By Maureen McNair
Food pantries across San Diego County, including ours, face several months of food shortages. The US Department of Agriculture farm to family program from which our South Bay Food Pantry has received many tons of food, has largely cut SD County out of federally funded food distribution contracts that cover the next several months. Our South Bay Food Pantry will be relying on food from the Jacobs and Cushman San Diego Food Bank and Feeding San Diego. However, both food banks limit the amount of food we can get from them. Feeding San Diego currently allows us food from their warehouse only two days a month. We shop weekly at the San Diego Food Bank warehouse, but our credit limit restricts the amount of food we can purchase there.
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By Maureen McNair
I met the homeless man I will call Angelo in a moment of synchronicity. Angelo, who was so gracious, considers his life a success. I want you to meet him too, at least virtually. Here are the events that converged to bring us together and what he shared about himself. County Public Health closed down another food pantry in Chula Vista for a couple weeks because that pantry has an outbreak of Covid-19. Again. Pantries cover for one another, so last Monday, I drove over to a donor of the closed pantry to pickup 185 pounds of free frozen meat. Our clients at the South Bay Food Pantry will be thrilled to receive such a bounty the Saturday before Christmas! By Maureen McNair Less than two miles from our South Bay Food Pantry in Chula Vista, UC San Diego Medical School is conducting a Covid-19 prevention study to evaluate a vaccine. Pantry volunteer Jude Outwater, a senior at Lesley University in Boston and son of Board Vice President Julie Forrest, organized a visit by a representative from the Medical School to recruit study volunteers. Medical School Community Outreach Specialist Aaron Gutierrez spoke to Pantry clients and volunteers to find adults, aged 18 and older, who are more likely to be exposed to Covid-19 and who might be interested in participating in the study, which does provide compensation. South Bay Food Pantry Nears First Year Anniversary after Distributing over 100,000 Pounds of Food12/2/2020
We only had a few cans of food on hand and told her we had no opening plans yet. But, we offered to give her food. We gave her several cans of food with pop tops. She turned out to be the first client at our South Bay Food Pantry.
By Maureen McNair Last Saturday, the pantry held its largest food distribution to date. We gave away over 8,000 pounds of nutritious food. We distributed a variety of kinds of fresh produce, milk, yogurt, cheese, meat, poultry, shelf stable food such as cereal and pasta, and about 500 pounds of food donated by Starbucks. We also had the largest number of people come to the pantry for food. The prior week, we distributed food for over 150 heads of household, providing food for about 600 people. Last Saturday, we provided food for over 190 heads of household, providing food for about 800 people. Our pantry guests repeatedly express how thankful they are that we have this food distribution. One woman told me about her family emergency and how important we are to her. I want to pass on the gratitude I hear about to you. I am not completely sure why we saw such a huge increase in one week. But, I have a couple educated guesses. By Maureen McNair For the first time since the food pantry opened, Lead Minister Rev. Kathleen Owens had her Saturday morning schedule freed up enough that she visited a food distribution. Kathleen did more than visit, though, she worked helping unload a delivery of food donated by Starbucks. There is nothing quite like repeatedly carrying 30 pound boxes of food across the parking lot to put into the cars of our pantry guests to drive home how labor intensive and physically exhausting pantry work can be. Kathleen is definitely up to the task! Rev. Kathleen also got to talk with regular volunteer, retired Rev. Arvid Straube, and some pantry volunteers that she knows because they are congregants. She also got to meet some, not all, of our volunteers from the wider community. By Maureen McNair. Inclement weather was bound to happen! Last Saturday, volunteers gave out food during three squalls which brought rain and wind during our distribution. It was a crazy day all around! As of Friday evening, we thought we would be receiving a delivery of 192 boxes of food on Saturday morning. But, at 6:30 am Saturday, the delivery company sent an email cancelling the order because the food was bad. It all worked out, I think. We had plenty of food on hand to substitute and who needed soggy cardboard boxes anyway? You Can Still Make Financial Donations Directly to the Food Pantry! Both one-time and monthly sustaining donations help us stay open! No amount is too small, or too large. Donate online. If you need food, there are lots of options, get all the details on our Food Pantry page. By Maureen McNair Deer Park Monastery, located on 400 acres in the chaparral mountains near Escondido, is a monastery established in 2000 under the guidance of Vietnamese Buddhist monk, peace activist, and author Thich Nhat Hanh. It is a mindfulness practice center and monastic training center with two hamlets, one for monks and laymen and another for nuns and laywomen.
The volunteers had fun dressing up for our food distribution. And, as ever, our pantry clients are deeply grateful for the amount and quality of food we give them. I’ll be back next week with more pantry news. Meanwhile, take care and thank you for your continued interest in the pantry and generosity.
By Maureen McNair Here is a good reason to answer a telephone call from an unknown phone number, even in the weeks leading up the election: it could be actual good news! Shirley Koch works for Rady’s Children’s Hospital in a program called Health Stars. Health Stars provides early literacy intervention for low income and homeless parents with children up to age 8. It was Shirley on the phone calling to introduce herself and ask if she and her team could distribute books and literacy information at some of our Saturday food and Sunday diaper distributions. I immediately agreed. Not only that, after Shirley explained her literacy mission in more detail, I let her know she had hit pay dirt to help her meet the goals of Health Stars. by Maureen McNair Food pantry volunteers Loren and Dana Tomlinson are moving to Arizona at the end of November. They own a huge Ford pick up truck and have been reliably and enormously generous with their time and energy picking up food for the pantry. In fact, they are the only congregant volunteers the pantry has who have ever picked up food in a truck for the pantry. The pantry needs transportation in place no later than November 27. If you, or someone you know, owns a pick up truck or delivery van, now is a great time to volunteer! By Maureen McNair. Early food preparation last Friday for our Saturday food distribution went smoothly. Jared Blackwell, Kate Collier, Steve Gelb, Steve Howard, Andrea Travers, and I carried 3,350 pounds of food into the pantry and securely stored it. We even arranged the cantaloupes, potatoes, and apples in such a way that Saturday morning, we could create an easy assembly line to put the produce into bags. We worked hard, said our goodbyes, and went home. Then, my phone rang. It was a friend who operates a food pantry in San Ysidro. She was delivered 48 extra USDA boxes of perishable food, including eggs, cheese, meat, and a full gallon of milk. In total, it was nearly 1,600 pounds of food she could not distribute or store. “Can you take it?” She asked. by Maureen McNair The combo box program arrives just as our food pantry clientele continues to explode. Last Saturday, we distributed food to 152 heads of household who waited in line while volunteers unloaded the delivery truck. The heads of household have families with a total of about 650 people for whom we provided food for meals for a few days. We received 132 combo boxes and distributed food to a total 152 households. So, one of the things I am working on this week is trying to obtain more boxes of food for October. by Maureen McNair Recently, during the same week, two adults visiting our South Bay Food Pantry told me they had not eaten in three days and I received an offer for 11,000 pounds of free apples. We all understand that people in our community go without food because they don't have the money to buy it. And, we know that many more than two people in our region went hungry that particular week. The produce wholesaler offered me the apples for free, if I would take them all. The transportation was our responsibility. The apples were harvested in Washington State and transported in a refrigerated semi-truck to the produce wholesaler's warehouse near the San Ysidro border crossing. But, the wholesaler couldn't find buyers for the apples. They were perishable and took up valuable warehouse space. If he didn't give away the apples, the company would have to pay the costs to transport the food to a landfill and pay the fee to use the landfill. That was more cash out of the business' pocket toward an investment that had already lost money. So, it made financial sense for the produce wholesaler to make a tax-deductible gift of the 11,000 pounds of apples. By Maureen McNair Four hundred years ago, in the first quarter of 2020, one of San Diego's two major food banks, Feeding San Diego, brought on our little pantry as a partner. They paired us with a Chula Vista grocery store. Several volunteers and I trained at Feeding San Diego (FSD) on how to pick up free food the grocery store would otherwise send to the landfill. FSD scheduled our first appointment to pick up free food. But, that week, as bad luck would have it, the governor closed the state because of the Corona virus. FSD canceled our appointment because there was no food. So, we never got food through this partnership. Feeding San Diego (FSD) then closed itself for two weeks to reorganize so it could support the increased demand for food from its existing pantry partners. I am sure many of you recall the food shortages and empty store shelves. FSD was very kind to our pantry, giving us thermometers for our refrigerators and freezers, a scale, a freezer blanket, and inviting me to online training. But, they also made it clear they would not be able to give us the one thing our pantry needed the most - food. That remains their official policy now - no food to new pantry partners. Until, one recent day, I received a gift by way of text. By Maureen McNair
Last week, Dana and Loren Tomlinson took their pickup truck on vacation, went boating on a lake, and left me to figure out food pick up and delivery for the pantry. The three of us have a good thing going. We plan what we are going to do to get food to the pantry, then we follow the plan. Since our pantry does not own a pickup truck or delivery van and I own a Prius, I called around to other pantries to see if anyone had an extra truck to deliver food for our Saturday morning distribution. Saturdays are busy food distribution days so I made lots of calls. Pantry friend Andre, who lives and works in Carlsbad, came through for us, and this is not the first time. Once, Andre decided our pantry needed another refrigerator. So, he gave us a used one, which he drove down from Carlsbad in the back of his pickup truck. When Andre arrived in our parking lot with the refrigerator, I noticed he did not bring portable ramps. Portable ramps are gadgets that allow a person to take an appliance strapped to a dolly and roll the appliance from the truck bed to the ground. "Did you bring portable ramps?" I asked Andre. "I have what I need," he said. Andre then reached into his pickup truck bed, wrapped his arms around the full sized refrigerator, lifted it to the ground, and carried it across our parking lot into what used to be the church social hall. I followed Andre carrying a reasonably-sized object - an iced latte. By Maureen McNair
Last Saturday morning, a woman I had never met drove over to my house and gave me $300 in cash. To be fair, I had spoken with her on the phone earlier in the day when she used her credit card to pay the fees for over a week at a county campground. Her altruism was on behalf of a homeless US Marine and his family who showed up at the South Bay Food Pantry earlier in the day. The Marine, David, with his two year old son in tow, found our pantry through 211 emergency services. One of our pantry volunteers gave David a standard bag of food we create for unsheltered guests. Saturday was a busy day. Our pantry has seen a 25% increase in clients over the last two weeks. Last Saturday when David showed up, we served 127 heads of household, representing about 570 people, in 90 minutes. I did not have a chance to get to know David until he came back later to give me his phone number. He had offered to volunteer. By Maureen McNair In June of 2019, four or five congregants attending the annual meeting in the Meeting House wrote down that their vision for the future of First UU included a food pantry or a soup kitchen. At the time, the primary concerns on the minds of most people at that meeting were things such as how we would respond to the offer from UCSD Medical Center to purchase our Hillcrest campus; whether we would expand our music, dance, and art programs; and, requests that we find more ways to enjoy meals together. I didn't believe those few requests to start a food pantry would make it into the top five goals of the new strategic plan the congregation was providing input for. But, those requests reflected such an acute and immediate need that, as a newly elected member of the Board of Trustees, I thought we should do something about them. The South Bay food pantry will be open every Saturday in May from 11 am - 12:30 pm.
Hillcrest: bring your food donations to the Hillcrest parking lot every Saturday from 8am-9am. Deliver bags and boxes to the bed of Dana Tomlinson’s dark grey Ford pick-up truck with camper shell. South Bay: deliver donations directly to the food pantry from 9:30am - 10 am. Get directions to either location. Peanut butter is our most frequently requested food! We cannot buy it in bulk, so your individual donations of 1 or 2 jars makes a difference! Our other frequently requested items are:
Here are the top 8 jobs where the pantry could use more support.
Both one-time and monthly sustaining donations help us stay open! No amount is too small, or too large. To donate by check: Make your check payable to FUUSD, write "SB Food Pantry" in the memo line and mail to to FUUSD, 4190 Front St., San Diego, CA 92101, Attn: Robie Evans. To donate by credit card: Go to firstuusandiego.org/donations.html. Follow the steps and under "Fund" select "SB Food Pantry." Remember to select the frequency for your donation. Photos by John and Peggy Holl. Click for a larger view. By Maureen McNair In December last year, Rev. Tania gave the go-ahead to open a food pantry at our South Bay campus. Since then, our members and friends jumped right in with their labor and donations. Today, volunteers keep the pantry open three days a week. We have already distributed thousands of pounds of food to our congregants and the wider community. We will continue to grow. The in-person pantry volunteers and donors of food and funds are the heart and soul of the food pantry. It is a testament to our congregation's deep commitment to this pantry that every single time the pantry has needed something or someone, that need has been immediately fulfilled. |
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