Amazing Pantry Volunteers Serve Another Record Breaking Number of People with Food Insecurity3/9/2022 by Maureen McNair
I don’t know how they do it! But our amazing team of Saturday volunteers, organized by Deirdre Lonergan, provided food for well over 1,000 individuals again inside 90 minutes. Mid-week, Liz and Scott Jones, Sue Marberry, Kay Chandler, and Nan and Bob Hazelton put over a ton of canned goods in grocery bags. Friday morning, Valerie Jaques, Nina Douglass and husband Jeff Kline, and Adrienne Kaplan brought in meat and bread from four sources. Friday night, Alice and Doug Diamond delivered the bread donation from Con Pane Rustic Breads and Cafe. Then, on Saturday morning, Sophia and Andres Lopez-Zimmer met the Feeding San Diego delivery truck to start off loading more food. This past Saturday, we gave away over a ton of dry goods, 3,640 lbs of fresh produce and a record 1,048 lbs of food from Starbucks alone. I’ll be away for a couple weeks. Please contact Deirdre Lonergan if you’d like to volunteer. Watch this space for blogs from Nina Douglass. As ever, thank you for your continued support.
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We'll be back together again for in-person, outdoor worship services on the patio at our Hillcrest campus! Masked, reasonably distanced, and with a clear expectation that all who can do so will be fully vaccinated. This includes a booster.
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. Starting February 15, 2022, the Rev. Kathleen McTigue will begin her six-week time with us as our next Minister in Residence. You can read more about Rev. McTigue in this month’s First Words, on page 6. Our current Minister in Residence, Rev. Deanna Vandiver will be ending her time with us in this role but will continue to work with us, along with Rev. Dr. Denise Graves, in our restorative process, Unfolding Peace, throughout this calendar year. 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. Q. When can we all meet, in-person and outdoors? Q. When can our choirs rehearse outdoors? A. We're looking at the end of this month. Risk levels in San Diego are still "Severe," but we believe a drop, even down to "High," could be enough for us to meet outdoors safely. The team will meet on February 12 to make decisions about in-person outdoor services for late Feb. and early March. Our best guess about when the Omicron wave will pass its peak is anywhere between now and March 1. Down the road, a further risk-level drop to some fraction of "High" could be enough for us to okay meeting indoors, though we have no guess about that timeframe. We do know that waiting to reach "Medium" could be forever, so that's not our goal. By Nancy Fisk Marshall Voit began working in January for First UU as the new Music Director. So far, he’s very impressed with the professionalism of the staff and the welcome he’s received. When in-person singing is allowed, he’ll be directing the Chalice Choir and the Women’s Choir. Until then, he’s collaborating with the other music staff members on our worship services. A native of San Diego, Marshall went to high school in the Poway Unified School District. He credits them with a foundation in music education that has led to his career in choral direction, singing, and playing musical instruments. Raised in the Jewish tradition, his father is a Jewish music leader, and his mother is a rabbi. 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! The first cycle of Listening Circles—which focused on reconnecting and healing from the past two years—ended yesterday (Sunday, January 23, 2022). Analysis of what was shared and of survey responses is in progress.
In the next few days, more information about the process and next steps will be posted here and sent in an eblast. A link will be included to a file containing responses from all Listening Circles. Thank you for your patience as the Listening Circles Planning Team continues its work on this important phase of making meaning from what has been shared. What is SJET doing in January?
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! If you didn’t participate in a Listening Circle in December, now’s the time for you to sign up for one of our January 2022 Listening Circles. (January circles are exactly the same as those completed in December, so if you attended a circle in December please only encourage others to sign up.) A total of 21 Listening Circles are scheduled from January 8 through January 23. We’re very disappointed not to have an in-person option. We’d hoped to schedule indoor in-person Listening Circles after January 15 but the date for indoor small group meetings is being pushed back. In December, we found that outside in-person Listening Circles didn’t work well. You’ll be asked to provide a 1st, 2nd, and 3rd choice of dates/times. We’ll do our best to schedule you for one of those dates/times. We do need a minimum of 4 “sharing” participants to hold a circle. To stay within 2 hours, no more than 7 “sharing” participants will be scheduled. You’ll be asked to respond to 3 questions (see Why Listening Circles below). Don’t miss out on this first phase of First UUs healing and reconnecting process. Sign-up now at our Listening Circles page. A total of 77 members and friends (64 participants and 13 facilitators) participated in one of the 11 December Listening Circles. Seven (7) others had to cancel for one reason or another and have been added to our January list. More than 15 others were interested in participating but couldn’t make the December dates/times. All participants received a link to a survey about their Listening Circle experience and 48 of them responded. Responses were overwhelmingly positive about what it was like to speak and to listen from the heart. Folks reported feeling safe and heard and some felt their Listening Circle was a sacred space. In addition to the responses, participants were asked to rate their experience from 1 to 5 stars. The average rating was 4.73 out of 5! 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. Each of us has weathered the past months of congregational changes and challenges as best we could. Without a space or place to share our feelings and what’s weighing on our hearts, remaining in covenant, connectedness, and community has been difficult. As a first step to acknowledge what we’ve experienced, we are implementing a Listening Circle program to share our feelings. Learn more and sign up at our Listening Circles page.
The staff team has worked very hard to get us to the point where we can livestream the Sunday service as it happens at 9:30 am on Sunday morning. This will mean that there will be a few important changes to how the online service will happen, and we wanted to be sure everyone is aware of what will be different.
Circle practices—from the traditions of Native Americans and other indigenous peoples—are a group spiritual practice grounded in love, respect, caring, cooperation, and mutuality. There are many different purposes for circle practices on a continuum—including listening, discernment, consent decision-making, policy, healing, and restorative.
As a first step for the entire First UU community to acknowledge what we’ve experienced, a Listening Circle (LC) program will be implemented to allow us to share our feelings about the past 18 months or longer (without interruption, dialogue, debate, or problem solving). The goal is to re-engage turning toward each other, strengthen and rebuild our relationships with each other, acknowledge the need for further work, and build trust—speaking the truth in love, listening to the different truths in the room with love:
Listening Circles are scheduled for a maximum of 2 hours—online or in person—each limited to no more than 9 participants (including 2 First UU trained co-facilitators). Confidentiality will be observed—just as for Funding Our Future sharing—no names, only feelings reported. What is learned will help the Board define goals to be used in the Developmental Ministry application process and will help our future Ministers in Residence work with us as we heal and move forward into our future. Listening Circles are only one step in our return to practicing beloved community. Other processes will follow to address specific aspects of our needed work. Our care and concern for each other will be the first gift we give by listening to the truths of others with a different perspective from ours. This process is truly the way to live our mission to create community and nurture spiritual growth—as containers for holding the concerns and hurts of others. May it be so From arts and crafts to holiday movies and music we have a lot going on! Download the First UU 2021 Holiday Calendar.
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. Help First UU become more of a “happening place” and promote more multi-generational, ethnic, racial, and class diversity at First UU, including greater offerings for events - among members, attendees and families. The Board has created a new board committee to administer the Outreach and Growth Fund (OGF) that was created as part of the generous Renewal and Growth Fund donation to the church in late 2021.
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. |
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