welcome shade for people waiting to collect their food.

by Nina Douglass, South Bay Food Pantry Volunteer
When asked what inspired her to found the South Bay Food Pantry, FUUSD member Maureen McNair has recalled noticing signs of insufficient access to nutritious food among the elementary school children she taught in that neighborhood.  Maureen’s recognition that chronic food insecurity in the South Bay is pervasive led her to address the problem through the creation of the pantry.

By Nina Douglass
​Maureen McNair’s imminent departure to her new home in Northern CA is a seismic event for FUUSD South Bay Food Pantry volunteers and the many clients who have come to know her.  As Deirdre Lonergan notes, “Maureen has been a “FORCE of NATURE because of the massive and persistent energy it took to build this community...”  While the pantry teams will grapple - and perhaps fumble at times - as we adjust to Maureen’s transition, her remarkable leadership and legacy will continue to inspire us.

By Maureen McNair.
​Last month, I bought a condo in a small town in the Sierra foothills. I am going to keep my house in Chula Vista where I have lived for 33 years and remain a member of FUUSD. However, I intend to spend significant time in northern California in a quiet place that is both close to nature and many cultural events. Operating the food pantry requires hands on labor and interacting in person with volunteers and clients. While I will always be the pantry Founder, I am shifting my status to something like Coordinator Emeritus at the end of this month. Various voices will take over this blog starting next week. In addition, I have trained a team of familiar faces to run the pantry. 

By Maureen McNair
Anna Kelley, a Senior at San Diego State University, has been volunteering at our South Bay Food Pantry for nearly two years. “I was looking for ways to get out of my box and serve with others,” she said after her shift bagging donated food from Starbucks last Saturday morning.​It was an hour before the food distribution actually began. Volunteers had already set up outdoor tables and bagged thousands of pounds of oranges, cabbages, potatoes, and Romaine lettuce. Anna will continue volunteering until this August because she “enjoys working with this group of people, especially the community members.”  Anna is referring to the community members who receive food from our pantry on Saturday morning, but come early to volunteer to sort and bag fresh produce and move boxes of dry goods indoors. Those community members vary each week. However, the pantry has an increasingly steady flow of clients who also form part of the backbone of our volunteer team. To protect their privacy, they are not identified in this blog.  

By Maureen McNair
Sebastian Hochgesang is 9 years old now and a veteran volunteer at the South Bay Food Pantry and Diaper & Period Products Program. Sebastian began volunteering with his mother, Mindy Hochgesang, in 2019 in what was then the Sunday morning free diaper distribution program. One Sunday a month or so, and often on Sundays that fell on a holiday, Sebastian and his mom volunteered together to give away free diapers for babies from 8:15 - 9:15 AM. Mindy explains their volunteer gig gelled for them after three things aligned. She heard from friends who already volunteered at the pantry  “how meaningful it was for them as a family.” Plus, Mindy says, “I had gone to the Social Justice week at Camp de Benneville in summer 2019 (it was a goal of mine to increase my social justice involvement) and I was looking for practical ways to do that -- one that fit in with my life (single working mother) and provided a meaningful opportunity for my son Sebastian (who is now 9) - it's really hard to find volunteer opportunities that meaningfully involve kids.” 

By Maureen McNair
Our South Bay Food Pantry opened in December 2019 with a good-sized volunteer crew of people who regularly attended services at our Chula Vista campus. We displayed food on
shelves in a large closet. Our clients came in to select the food they wanted and shopped for themselves. Then, the covid pandemic hit and inside of a week, almost all the volunteers went into self-quarantine. I decided to try to keep the pantry open, and put together a mostly new set of volunteers who started distributing food from tables we set up in our parking lot. Bella Furth started pitching in
wherever she was needed. One of Bella’s many talents is she can see what needs to be done, then does it. As Bella puts it, she “pretty quickly ended up handling intake, rosters and client record-keeping.” It’s a job Bella does most Saturdays to this day.

Our thriving South Bay Food Pantry recently went through a major transition. While church activities were solely virtual during the first years of the pandemic, we were fortunate to be able to use two large FUUSD South Bay campus suites to store the dry goods, bread, meat and period products we distribute to the local community every Saturday morning, as well as diapers on Sunday mornings. With the upcoming re-opening of the South Bay campus, we needed to relocate to suite 105, a smaller space than either of the ones we’d been using. Having grown to accommodate some 300 households seeking food each week, how could we adapt our operations to work from this smaller space? And how could we make that move quickly, so that the South Bay worship and social spaces could be restored for in-person use ASAP?

By Maureen McNair
 
This past Saturday, pantry volunteers gave away food to a record 252 heads of household. Surely, we broke the 1,000 person barrier when we look at how many people are actually receiving the food we distribute. Our prior record had been 226 heads of household.
 
Our food pantry distributes food to a lot of individuals and families. On Saturdays, we track the food we give out to the “heads of household” who actually walk through our food distribution line. The heads of household report to us when they enroll how many people live in their homes. 

by Maureen McNair
 
During 2020, when Donald Trump was US President, Congress responded in a variety of ways to what we did not then know would only be the first year of the covid-19 pandemic. One way Congress responded was to enact legislation to empower the US Department of Agriculture to pay farmers to send food into communities experiencing food insecurity. The idea was for pantries like ours to find volunteers, find people in need, and distribute those USDA boxes.

by Maureen McNair

Leo Casas is the property manager for the strip mall in Chula Vista where our South Bay Food Pantry is located. I do not know what I would have done without Leo for the last couple years.

​Leo is a tall, gently-spoken bilingual senior citizen who is still noticeably in love love with his wife of many years. They met as teenagers in Mexico. They have children and grandchildren now. I hear stories about them, the food they bring over for holidays, the son who is an architect in Santa Monica who does not make it home as often as Leo would like. Leo is a man a devotion, who also treats the strip mall and pantry with the same care I would expect from an owner. He and his wife live near the food pantry. He has an intuitive understanding that the work we do is for the community.

Volunteers did not even put out on Broadway our sandwich sign stating “Free Food” in both English and Spanish last Saturday. Nonetheless, we still broke another distribution record. We gave food to 218 heads of household for around 800 people. I have no explanation for the increase in clients, but food prices are rising, so that might be a factor. And, of course, I have no idea how many clients we will serve next Saturday. More? Less? Stay tuned!

by Maureen McNair
Happy New Year, everyone!
We had access to absolutely no turkeys from either of the two main regional food banks before Christmas. It was our pleasure to give away a lot of other food and the dozens of gift cards many of you all so generously donated. Our last food distribution before Christmas turned out to be our biggest food distribution to date, serving 206 households with over 840 individuals!

By Maureen McNair
My main goal for our church’s South Bay Food Pantry is for it to go out of business because no one needs our services any longer. Along those lines, I have bad news and good news to share. The bad news is last Saturday, we had our biggest food distribution to date. We provided food to 206 households — mostly families and seniors. The good news is we were there to alleviate their food insecurity. The members and friends of this congregation are so consistently generous, we have never had to turn away anyone without giving them food. We distributed over a ton of fresh produce, plus chicken, eggs, frozen meals, dry goods, and bread. And, through the generosity of a one-time donation from a community groups, we were also able to give away often-requested adult diapers and at-home covid tests.

by Maureen McNair
Have you ever wondered what kind of work it takes to get food into our church’s South Bay Food Pantry?
Right now, it takes several volunteer teams working on Friday and Saturday to get the food we will distribute Saturday morning.
On Friday morning at 8 AM, Valerie Jaques and I meet in Mira Mesa at the San Diego Food Bank warehouse.  We shop for meat, poultry, frozen meals, eggs, fresh produce, and dry goods. Valerie does a lot of heavy lifting of goods into her pick up truck, then drives down to our pantry in Chula Vista.

By Maureen McNair
A well-oiled machine of food pantry volunteers, including church members and dedicated people from the wider community, distributed free food to over 200 happy families last Saturday in our busiest food give-away to date. The South Bay Food Pantry volunteers gave away fresh produce, frozen chicken, eggs, a bag of dry goods, 8-10 food items from Starbucks, and artisan bread to each household. In addition, we gave frozen turkeys to several community members. We also delivered free turkeys to the homes of several church families. Many, many hours of prep work went into creating this mass food distribution. But, our volunteers managed to put several tons of nutritious food into our South Bay community in 90 minutes. Then, we cleaned up, and went home.

by Maureen McNair
The South Bay Food Pantry is pleased to announce we won a countywide competition to launch a program to distribute free period products. We accepted our first delivery this past Tuesday. We will distribute pads and tampons on Sundays during our free diaper distribution.
The period products program is being administered by the Regional Diaper Bank. Several months ago, our contact at the Diaper Bank let us know the period product program would be coming down the pipe. We submitted our application, then waited for the results. We are so pleased to be able to offer these products to the many women in our area who live near or below the poverty line. Our goal is to provide products to women in South County. Our pantry is one of only five pantries chosen to launch this project.
Distributing diapers and period products is a very easy volunteer job. Two people can easily cover a shift. If you are interested in distributing diapers and period products during the week, please contact me. Flexible days and hours are available. Thank you for your interest and support!

by Maureen McNair
Bob, who is physically disabled, lives in a two bedroom mobil home he rents with four strangers in south Chula Vista.
When Consuela’s son was born disabled, her husband left the family. She continues to care for her teenage son as a single parent and is their sole support.
Food prices are just too high for Manuel, who works full time, to pay rent and feed his wife and four children.
Last Saturday, our South Bay Food Pantry had its busiest food distribution to date. We broke the 200 families mark for the first time and gave away food to 204 heads of household.

by Maureen McNair
Earlier this month, Feeding San Diego (FSD) made an offer I couldn’t refuse. They are now delivering food to us every week! This is a really big deal for two reasons: the pantry does not own a truck and sourcing tons of food every week is time-consuming work with no guarantee of success.
During the pandemic last year, FSD had waived their rule that they would not bring on any new pantries to supply with food, and offered to deliver food the first and third Fridays each month. The first and third Fridays food and delivery was arranged as an incredible surprise by another pantry manager whose family has hosted a food distribution for 30 years. She saw the need for food in our community and our church’s commitment to providing it. Those deliveries have been very gratefully received by pantry volunteers, client, and me.

by Maureen McNair
​Even though the Food Pantry volunteers received a key for our new suite at the beginning of the month, we could not move in immediately. The owner of the strip mall where we are located sent in a plumber, carpet cleaner, and property manager to do some work. Even after he sent in a carpet cleaner and released too many cans of air freshener, the suite was still visibly dirty. We were also concerned the air freshener was not solving, but only masking, odors we originally detected. The suite had been a marshall arts studio for many years.