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DESCRIPTION:THANK YOU SANTA CRUZ\nWe couldn't have done it without you!\n\nCELEBRATION 
 WITH LIVE MUSIC                                        \nBY JOHNNY AND THE 
 FREE THINKERS                  \n\nSUNDAY MARCH 13, 2022\nNoon to 4:00 
 PM\nAt the Town Clock; where it all began.\nPacific Avenue and Water 
 Street, Santa Cruz, CA\nBring your beach chair, if you want a good seat.    
                \nFree Event / Donations are Appreciated.                    
                                                                             
   \n                                                                        
                          \nFood Not Bombs thanks the people of Santa Cruz 
 for two years of support during the pandemic. We could not have done it 
 without you!\n\nOn March 14, 2020, we learned that all the indoor food 
 programs would be closed because of the COVID-19 crisis so we stepped in to 
 take their place and started to share our meals seven days a week, thinking 
 we would return to our weekend schedule as soon as the pandemic was over, 
 in a month or two. Two years on, those programs are still not able to 
 provide the hot meals they had before the lockdowns.\n\nThankfully, our 
 community stepped up. Hundreds of local people have helped bring donations 
 of food, clothing and survival gear to help us meet the needs of those who 
 live outside or are struggling to maintain housing. Others have chipped in 
 $5, $10 and $20 dollar donations to help us buy pup tents, car batteries 
 and repair to support our effort to save people’s vehicular homes from 
 being seized by the city.\n\nOur unhoused friends help us set up and break 
 down every day. College students from Cabrillo and UCSC join our team to 
 help serve our seven to ten course meal. Local herbalists have provided 
 tea. Area farmers truck in fresh harvests. Second Harvest, Trader Joes, 
 Gayle's Bakery, Beckmann’s, Grey Bears and local farmer’s markets are 
 among those who provided our food. Advanced Auto interrupted their schedule 
 to fix our van so we wouldn’t miss providing that day’s meal. The Tabby 
 Cat Cafe ground our donations of coffee beans. The staff at Big Five 
 Sporting Goods seeks ways to give us discounts for tents so we could afford 
 as many as possible. Stolts Signs helped us replace the signs and banners 
 taken from us by members of Take Back Santa Cruz. The workers at Santa Cruz 
 Restaurant Supply make sure we have the equipment we require to keep our 
 kitchen humming. Bernie and the kind office staff at Azzie's Storage jumped 
 into action to move our shipping containers every time we were 
 evicted.\n\nThe security guards at New Leaf and their staff lifted our 
 five-gallon water bottles into shopping carts and dozens of people passing 
 through the New Leaf parking lot have helped us load those heavy jugs into 
 our vehicles. Others were happy to be stopped on the street to help lift 
 urns of coffee into our van at the Little Red Church.\n\nIndia Joze 
 contributed their kitchen, their refrigeration and thousands of hours of 
 labor to help make sure a healthy meal was served every day. Tom at 
 University Copy donated reams of printing. The staff at World Centric has 
 gone out of their way to supply us with cases of compostable paper 
 products. Our good friend, Eric Fawcett, a local retired master plumber 
 constructs our DIY hand washing stations and repairs the faucets at our 
 kitchen. The staff at the Homeless Garden Project made vegan burritos and 
 sandwiches. Barrios Unidos helped store dozens of pallets of dry goods 
 before we purchased our second Conex box. Musicians perform at our meals. 
 The drivers at Meals on Wheels drop off their extra food. Encompass social 
 workers help us calm the emotionally distressed. Our friends at the Court 
 Community Service Program send us waves of volunteers. Church people 
 deliver cases of socks. A small army of supporters share our messages on 
 line.\n\nWe even get clandestine help from city and county workers. The 
 number of ways the people of Santa Cruz have helped us provide the most 
 reliable source of support for communities poor and unhoused cannot be 
 detailed in one short article. You can thank them for saving downtown Santa 
 Cruz from suffering the damage that would result if people had no other way 
 to get food became so desperate that they had to resort to extra-legal 
 means to eat.\n                                                             
                                       \nWe have a dedicated core of 
 volunteers who know what is required to provide healthy hot meals, 
 groceries, drinking water and survival gear to hundreds of people every 
 day.\n\nWe haven’t been sitting at computers collecting $100k+ salaries 
 like those at city hall and the county buildings who spend their time 
 evicting us from one location after another in their campaign to attract 
 hedge-fund property speculators to ravage our community.\n\nWe have been 
 volunteering for free on the streets of Santa Cruz everyday of this 
 pandemic responding to the hunger and emotional stress of those living 
 outside.\n\nWhile the city is busy facilitating the wishes of global hedge 
 funds and out of county property speculators we have been preparing for the 
 unfolding crisis of evictions and the dramatic increase in hunger. We 
 raised money to buy three shipping containers to stockpile dry goods and 
 equipment. We have invested in reliable sources of fresh water. Our group 
 has organized systems to maintain a daily response to the escalating 
 disaster working in teams.\n\nOne team coordinates the preparation and 
 cooking of 150 to 200 hot meals a day. Another team recovers our scraps to 
 compost at the Homeless Garden.\n                                           
                                                         \nWe have two 
 shifts of drivers to bring the hot water for our hand-washing station, 
 sanitizing buckets to clean our tables, serving equipment and the first 
 round of coffee. They open one of our shipping containers and set up the 
 canopies, tables, social distancing cones, signs and banners.\n             
                                                                         
 \nYesterday’s bread and the survival gear that was not distributed the 
 day before is brought to the sanitized tables along with our pre-meal 
 snacks, creamer, sugar and paper products.\n                                
                                                                       \nA 
 team of servers complete the setup and the madness of four hours of food 
 service and compassion begins.\n\nThe driver returns to the kitchen to 
 collect six to eight five-gallon hotel trays of that day’s hot meal, 
 another five gallons of tossed salad and fruit salad.\n\nAnother team 
 orders two or three pallets of food from Second Harvest and recovers food 
 from the farmers markets, local grocery stores and bakeries. Then much of 
 this food is taken to one of our three shipping containers and our kitchen. 
 At least one pallet is taken to the people at the Benchlands along with our 
 five gallons of drinking water and another load is distributed to 
 undocumented families.\n\nYet another team orders the paper products, 
 cooking oil and coffee, receives the deliveries and packs them into our 
 rented storage units, kitchen or Conex boxes.\n\nFinally, the closing team 
 sanitizes the tables, packs the empty hotel trays and coffee urns into the 
 van. The tables, canopies, signs, banners, unused paper products, left over 
 bread and survival gear are packed into the shipping container or as of 
 late into our rented U-Haul trailer. That team also picks up all the trash 
 left around the area during the day, sweeps up the site and scrubs the food 
 stains off the pavement. That team bags all the garbage and takes it to the 
 dumpster we rent at the Little Red Church. Then they return to the kitchen 
 to wash and sanitize our serving equipment and hotel trays, ending the day 
 by giving the kitchen a thorough cleaning.\n                                
                                                                             
                                               \nBesides serving food, 
 volunteers at the food distribution site also unload and distribute donated 
 items, such as clothing and misc. household items.                          
       \n                                                                    
                            \nThere is also a website to monitor, emails to 
 reply to and phone calls that are answered daily.                           
        \n                                                                   
                               \nThis all repeats again day in and day out 
 for nearly 730 days now.\n\nPLEASE JOIN US ON SUNDAY, MARCH 13, 2022.      
 \nAccept our thanks to the people of Santa Cruz for making all this 
 possible!\n\nSanta Cruz Food Not Bombs\nPO Box 422\nSanta Cruz, CA 95061 
 USA\nsantacruz.foodnotbombs.net\nmenu@foodnotbombs.net\n1-800-884-1136\n 
 https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2022/02/17/18848066.php
SUMMARY:Food Not Bombs Celebration & Free Live Music
LOCATION:Santa Cruz Town Clock\nat Pacific Avenue & Water Street, Santa Cruz, CA
URL:https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2022/02/17/18848066.php
DTSTART:20220313T190000Z
DTEND:20220313T230000Z
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