On a cool, foggy afternoon, Santa Maria Recreation and Parks employees pulled vacuum-sealed trays out of a large ice chest and handed them an apple and a carton of milk to kids lined up at a table near the sidewalk at the Newlove Community Center. It was the week before school resumed, and one of the last days local kids could show up for a free lunch as part of Picnic in the Park, a federally funded summer meal program.
The Foodbank of Santa Barbara County and the Community Action Commission (CAC) provided the food for the program, which expanded its geographical reach this year, offering more meals at local parks in areas of Santa Maria where the need is greatest. The program served food at 14 sites over the summer. The small crowd of kids at the Newlove Community Center—accompanied by parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, child-care providers, and older siblings—chomped, smacked, and chewed their way through the meals. Older siblings under the age of 18 joined in, and the adults present sat and enjoyed watching the kids chow down. The food was for the kids only, and had to be consumed there, per the federal requirements of the program.
A group of kids sat around a tree eating while Carmen Martinez, who takes care of the youngsters when their parents work the fields, spoke to the Sun in Spanish. She brought the kids to the community center almost every day this summer while their parents worked.
“The food is healthy and they like it,” she said. “It’s a help, not only because they get food, but because they enjoy being here and they get to play after they eat.”
Kids scampered from the picnic tables to the playground after finishing their meals. As others left clutching the hands of guardians, more showed up, racing to get their meals.
The Newlove site has fed as many as 100 kids each day from the surrounding neighborhood, said Recreation Leader Yesenia Becerra, who was one of two city employees passing out the meals. She said that some visitors this summer included homeless families who told her that the free meal was the only one their kids would eat that day.
Other children were from families that lived in low-income housing in the neighborhood, who either didn’t have food at home to prepare or weren’t able to make meals on their own. It’s a dilemma Becerra isn’t a stranger to, she explained. She was raised in a low-income household and knows firsthand the stress of food insecurity.
“I feel good, because I know what it feels like to get food when you actually need it,” she said. “When I was a kid, I would have to go with my mom to various places to get food, so it feels good knowing I’m doing that for someone.”
Picnic in the Park is part of the Summer Food Service Program, the USDA’s initiative to feed low-income children throughout the country. Local organizations like the Foodbank and CAC that participate have to make sure the food meets safety and nutrition standards laid out by the USDA in order to receive federal funding.
Unbeknownst to the little ones munching their free meals, government agencies and support organizations on local and national levels collaborated to ensure that the meal was there each weekday and was fresh, nutritious, and safe to eat. Whether or not they knew the extent of support was unimportant, as the gratitude was certainly there.
“Thank you for the lunch!” one little girl shouted through a smile, waving goodbye to Becerra and fellow Recreation Leader Carlos Angulo, as she and her guardian departed the park, careful not to bump into people on their way in.
Raising awareness
Other cities in Santa Barbara County—like Santa Barbara, Lompoc, and Guadalupe—provide the summertime meals through their respective school districts, but Santa Maria’s districts are unable to provide the meals during the summer break. That’s where volunteers from CAC and the Foodbank of Santa Barbara County along with Santa Maria Recreation and Parks staff come into the mix to fill the valley’s need. What looks like a humble operation requiring an ice chest and a few volunteers on the surface has ties to numerous local support organizations receiving the funding and doing the legwork of providing the meals.
These local nonprofits aren’t alone either. Santa Barbara County’s Picnic in the Park program received various means of support from Share Our Strength, a nonprofit organization that addresses childhood hunger nationwide through its No Kid Hungry campaign. The organization’s involvement in Santa Barbara County comes primarily through Santa Barbara native and Hollywood actor Jeff Bridges, who’s advocated for children worldwide since the 1980s, but became involved with Share Our Strength in 2010 in an effort to focus on childhood hunger where the actor grew up, he told the Sun via email.
“Our goal is to make Santa Barbara County—the whole county—a No Kid Hungry County,” Bridges wrote. “We are all connected, all in this together. So yes, that means a lot of focus on North County where too many kids struggle with hunger.”
In the past, the Picnic in the Park program has struggled with participation countywide, explained Laura Burton Capps, local nonprofit consultant and program director for No Kid Hungry, and daughter of Rep. Lois Capps. She said that after reviewing data from California Food Policy Advocates—which provides data online about California’s hunger needs statewide and by county—the organization decided that the best way it could lend support was through garnering public awareness.
The California Food Policy Advocates’ Nutrition and Food Insecurity Profile reveals that during 2013 only 15 percent of free or reduced-cost lunch participants were fed by summer meal programs. No Kid Hungry stepped in to help raise awareness and help connect locals with Picnic in the Park sites, Burton Capps explained.
“Summer participation rates were alarmingly low here,” she said. “Plus, you match it with the fact that Santa Barbara County has such a robust nonprofit service provider community and ethos. … We don’t have the issue of too many kids coming, our challenge is that not enough families and kids know about it.”
No Kid Hungry provided a text service for Picnic in the Park that provided locals with addresses to the closest service sites for the program. Those who sent a text to 877-877 with the word “summerfood” received a text back inquiring for reply with an address. Texts would follow with the locations of the nearest sites to the address, no matter where it was across Santa Barbara County.
Another effort by No Kid Hungry aimed at getting attention for the program, was the concert series conceived by Bridges, which included several concerts right before and during the first month of summer break. Local children’s music band Birdie performed in Santa Maria at Grogan Park on June 24 while kids ate free lunches.
The event helped spur turnout at the park that day and across the summer, said Santa Maria Recreation and Parks Department Recreation Coordinator Barbara Wiley. The department also co-sponsored the event, she explained.
“The concert was to bring attention to the program and recognition to the fact that this was for everyone,” Wiley said. “It was very popular. The children had a wonderful time, and it brought a lot more recognition to that site.”
Making it happen
Organizations like CAC and the Foodbank are used to feeding high-needs groups in the community, including impoverished adults, pregnant women, the elderly, and kids. It’s the deficit created by a lack of federally funded meals in local schools that adds to both organizations’ workload during the summer months.
Both the Foodbank and CAC have provided food for summer meal programs for years, but collaborating with the city of Santa Maria was paramount in reaching the thousands fed this year, explained CAC Director of Nutrition Services Chris Barrett.
“The Community Action Commission can’t do it all by themselves, and the Foodbank can’t do it all by themselves,” he said. “The mission is to take care of as many kids as we can.”
Meals prepared in CAC’s cafeteria went out to local parks and some of the affordable housing complexes under the nonprofit’s umbrella. The CAC also provided free breakfasts at several of these locations. Ingredients for the meals are sourced locally as much as possible, Barrett said.
Also instrumental in expanding the reach of Santa Maria’s Picnic in the Park program this year was the Santa Maria Recreation and Parks Department. Besides co-sponsoring the promotional concert event, the city department pushed the program into several parks where it wasn’t previously offered and added paid city staff to distribute food and lead recreation activities following the meals, Wiley explained. The Santa Maria Utilities Department also assisted with additional receptacles and trash cleanup at each park.
“Because the food vendors—both the Community Action Commission and the Foodbank—are nonprofit organizations, if they had to pay rent at their distribution locations, I’m sure that would be cost prohibitive and limit the number of locations where they could serve,” she said. “And it fulfills our Recreation and Parks goals not just in making sure the children have a stable meal during the summer months, but getting them off the couch and being more active, bringing them out and recreating in our parks.”
The Foodbank provided meals throughout North County, buying meals from Revolution Foods out of Los Angeles, which focuses on healthy school lunches, explained Community Program Coordinator Bethany Stetson. The Foodbank provides food year round. It also has the resources to dedicate time and money to food literacy among local youth as well as determine areas in the city that are high need, which is why the summer lunches program was able to reach so many this year.
“There are deep pockets of poverty in Santa Maria, so we’ve established a map of the highest-need areas,” she said. “We’re trying to fill these gaps, and that’s part of why Picnic in the Park has so many sites in Santa Maria, we’re filling the gaps where there isn’t a presence already.”
Wiley, with Recreation and Parks, remarked that the addition of Tunnel Park was well attended all summer, even though it was the first time the program was offered there.
“We have such a big city, and there are all these kids,” she said. “You can’t send your kids miles away to get a free lunch.”
At the Newlove Community Center, during the last week Picnic in the Park was offered, grandmother Rosa Castro told the Sun that she didn’t mind walking several blocks with her grandkids so they could enjoy the free meals almost every day this summer.
“They’re very grateful and they’re blessed by this nourishment,” she said. “This is a blessing that God has sent down to us, and the people who make this program possible are a blessing, too.”
Contact Arts Editor Joe Payne at jpayne@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Aug 20-27, 2015.