What We Do

No large-scale aid program, no matter how carefully designed, can ever even hope to address the needs of individuals, even though individuals make up 100% of their target clients. So they try to be “fair” by being “equitable,” by spreading it evenly, which is invariably neither fair nor equitable. In our program, the woman with a son who is suddenly out of work will be able to step in instantly with free food for his family, and with the help and blessings of her entire community. Because it’s coming from Grammy and her friends, it will continue not just until he finds another job, but until they can comfortably afford to do without it, and her whole community will be helping her help them in all kinds of little ways that really add up. This special treatment isn’t just for residents and relatives – it’s for anybody that any of us care enough about to want to help.

Our program can do things no other aid program has ever been able to do before, like targeting individual needs and seeing that those who need the most get the most, precisely because our program builds communities and it is those communities that do the distribution. And the real beauty of it is that we don’t have to control or regulate anything unless a problem develops.

What happens on a weekly basis:

We deal mostly with fresh food, so whatever comes in each day goes out that same day.

What Comes In

Thanks to the generosity of Trader Joe’s in San Rafael and Larkspur, we pick up donations all of their dated goods seven days a week, twice a day, from rib eye steaks and fresh produce to stuffed mushrooms and gourmet salads, as well as other goods like laundry detergent and kitty litter when those packages have been damaged and can’t be sold in the store.
Early on Saturday and Sunday mornings, volunteers go to Whole Foods and one of the Safeway
stores in Mill Valley and pick up their donations (variety of items from Whole Foods, and bread and pastries from Safeway).

How All Of That Surplus Goes Out:

Seven days a week, volunteers take the wonderful variety of food to twenty different Section 8 and Section 54 senior complexes throughout Marin County. In addition, each week we have  six open Food Days at:

What Happens at a Typical Senior Complex

To give you an example of what happens at some senior complexes, on Fridays the Larkspur Trader Joe’s donations go to the Villas at Hamilton, where teams of volunteers unload and sort everything out so that the volunteers and other residents have a chance to pick out what they need. Then the surplus is packed up and delivered to another complex.

On Saturdays at the Villas, we pack approximately 90 bags with some of the fruits and vegetables from Friday’s Veritable Vegetable donation, and then add the food from the Mill Valley Whole Foods, Safeway and then both Trader Joe’s stores. Most of those bags are delivered to residents at the Villas at Hamilton who cannot come and shop for themselves, with about 30 of those bags going to others in Marin who have let us know that they are in need of food.