Salesforce and Eat. Learn. Play. Announce New Partners, Funding and Scope of Pilot Program to Address Food Insecurity in the Bay Area
As a response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Salesforce and Eat. Learn. Play., along with partners Oakland Unified School District, World Central Kitchen, Numi Foundation and Full Harvest, launched a pilot program to combat food insecurity. This initial 6-week program, launched in June, connected families with fresh food from farms and to help ensure that food did not go to waste. During the pilot, the partners sourced nearly 500,000 pounds of fresh farm produce from local, minority-owned farms and served more than 32,000 mostly (85%) Black and LatinX low-income families.
Unfortunately, hunger is becoming an even more critical issue for Americans during the pandemic, affecting almost 54 million Americans with a disproportionate impact on Black and LatinX families.
Today, Salesforce and Eat. Learn. Play. are announcing the next phase of the program, which includes adding more partners, additional funding and scaling the program to reach more families. Full Harvest and World Central Kitchen will continue in their roles sourcing and distributing produce respectively. The program will also add new partners to accelerate the mission, including Uber Freight, Growing Together, Mandela Partners, Office of Kat Taylor, Dreisbach Enterprises, Hellman Foundation and Battery Powered. Together, these operational and financial partners will support direct-to-home deliveries for ~5,000 families per week, with an expansion target to serve at least one million school families with millions of pounds of fresh food.
Mandela Partners will focus on sourcing from local BIPOC-owned and regenerative agriculture farms. The logistics and freight team at Uber Freight is now helping to transport bulk produce from farms to warehouses. Growing Together is driving home deliveries, while employing local partners of students who attend OUSD to help with transportation and labor. Dreisbach and World Central Kitchen will deliver produce boxes to OUSD sites.
In addition to Salesforce and Eat. Learn. Play. re-investing $1M in this next phase, new funding partners include Uber, Hellman Foundation, Battery Powered and the Office of Kat Taylor, in partnership with their Growing the Table initiative.