National Health Corps (NHC) members' service with SF-Marin Food Bank.

National Health Corps member, Joanne Lum, blogs about her experience serving at the SF-Marin Food Bank to meet the needs of individual senior citizens earlier this year. 

Normally, our monthly member meetings take place at the San Francisco Community Clinic Consortium (SFCCC), but one of our last member meetings involved a bit of traveling around the city.  We started our day at the SFCCC and then split into two groups.  One group traveled to Kimochi Senior Center at Japantown to serve meals to seniors, while the others served with Street Outreach Services (SOS) and then traveled to the SF-Marin Food Bank.  I was in the latter group.  Everyone returned to the Consortium in the afternoon.

Normally, we hand out hygiene bags to people experiencing homelessness when we serve with SOS, but this time we walked around the Fisherman's Wharf neighborhood and passed out flyers for an undie drive to businesses to post around their store.  Unfortunately, some businesses were closed due to the holidays, but we did go to Starbucks, Trader Joe's, World Market, and Ross.  We returned to the SFCCC and then proceeded to go to the SF-Marin Food Bank.  After receiving an introduction of the organization, we got started with our shift.  We formed an assembly line and made grocery boxes for senior citizens.  Members (and our director Nadia!) took turns performing various tasks, including restocking the conveyor belt, placing food into boxes, moving the boxes along the assembly line, and breaking down boxes.  We quickly became experts at what we did (and got an arm workout while we were at it!  Who needs the gym when you can serve at the food bank?!).  With music playing in the background, the time flew by and our shift was over before we knew it.  We were told the previous volunteer group had put together 800-900 boxes, and of course the overachievers that we are decided to beat that record.  We put together exactly 1,200 boxes of groceries, helping individual senior citizens for the next three weeks.  That amounts to 36,000 pounds of groceries!

Needless to say, we were proud of what we had accomplished in those few hours at the food bank.  We had a great experience and would love to return sometime in the future.  If anyone is seeking opportunities to serve, now is an especially useful time to stop by, as they are short on volunteers during this COVID-19 pandemic.