According to Mercury News, in March 2020, more than 2.8 million Californians lost their jobs due to the Covid-19 pandemic, and 6 million kids are suddenly going school online. The Covid-19 pandemic creates hardships for all Californians. Low-income families and homeless suffer the most because among this group, the job loss rate is the highest, and emergency savings are essentially zero. In addition, many of the food pantries in the bay area are closed due to the Shelter-in-place order, which slows down the spread of the Covid-19 virus.
At the Campbell Care Ministry, we work closely with the CityTeam ministry to do our part to help feed struggling families in our community. Instead of closing our food pantry services, we ramped them up with a streamlined food distribution process and safety precautions. With the safety guidelines provided by CityTeam, all Campbell Care volunteers wear personal protective equipment including gowns, face shields, masks and gloves. All groceries are prepacked and ready to be loaded into vehicles. All people remain at least 6” apart, and volunteers will not touch any part of the vehicles of our guests. Our guests will stay in their vehicles during the entire food pickup process except when they need to open and close the trunks or doors of their vehicles for the volunteers to put the prepacked groceries into their vehicles.
Since the beginning of 2020, the number of people visiting the Campbell Care food pantry have increased from 30 families in January to over 100 in early April. The Campbell Care food pantry also increased its opening times from once a month to twice a month on the 2nd and 4th Saturday of each month. As the pandemic continues, needs will also increase. We at the Campbell Care Ministry are ready to serve and are thankful to have the opportunity to do our part to help.
