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• The South Bay Food Pantry is the largest and fastest growing mission of First UU Church. Fifty-eight church members from both campuses, and 34 volunteers from the wider community, 92 people whose ages range from ten to mid-eighties keep the Pantry running and support First UU’s mission. 

By Sebastian Hochgesang
My name is Sebastian. I'm 10 years old and I go to Martin Elementary.  We have been volunteering at the Diaper Pantry since it first opened. My mom and I started volunteering about a year and a half ago.  In the beginning, it was a little bit hard, but eventually I got used to it.  It was nice to know other people in the community. And my mom and I usually go for a treat after we volunteer. Here are some of the things I help my mom with when we volunteer:
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By Isabella Furth, Pantry Volunteer
For years, I have been fiercely protective of my Saturdays. As it is for many people, my work week is a bustle of work and meetings and activity. Sundays are full of church, music rehearsals, and gearing up for the week to come. But Saturdays! For me, they are the day of rest. There’s time for a swim, a walk, an outing, visiting a friend, doing the crossword, cooking. A time to relax, to think, to slow down and make room for things outside the world of work and consumption and productivity. Saturdays are my Sabbath. For years, when faced with any standing commitment, no matter how important or worthwhile—if it meant giving up Saturdays I would give it a pass. And then in March 2020, Maureen McNair called me, looking for volunteers to work at the food pantry. On Saturdays.
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By Rhea Kuhlman, Pantry Volunteer
In the two and a half years that John and Peggy Holl have been picking up bread donations from Con Pane Bakery at Liberty Station, hauling it to the South Bay Food Pantry in their small car, weighing it, and individually wrapping or bagging each loaf or pastry assortment, they’ve handled about 7,200 pounds of bread, or a little over 3.6 tons.   That’s a lot of tonnage for a couple in their 80s!  Now the Holls are passing the torch to a new generation of volunteers, to satisfy their children, who worry about their night driving on the freeway.

By Isabella Furth, Pantry Volunteer
Did you know that the parking lot at the Chula Vista campus/food pantry is in fact a five-dimensional shape-stacking Tetris alley that defies the laws of time and space? It’s a modestly sized strip-mall parking lot, with a single entrance/exit and maybe 75 parking spots total. During our Saturday distributions about a dozen of those spaces are blocked off to allow room for deliveries and our lineup and registration areas. Another handful are reserved for customers at Carmen’s beauty salon and Alfredo’s deli, our wonderful and supportive neighbors.
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By Nina D, South Bay Food Pantry Volunteer
In late 2019, when former FUUSD board member Maureen McNair first engaged us in launching the South Bay Food Pantry, neither my husband Jeff nor I had been involved in such a project before. I anticipated distributing mushy canned green beans and other basic (and unappetizing) canned goods, and wondered how much difference such items could make.
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By Pantry Volunteer Rhea Kuhlman

There was a lot going on at the Pantry as we built up to an exciting Dia de Los Muertos week distribution.  The Sunday before, we finally got our gigantic almost-new commercial refrigerator, transported on Valerie Jaque’s even more giant (and ancient, and extremely green) horse trailer, appropriately dubbed The Pickle.  A hearty team of volunteers, including Robert, Manny, and Jim, valiantly wrestled the old fridge, now hobbling on its very last legs, out the door and adroitly maneuvered the new fridge in, accompanied by vociferous instructions from our devoted team of back seat drivers.
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By Nina D., South Bay Pantry Volunteer
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The South Bay Food Pantry has grown in many ways since it was founded by Maureen McNair three years ago. The number of clients benefitting from the variety of food items, period products, Covid tests and infant and adult diapers we provide has increased to over 300 families each week.  The volunteer contingent has also increased, from a handful of FUUSD-connected individuals to a large group of FUUSD and South-Bay based volunteers active throughout the week.

by Valerie Jaques, Pantry Coordinator
I started with the pantry about 2 years ago, when Tony Bianca shared on Facebook a plea for someone with a truck to help with a weekly large shopping trip at the San Diego Food Bank. I said, sure, why not, at least for a few months I should be able to handle it. I’m one of very few members of First Church who happens to own a large pickup truck. Might as well make use of it to help my community.  Somehow, I am now the Pantry Coordinator.

by Rhea Kuhlman, Pantry Volunteer
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Around 7:30 each Saturday morning, an enormous white truck rumbles into the parking lot at 970 Broadway in Chula Vista, and the driver starts unloading pallets.  Out pour cases of fresh fruits and vegetables – strawberries, melons or plums in the summer, apples or pears in the winter – and squash, potatoes, cabbages and tomatoes, depending on the season.  The truck driver then unloads pallets of dry goods – maybe tuna and beans, oatmeal and pasta or rice. On a good day, there’s boxed milk, too. Each case of food is carefully placed on pallets so that no food ever touches the ground.

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.