World Central Kitchen volunteers at the CityView senior apartments in downtown. From left to right: Pam Chotiswatdi, Marcia “Pinky” Tolentino, Stella Ursua, and Emily Litt. Photo courtesy of Mariela Salgado.

Volunteers Needed for World Central Kitchen’s Senior Meal Program

by Joe Brizzolara  |  Published April 25, 2020 in Journalism

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Three local restaurants and a band of volunteers have partnered together to help deliver thousands of meals to seniors in the city during the coronavirus lockdown, but organizers say they need help.

The efforts are part of a World Central Kitchen (WCK) program being piloted in Long Beach, one of a handful of the cities in the country to be participating. Founded by celebrity Chef José Andrés, the organization has received international headlines for its work in Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria, and in the Bahamas during Hurricane Dorian. Here in Long Beach, WCK is working with local restaurants The Ordinarie, Lola’s Mexican Cuisine, and the Breakfast Bar to supply the food. Because WCK is compensating the restaurants for the meals, the program is helping to keep some of their staff employed. But there’s another side to the operation—the distribution.

When the stay-at-home order was first announced, Long Beach Parks Commissioner and small business owner Mariela Salgado immediately thought of those most heavily impacted by COVID-19: seniors.   

“How are they going to get food?” Salgado, formerly a candidate for Long Beach City Council’s 1st District, asked herself.

Salgado began putting in hours at the AIDS Food Store Long Beach, an all-volunteer run food pantry that among other things assists those affected by HIV/AIDS. It was during that time that she was introduced to the WCK program by the property manager of one of the participating buildings who reached out to Salgado and asked whether she’d be able to help distribute the hundreds of meals they were receiving a day from the restaurants. Salgado agreed, and, along with a team of volunteers she helped assemble, distributed over 1,200 meals in the first week at three of the six buildings participating in the WCK program. 

Here’s how it works: Once the food is packaged by the restaurants, it’s delivered by UPS to each apartment building a few times a week. When it arrives, volunteers take it to the individual residences by leaving it at the door, a lengthy undertaking given the size of some of the buildings. For example, CityView in downtown accounts for 300 meals per visit while Providence Gardens and Plymouth West account for another 435 meals between the two, according to Salgado.

“One day it was chicken and the next day it was fajitas,” says Danny Reich, an 83-year-old resident of Providence Gardens who receives meals from the program. “It was yummy.”

But while the food is plentiful, there’s a need for more hands to get the meals to seniors in need.

“We’re looking for volunteers,” Salgado said. “I know that there are good people out there who are willing to help.”

She says social distancing protocol is being strictly followed. Residents and volunteers do not come into direct contact. Volunteers are on-boarded with instructions not to touch anything on their person once they enter the building. Anyone who joins the team must be healthy, wear a mask and gloves, and commit to a shift of at least two hours once a week to minimize the amount of people entering the apartment buildings at one time. 

“I wanted to do a little bit more,” said volunteer Pam Chotiswatdi, director of community education for the Long Beach Collective Association. “Only two days a week and it’s just lunchtime? I can totally do that. The whole process is really amazing,” she said. 

Those interested in volunteering can reach Salgado by phone at 562-533-5681.

Anyone who’d like to donate to World Central Kitchen can do so here (make sure to include “Long Beach” in the comment section if you’d like your dollars to stay local).

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More by Joe Brizzolara
  joe@forthe.org
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[1] Militarily demobilized. Since WWII—which was both the death knell of European colonial empires as well as the starting shot of the American neocolonial era—Europe has had notoriously scant standing armies, and has been able to consistently slash government military spending domestically and as a percentage of their contributions to international diplomatic bodies such as the UN. This is because nowadays European nations very rarely find themselves in situations where they need to independently send their militaries abroad in order to secure trade routes, foreign resources, or privileges within markets overseas; the U.S. has been fulfilling that hard-power obligation for them for over half a century. The social results of Western Europe’s decreased militarization are striking, especially when contrasted with the U.S.: there is not a single country in Western Europe without universal healthcare, labor rights and welfare systems are strong, value is placed on corporate and financial regulation, environmental policy is lightyears ahead, and, not least of all, there is a robust governmental approach to curbing digital surveillance and reining in tech monopolies. Japan enjoys a similar arrangement with the U.S. in which it, too, is militarily demobilized yet is given full access to, and prominence in, the global economy. In the last decade there has been a reversing trend of remilitarization in some of these nations. That trend was hastened during the last four years as a result of Trump’s ultranationalist politics, but is likely to continue even after his departure in large part due to the growing bipolar geopolitical climate of competition between superpowers.

The “owner” bit of home-“owner” appears in scare quotes throughout the text for reasons that will shortly become apparent.

Nothing signals trouble quite like consensus.

More on them later.

And, anyways, what exactly remains “obvious” in an era “post-truth”?

I take as my starting position that even the “obvious” must be won.

It’s like Lenin said, you know…

Whether directly, or through a chain of investments, or through the wider speculative market in real estate.

I use “banks” in this piece as a stand-in for several sources of income that derive partly through the mortgaging of property and/or investment in institutions that have the power to mortgage property.

That is just its “ideology.”

The Ricardian “law of rent” explains that any location with an advantage over another location, can accrue an economic value, called “rent,” to the owner.

This happens without the owner needing to pitch in to create the advantage.

If the owner does pitch in, then the value accrued from that advantage cannot be called “rent.”

“Rent,” in economic terms, is only, precisely, the value accrued from that portion of the advantage for which the owner is not responsible. That is what we mean when we say, “Rent is theft.”

This does not mean places with lower property taxes ipso facto have higher property prices—and that is because the property tax is only one of the contributing factors. You could have zero taxes on land in Antarctica, for instance, and it would still sell for $0. This is why the introduction to the analogy controls for such variables.

This is the logical conclusion of believing two premises:

(1) All humans have an equal right to the Earth.
(2) Vaginal birth is a lottery system

Prop 13 is rent control for home-“owners.” You can learn more about its history and impact here.

“Hamlet” by William Shakespeare. Act 4, Scene 5

This is why the lobbyists who spend the most money to support the mortgage interest deduction are bankers, mortgagers, and realtors.

Term

Definition