Volunteers provide food to needy in community
Community Kitchens helpers dig in to tackle hunger issues among people on the streets
OAKLAND >> With 6-yearold daughter Leila's assist, Parul Patel cooked and packed several pad thai meals with salad in their Ridgemont district kitchen.
The next morning, she and her husband, Anand, delivered the meals to a town refrigerator near the intersection of Bartlett and Deering streets in the Bartlett neighborhood in town.
Patel is a home chef volunteer for Community Kitchens, a collective of restaurants and community groups in Oakland that provides nutritious meals to people living on the street and others who are hungry. Volunteers like Patel commit to making 25 meals on a weekly or biweekly basis and delivering them. So far, nearly 20 volunteers have made more than 3,000 meals, Oaklandside reported earlier in December.
The collective received a $400,000 grant for the program from health system Kaiser Permanente through its fund at the East Bay Community Foundation.
The refrigerator Patel filled with pad Thai and salad meals is one of 16 in a network of public refrigerators.
Maria Alderete, the collective's executive director and co-founder, credited the health system with helping improve meal access to the city's unhoused communities.
“With Kaiser's $400,000 community grant, we are able to provide the administrative backbone for our CK home chef volunteer program, including training, scheduling and packaging materials,” Alderete wrote in an email.
“This helps our CK home chefs focus on preparing meals with love and dignity to help nourish not only the bodies, but also warm the souls of our most vulnerable community members.”
Next year, the collective will roll out its Mobile Oasis, an ice cream truck-styled bus for curbside outreach, which also is being funded by Kaiser along with expanded meal programs that will include CalFresh and MediCal enrollment at Roots Community Health Center, Alderete said.