Pandemic Response & Mutual Aid
Interview with Maria Alderete, Executive Director of Community Kitchens
Blue Heart’s Lindley Mease had the honor of speaking with Maria Alderete, Executive Director of Oakland’s Community Kitchens, a collective of over 50 local restaurants and 10 community groups working together to prepare and distribute meals to people left behind by other food programs, building community and solidarity through food.
Interview edited for clarity.
Lindley Mease: How did you come into this work?
Maria Alderete: My husband and I owned Luka’s Taproom & Lounge for 18 years in Oakland, and it was always much more than a restaurant. It was a way of bringing together everyone in our community. Luka’s had a little bit of fun for everyone, whether you were in the back room playing pool, or spending some time on the dance floor, or just sharing a meal with family. Early on, we knew supporting other small businesses in the area in a collaborative way would help promote us, so we’ve always been community collaborators. We’re proud of what we did at Luka’s. Unfortunately, it closed at the end of January. We decided that at this point in our lives we wanted to serve our community in a different way. And that’s really the transition from Luka’s into Community Kitchens. The spirit of Luka’s lives on.
We started Community Kitchens the week the pandemic started. After shelter-in-place first went into effect, we really saw the community that was left behind. The press releases and notices really hadn’t hit our encampment communities. People didn’t know what was going on, and they had lost their source of panhandling money, so we had people coming to Luka’s needing food. We also had community groups coming to our doors. Berkeley Free Clinic came and said, “We had to shut down our medical clinic, but our volunteers want to go out into the encampment community. And one of the best ways to keep people healthy is through food.” I think they just thought that we had some extra food in our walk-in fridge. But that was the spark that we needed to go out and create the organization that we’ve created.
The message that we were getting from all our community groups was that there was a meal gap. We tried to fill that gap, and something beautiful happened. Other restaurants came to us, wanting to participate. Other community groups came to us, wanting to participate. It was really a ground-up growth process where we were working in solidarity with over 50 local restaurants and 10 different community groups. And since that time, we’ve been able to serve over 150,000 meals to our community. Last year we were able to get a contract with the Alameda County emergency food program and quadruple our meal production.
In Alameda County, the county came to the community groups at the community group level, not channeling through the food bank or other sources. It was direct money going to community groups. That enabled us to support the food insecurity that we’re seeing across Oakland. The neighborhood that Homies Empowerment is at, if you look at some of the statistics, 50% of the people, 50% of the families, face food insecurity. That means they don’t have a reliable meal source. That’s every other person. That heartbreaking statistic existed even before the pandemic, and obviously the pandemic exacerbated it, but it also enabled federal funds to channel down into the county and really develop a food program that’s been needed.
Unfortunately, those are one-time funds. I’ve sat on so many county supervisor calls, explaining there’s a lot of money out there for senior programs and youth meal programs, but there’s no money dedicated for the unhoused community. They struggle with access because existing public benefit programs like CalFresh don’t necessarily work for an individual who doesn’t have a refrigerator or a kitchen. It’s just not a model that works for our unhoused.
Our founding pillar has always been our encampment meal program, but we were also able to start a youth meal program with our beloved City of Oakland Town Camp. Something like 85% of the kids in the camp are on scholarship. That means they’re definitely food-insecure. We developed this youth meal program where each of the kids were sent home with a family meal package. We called it Kitchens Around the World because we wanted to not only feed them but teach them about different cultures through food. We had a Chinese meal, we had a Vietnamese meal, we had a Mexican meal, we had an Ethiopian meal. They took it home and then gave us feedback and wrote reviews. It was an exciting program that not only supported youth food insecurity but also did it in a fun way, to teach them. The program caught the eye of Steph and Ayesha Curry’s Eat. Learn. Play. Foundation. We are partnered with them this year to provide the meals on their bus. They’re going to be driving around Oakland, hitting all the different rec centers and schools and libraries, and providing books and produce and meals to our community.
This year we started a third pillar which we’re calling Community Building. It plays on the connection that food provides, how it’s much more than just a meal of nourishment, it’s a bringing together of people, it promotes collaboration. One of the things we’re going to be working on with Homies Empowerment is their community garden. They’re going to have over 150 community members have their own plot where they can grow produce and other plants. Our thought is, let’s have a monthly meal together with everybody that has a plot. The more the community knows each other, the more they’re going to support each other. So that’s our new pillar that we’re looking to grow this year.
Lindley Mease: What’s it like to be strategic in building a program while also being responsive to your community?
Maria Alderete: I think the singular thing that’s come out of the pandemic, that I hope everyone’s learned, is that we’re stronger together. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Everyone has a place at the table, to put it in Community Kitchens’ language. That means we need business entities, like restaurants, to be a part of the solution. We need community groups, like the East Oakland Collective, who have the trust in the neighborhoods that they serve. We’re building a Dining for Justice model, where partner restaurants have a 1% surcharge on dining that goes to providing community meals. Now in addition to making meals, they generate funds for those meals.
We need to be talking to our city council members and our county supervisors. And it’s not just to get funds. It’s how can we help them be more effective? When they’re doing outreach to our encampment community, why not start with providing folks with a meal? There’s so much distrust out there, we need to break down those barriers. At the grassroots level we’re trying to help our unhoused community get more access to the services that are out there. It’s only going to work by working together in each of those individual areas. We work with an organization called Kerry’s Kids which is a pediatric clinic that does mobile pediatric support to homeless families. Dr. Christine Ma, the executive director, and I were on a UCSF panel together and what we talked about is, as organizations we have our core focus. Kerry’s Kids focuses on pediatric support to homeless families. But part of the health and wellbeing of a child is making sure they have a nutritious diet. Now, Christine’s not a chef. So why not team up together and bring to the table the skill that you have? In her case it’s medical services and in our case it’s meal production. The collaboration is just critical.
Lindley Mease: How is your work connected to movement building more broadly? How do you see yourselves as part of a bigger movement?
Maria Alderete: There’s a couple different areas of movement building where we’ve already launched. I do feel like our Dining for Justice model is really a food justice model and it’s an initiative that brings together the restaurants to be a part of the solution. And it’s really addressing a need where there’s instability of funding and this is a channel for us to build reliable funding. A lot of the organizations that we work with, they do a lot of community power building, not just providing meals as charity, but creating the solidarity within the community to enable them to lead a better life. It’s not just a meal that goes out. They have educational programs, they have community gardens.
What I’ve seen over the last two years is that food security is just one part of the whole equation of food justice. Food justice is really food security plus access plus equal dignity. There’s a lot in that equation. What we’re trying to do is really shake the notion of a free meal program to be more than just that meal. Our meals are served by restaurants and they’re the same meals they serve their customers. We want the person who receives that meal to have equal dignity when they receive that meal. We serve our meals directly to the encampment community. A lot of these communities are pushed into the outskirts, and a walk to a grocery store could be 3–5 miles, so giving them access is critical.
That’s the momentum, the movement, that we’re trying to build in Oakland. It’s not just Community Kitchens. It’s all of my community groups and restaurant partners. It’s even my corporate sponsors, trying to bring this up at a citywide level. And honestly, I think it’ll be a blueprint for other communities that experience the same food insecurities that we do. We’re building coalitions in Oakland at the community level but also have a contact in L.A., and they’re doing a lot of the same things. What I’ve heard from our state officials is we can’t just come to them and say, OK, this is what Oakland needs. We can’t even come to them and say, this is what Alameda County needs. We need multiple counties throughout California to have that voice. That’s the goal for next year, to take the movement to the state level. We know how to do it at the county level, if we’re funded through federal funds, but we need to create permanent change in the infrastructure to support this community in a new way.
Lindley Mease: Where do you see yourselves in five years?
Maria Alderete: We have the momentum right now to put us on a path for change in five years. It’s going to be a long road because of politicians and legislative processes and all kinds of things that are going to be new to us. We also want to share information outside of Oakland and help other communities build similar meal programs.
In the next two years, we want to be more than a meal program. We want to have a central kitchen and really use our chefs. We want to create a program for folks who have typically not owned restaurants, like Black women, to share with them the how-to of starting their dream. We also want to have workforce development, where either the kids or maybe even our unhoused community come in and be a part of the team preparing meals. And we want to get into food recovery because it’s a big initiative statewide and part of zero-waste. I feel we can make delicious food with it.
The five-year goal is to take this program and help other communities do something similar. We think the advocacy is going to be critical at the county and the state level. The last two years I volunteered all my time and ran it myself, but I’ve recently been able to hire some people so now I’ll be able to focus my time on these higher-level things.
Lindley Mease: Anything else you want to add for folks in the Bay Area who are wanting to show up for social justice issues and are looking to learn?
Maria Alderete: They can dine at one of our 36 Dining for Justice restaurants. Just by going out and having a meal at one of these restaurants they’ll be supporting the movement. We project that 50 restaurants could generate funding for 10,000 meals a month. It’s really a powerful tool.
I do feel that as we emerge out of the pandemic, we need to build back Oakland in a better way. Whether it’s a pediatrician, a restaurant, grocery stores, technology services, banking, or other industries, it’s my hope that the community is a priority when folks think about how they spend their time or what contribution they can make.
Lindley Mease: It’s exciting to partner with groups where it’s possible for our members to get their hands — or mouths — involved. Anything else you want to share?
Maria Alderete: Community Kitchens is at a critical point. We were anticipating some government funding to come in May, but it’s been delayed and there’s a funding gap for our meal program. We were fortunate to have reserves from our Dining for Justice restaurants to cover our May programs, but we’re really looking for some support so we can continue our meal program until the government funds will be released. We’re also hoping to bring together some events in memory of Shock G, and this summer Homies Empowerment will be building their community garden plots. There will be opportunities for people to come out and be a part of that creation from the ground up.
