THE PUBLIC HEALTH PROBLEM VACCINES CAN'T FIX

When the COVID-19 pandemic first hit, Carolyn Tan was in Los Angeles. Her only child, a grown daughter, was more than 7,000 miles away in the Philippines.

As border after border closed and travel restrictions piled up, all Tan could think about was when she could see her daughter again.

Then, her husband lost his job. Tan's own work as a caretaker to a 96-year-old woman became their only source of income, almost all of it going toward their rent, $1,000 a month for a studio apartment in San Bernardino.

One night, for the first time, the couple couldn't afford food for dinner.

She applied and was accepted to CalFresh, California's version of the supplemental nutrition program. She learned to make the monthly food benefits last for weeks, even as she drove from San Bernardino to Beverly Hills daily to care for her client.

Then, in April of this year, with Tan's husband still unable to find a new job, her CalFresh benefits did not show up at the beginning of the month.

"I tried to call them and say my food should have been here yesterday and it didn't come," Tan said. "I guess it just expired."

Unable to feed themselves, they joined the hundreds of thousands of people facing a lack of sufficient food in Los Angeles.

For many of them, not having enough food was never a concern before March 2020.

In 2018, 27% of low-income households in Los Angeles County faced hunger, according to a report from USC's school of social sciences. Before the pandemic, one in five L.A. County residents lacked consistent and reliable access to enough food according to the LA Regional Food Bank.

'Pick-Up Artists'

The Hollywood Food Coalition—or HFC—is a nonprofit that has worked to feed the hungry and homeless in Los Angeles by offering hot meals nightly since 1987.

Bonnie Friedericy started volunteering for the coalition four years ago. As an actor, she had seen first-hand the amount of food thrown out on TV and film sets. Many caterers and restaurants are reluctant to donate such food because they think it's a liability issue, she said.

"And it's like, 'No, it's not and let me explain to you why it's not,'" Friedericy told them. "These are the laws that are in place, also, 'I'll make it easy on you, I'll take the food off your hands and by the way, this is where your food is going.'"

That became the premise of Friedericy's new HFC food program they decided to call the Pick-Up Artists. On a single TV set early on, they picked up 150 pounds of steak, shrimp and salad.

Soon, the Pick-Up Artists were collecting 2,000 pounds of food a week, more than the HFC kitchen had the capacity to make. They started bringing the extra food to other nonprofits and created a spreadsheet to keep track of where the food should go.

Four months after the pandemic hit Los Angeles, two in every five low-income households in the country didn’t have enough to eat. Between April and December 2020, 34% of all L.A. County households—or over a million in total—faced hunger, according to the USC Dornsife report.

Carmen Lopez is a mother of a toddler and a 16-year-old son she has struggled to convince to continue with online schooling for the last year.

"He says he doesn't want to attend class because he doesn't understand anything," she said. "It's so frustrating for him."

On top of that, Lopez lost her job at a 99 Cents store in April 2020. Without that paycheck, she cannot afford to feed her family. Getting a new job is hardly an option until her 3-year-old is back in preschool because she has no one to stay home and watch him. Food banks have provided her family's only source of food for a year.

Thousands of families are in a similar position. LA Regional Food bank reported distributing nearly one and a half times more food in 2020 than the previous year. CalFresh saw a 179% increase in applications for food in April 2020 compared to April 2019, according to the L.A. County Department of Social Services.

"All of a sudden, there was this explosion of people needing food," Friedericy said.

"Organizations that never had to feed their people were finding that people were coming from everywhere asking for food."

The new wave of hunger was not limited to low-income households. Between April and July, almost one in five households experiencing food insecurity had annual incomes of at least three times the federal poverty line, according to the USC Dornsife report. That is more than $78,000 for a family of four.

The Center in Hollywood is one of those organizations that rarely distributed food before the pandemic. It is a nonprofit focused on ending homelessness and isolation in Hollywood. Previously, it offered group activities such as coffee hours, an on-site nurse for medical assistance once a week and helped people find housing.

"People were losing their jobs, food pantries were shutting down because of the pandemic, churches were under-resourced, and we realized the food need was primary," Executive Director Nathan Sheets said. "People had nowhere to go for food."

The Center shifted its efforts toward providing food Monday through Friday. But the number of people in need greatly exceeded their ability to respond.

"We ended up spending and investing a lot of money outside of our budget," said Sheets, "but we just had to meet the need."

The HFC, meanwhile, had a larger budget and experience serving food. HFC quickly switched to putting its nightly meals in to-go boxes for people to pick up. The goal became to expand Pick-Up Artists and find a way to get more food to other nonprofits. But it needed more space to store and sort through donations.

No Hard Food for the Elderly

With churches closed, United Methodist Church offered its space to the HFC. In mid-May it launched the Community Exchange program with Friedericy as the co-director. Given the soaring number of nonprofits approaching the HFC for help, the spreadsheet started under the Pick-Up Artists became essential.

Friedericy's team began to ask for detailed information on each nonprofit, such as the age range of the population it serves, when it plans on distributing the food and what kinds of refrigeration and storage it has access to.

If an organization feeds a lot of elderly people, for instance, the Community Exchange program notes a lot of the people might have bad teeth, so it takes care to avoid providing hard foods.

Another big concern is timing. Many nonprofits, especially ones that do not specialize in food services, have little access to refrigerators and other preservation methods. Making sure the right food is donated at the right time, so that it is given to people before it goes bad, is imperative.

"These are important questions because if you give a housing unit that has 25 people 500 pounds of food or 150 prepared meals, they are going to throw some of them out," said Friedericy. "And now you're wasting food again, and you're putting the burden of composting or throwing the food out on organizations that are trying to offer other services and weren't built to handle these things."

The Community Exchange program uses the church to sort through all of the donated food, discard bad items and designate the food to each nonprofit based on its needs on the spreadsheet.

Since last May, Friedericy said the list of nonprofits the program is actively donating to has surpassed 40. In total, the program has taken in over 1.2 million pounds of food over the last year.

A big reason the program has been able to do this, Friedericy said, is because the HFC's budget grew from about $150,000 annually four years ago to $1.4 million this year thanks to increased donations from business and private donors.

"I think it's so visible that people are starving on the streets," she said. "And I think people are seeing that there is a need there and are trying to find places to donate money or food, or try to help."

How to Do Good

One of the HFC's most consistent donors throughout the pandemic is a Los Angeles community group called Hang Out Do Good. Last March, group member Jennifer Levin started a home-made bagged lunch drive that hasn't ended. It now has 11 drop-off locations in different neighborhoods around the city and donates over 6,500 lunches every week to HFC.

The drive that takes place on Sundays is particularly important. Many nonprofits do not serve food or have access to buildings with refrigeration on the weekends. Friedericy said giving people bagged lunches is one of the only ways to feed them.

But lunches, Levin said, are really just a band-aid. She wants to use the drive as "a trojan horse" to help address why so many people in the city are left hungry, rather than just feeding them. "But we haven't figured out how to do that yet," she said.

Friedericy believes collaboration between organizations will be key to feeding more people. In April, the Community Exchange program partnered with another organization called Hollywood Harvest and moved into an old pawn shop. The program will use the larger space to continue to expand after the pandemic.

It hopes to make the spreadsheet with information on each nonprofit a living, open-source document for the community to access. For instance, if a nonprofit has a surplus of a particular food, it can check to see what other organization might need it. Or, if a nonprofit needs help transporting food, it can look at the document to see which organization has a lot of vans.

"What we're trying to do with the exchange is just keep getting the community together so that we are helping create a safety network for food in the city," Friedericy said.

The overriding goal is to create a robust system that endures. They define success as getting more food more efficiently to hundreds of thousands of hungry people in Los Angeles, not just amid a pandemic, but in the years to come.