Food Security
Initiative
Mission Statement
To facilitate a more sustainable local food system that is strategic, coordinated, and effective to meet the needs of people experiencing food insecurity.
Catalyst’s first initiative, Covid-19 Pandemic response, focused on filling the gaps to ease suffering during the pandemic. One of the lessons learned was that the demand for food assistance was high and continued to increase even as the pandemic eased.
In 2023, after leading a study of the local food security system and uncovering the sobering fact that nearly 8,000 Sonomans were experiencing food insecurity, the Sonoma Valley Catalyst Fund launched an ambitious initiative to address this problem. With the study recommendations as our guide, Catalyst designed a series of pilot programs to reduce barriers, increase food supply, and decrease hunger. The long-term goal of this work is a sustainable, local food security system that relies on the abundance of local food, the creativity and expertise of the Valley’s nonprofits, and leverages the connections and resources of public agencies and regional partners outside of the Valley.
The first step in this effort was to hire a “Food Network Weaver,” Elise Gonzales to facilitate the work of the initiative, and Diana Jensen to help set the strategy and provide the larger state and federal context. Together, Elise and Diana have brought together over a dozen nonprofit partners to create a collaborative Food Roundtable. These partners are the backbone of the food security system, and together they are working to increase coordination and continuous improvement to better meet the needs uncovered by Catalyst’s study.
We’re pleased to share below the results of our efforts as of October 2024.
We learned of a 2022 California law aimed at reducing food waste by mandating that certain businesses make non-sellable, but safe and edible food available to local organizations that can distribute it to those experiencing food insecurity. In Sonoma Valley, there were intermittent efforts to capitalize on this law, but there was nobody locally providing coordination for the recovery and distribution of the recovered food. In fact, the bulk of the food recovered from grocery stores was leaving the Valley, destined for places beyond the reach of the many hungry Valley residents.
After doing much homework and legwork, Catalyst granted funds to an organization called Extra Food to become the food recovery agent for Sonoma Valley. Thanks to this coordination, we have gone from sporadic and infrequent recovery stops at two grocery stores, to regular weekly pick-ups from five stores (Safeway, Whole Foods, Luckys, Nugget and Glen Ellen Market), as well as the school district, the hospital, and Fairmont Sonoma, among others, with food delivery scheduled for multiple Valley nonprofits
The next step was to design the right places in the community to deliver all of this recovered food. A missing link was how to get food to those who have trouble accessing distribution points. They may be infirm, elderly, disabled, unhoused, or lack transportation. Catalyst’s pilot solution: community pantries and refrigerators. “Community fridges” as they’re called, are typically commercial, glass-front refrigerators placed in specially designed and monitored locations that are convenient for people to access healthy, recovered or donated food.
To expand the availability of these fridges in Sonoma Valley, Catalyst worked with local partners to apply for grants from Zero Waste Sonoma/CalRecycle, which added three new community fridges in the Valley. Our partner Farm to Pantry donated an additional refrigerator, and will soon be donating two more, and Meals on Wheels Sonoma has also donated a freezer. This means we will soon have six fridges and a freezer at locations around town that serve children, families, seniors, people with disabilities, and unhoused residents. These are being stocked by Extra Food as part of regular deliveries.
This food recovery pilot launched on September 10, 2024, and in the first month, 20,000 pounds of food was successfully recovered and redistributed. Based on USDA estimates, this equates to about 16,700 meals. And this is only the beginning! As the program expands to recover food from more sites and deliver to additional partners and community fridges, the amount of recovered and redistributed food will increase exponentially, with the potential to reach hundreds of thousands of pounds of additional food annually. Not only is it saving the food from landfills, it’s feeding hungry people right here in Sonoma Valley.
In addition to these efforts to recover and redistribute additional food in Sonoma Valley Catalyst also introduced the Valley’s first bilingual, text-based food access platform “TEXT FOR FOOD/COMIDA," through a partnership with Justice Wise, as well as a successful marketing campaign which targeted over 20 service providers in the Valley. We also developed and distributed a bilingual, comprehensive calendar detailing food access locations across the Valley.
We have leveraged your generosity in starting this initiative to bring in $65,000 of additional funding from the County and the State to increase the food recovery efforts and collaborate with other local partners. After this first year, the results will be assessed and adjusted based on our analysis. We will be launching additional pilot programs as well, with the ultimate goal of ending hunger in Sonoma Valley through a coordinated, effective and sustainable local food system.
