Alumnae set table in Knights Landing
Sara Guevara-Plunkett knows what it’s like to rely on handouts during tough times.
Sara Guevara-Plunkett knows what it’s like to rely on handouts during tough times.
At the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, the UC Davis premed student looked forward to Tuesdays, the day when several “moms and pops” in Davis and Woodland take to the sidewalks where they set up tables and load them with groceries, clothes and toiletries. Guevara-Plunkett could take as much as she wanted. Free. No questions asked.
A year into the pandemic, and with her situation slightly improved, GuevaraPlunkett turned the tables, so to speak. She and two friends from UC Davis, Ana Jazmin Flores Pimentel and Elyse Kristine Ong, started their own weekly giveaway table in Knights Landing, a high-need, low resource, heavily Latino community in rural Yolo County.
Take what you need
On a recent table day, the clients included an older man maneuvering a walker, mothers with tugging toddlers and a man who rode up on a bicycle with a Bible in hand.
The resource table — actually, up to six tables now — is generally stocked with fresh fruit and vegetables, dry food, canned goods, feminine hygiene products, pet food and other supplies for animals, diapers, hand-knit scarves and other items.
Some of the provisions come from Facebook Marketplace ads for free goods, no matter where they happen to be, from the Sacramento region to the Bay Area.
“We happily travel for the needed items,” said Guevara-Plunkett, who graduated recently with a degree in global disease biology and aspires to be a physician in infectious diseases and preventive medicine.
A world away
“The people that come to the resource table each week are like our family,” GuevaraPlunkett said. “We love them. So all the driving and time is worth it, especially when many of the items we provide are hard for residents to get in Knights Landing.”
The unincorporated farming town of about 1,000 people is a 30-minute drive from Davis, and a world away. The town has no stoplights. Its convenience stores sell bait and tackle, and only a limited amount of produce. Many of the residents work long hours as seasonal, migrant agricultural workers.
Public transportation is scarce in Knights Landing, which prevents some residents from traveling to the nearest city, Woodland, for fresh produce. “Diabetes and hypertension are common medical conditions for Knights Landing residents,” Flores Pimentel said, “and the limited bus hours make it harder for them to access healthy food and thus improve their health.”
Access to health care also is inadequate in the community, which is why UC Davis students in 2011 established a branch of their Sacramento-based free clinic, Clinica Tepati, in Knights Landing. The satellite location is called Knights Landing One Health Center and also includes an animal health clinic run by UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine students.
Humble beginnings
Flores Pimentel, GuevaraPlunkett and Ong each experienced some degree of financial hardship growing up, and they’re passionate about helping people in need.
As the pandemic dragged on, Guevara-Plunkett and Ong, who were housemates at the time, realized that if there’s a need for a Tuesday Table in Davis, then surely there must be a greater need for one in Knights Landing.
“I’ve been wanting to do this for a while,” said Ong, who graduated in 2019 with a degree in neurobiology physiology and behavior. “But if it wasn’t for my housemate, I would have never thought we could have gotten this going.”
Last Thanksgiving morning, Guevara-Plunkett and Ong crammed donations into Ong’s compact car and drove to Knights Landing where they put their folding table outside the small community center. They offered a few cans of food and feminine hygiene products.
They wondered if anybody had read their fliers or seen their Facebook posts. “We were ecstatic to get one person, let alone five!” GuevaraPlunkett recalled.
Familiar struggle
Word spread fast. Three weeks later, when GuevaraPlunkett and Ong drove up to unload their table, there were 15 people waiting in line for them.
Their operation was growing, and they needed help.
Guevara-Plunkett sought volunteers through a Slack message to nearly 90 students connected to the Knights Landing clinic where she is a board member. Flores Pimentel, who graduated in 2020 with a degree in psychology and plans to apply to medical school, was already part of a COVID-19 relief effort and was willing to do more.
That, plus the challenges in Knights Landing felt familiar to her.
“I can relate to many of the struggles that the Knights Landing patients face,” Flores Pimentel said. “I come from a similar background growing up and obtained firsthand experience of the extent to which the Latinx population is underserved. I am passionate about giving back to my community, especially my local Latinx community, and I also hope to do as much as I can to reduce any health care disparities.”
Switch to Sunday
What started as the Thursday Table is now the Sunday Table to serve more clients and increase the number of available volunteers.
Some weeks, more than 50 people show up for what the table has to offer. Most of them learn about the table through word of mouth.