Feeding Families, Nurturing Community

Community Collaboration Builds Food Security And Resilience

One of the most powerful lessons I took away from last year was how quickly our community could pool its resources in creative new ways to support the most vulnerable among us. CEC's Santa Barbara County Food Rescue was a prime example.

SBC Food Rescue builds relationships between donors with excess food and charitable nonprofit organizations, feeding people in need. The goal is to prevent good food from going to waste and strengthen food security in Santa Barbara County.

As charitable food demands at nonprofits soared by as much as 7,000% during COVID, we quickly learned that the network of donor and recipient organizations we had begun to gather – and the database to store these relationships – was a resource that did not exist elsewhere in the County. In addition to supporting food rescue efforts, our work expanded rapidly to help other projects seeking to feed hungry people.

One of these was a collaboration with UC Santa Barbara that went from concept to execution in a little over two weeks' time. Over a nine-month period from October 2020 through July 2021, we partnered with the university's Campus Dining Services to deliver 263,003 meals to 15 local community agencies serving children, families, seniors, and homeless.

The collaboration was a win from every angle. It put dining staff back in campus kitchens, which had gone dark as instruction was conducted online and residence halls sat empty; it bonded the university and local agencies in an effort to help their community; and it gave everyone involved a renewed sense of purpose.

This is a perfect picture of how our team at CEC and Santa Barbara County community members turned the question of “How are we going to do this?” into “Let’s get this done.”

We care for each other as a community at CEC.

If you would like to support more of this type of critical work, please donate now.

In health,

Sigrid Wright, CEO/Executive Director
Community Environmental Council

P.S. You can learn more about the collaboration mentioned above in the full UCSB press release here.