Bags of rice. Bulbous summer squashes. Tangerines. Cans of hominy and coconut milk.
All afternoon, people dropped by the plaza on foot and by bike. They picked up pieces of produce to inspect them and loaded canvas shopping bags with food. All items were free, donated by stores or “rescued” before heading to the landfill.
The Self-Help Hunger Program has operated for close to 15 years on a small triangular park on the Oakland-Berkeley border, known as Jasper P. Driver Plaza or simply “The Island.” From Tuesday through Friday, a largely volunteer crew distributes free produce and pantry items.
“Food is medicine,” said “Aunti” Frances Moore, a former Black Panther who started the Self-Help Hunger Program, modeling it after the Panthers’ free breakfast initiative. Moore spent decades dealing with addiction and said she knows how important a nutritional, balanced meal can be for someone who may access only one in a given day or even week.
“Top Ramen is not going to sustain you.”
That Tuesday afternoon, Moore, wrapped in an apron, was busy spooning tuna salad into takeout containers. A few months ago, that salad might have been soup. For years, the Self-Help Hunger Program served hot meals twice weekly.
One day in February, the crew at Driver Plaza got an unexpected visit from several city and county workers, including police. They informed the Self-Help Hunger Program that they weren’t authorized to serve hot food.
“After 14 years, a permit?” Moore remembers thinking. “It was foreign to me.”
Working with the Alameda County Environmental Health Department, the program was able to get registered. It’s now allowed to serve cooked dishes, provided the group follows protocol, which includes standing up a tent and using electric steam plates powered by a generator.
But those steps are proving pricey for the mostly volunteer-run organization. It’s not the first hurdle the group has encountered during an at-times contentious several years in the neighborhood, and not the only one this year.
Roots and rifts in North Oakland
In 2009, Moore was living on 61st Street, among the maze of roads that intersects the plaza.
“The state of the park in the beginning stages was pretty reckless,” she said. Moore wanted to introduce a positive, unifying force.
She had a model in mind. The Black Panther Party’s free breakfast program, launched in 1969 at a church in Oakland, provided thousands of children across the country with donated morning meals. With these kinds of “survival programs,” the Panthers sought to create their own social safety net, taking care of the people where the government wouldn’t.
The FBI saw the free breakfasts as “potentially the greatest threat to efforts by authorities to neutralize the BPP and destroy what it stands for.” The feds ordered the program’s demise, and agents raided sites. But today it’s considered the precursor to the free lunches served in public schools.
“As a Panther, I used food as a tool to organize,” Moore said. And it was clear the people who hung around the plaza could use something to eat.
“One time I was confronted with a knife,” Moore remembered. “I said, ‘Are you hungry?’ Her whole facial expression changed.”
Fifteen years later, the Self-Help Hunger Program is recovering upward of 100,000 pounds of food a year, according to Sofia Tudose, a volunteer administrator. The donated items are picked up from the Berkeley Food Network, the Chase Center, Paula LeDuc Catering, Foodshift, Firebrand Bakery, local churches, and other sites. They’re transported in a refrigerated van the program leases.
The organization collects far too much food to hand out at the plaza. Extras go to Dorothy Day House in Berkeley, the Telegraph Community Ministry Center’s breakfast program, and elsewhere. When the meal program is running, food is cooked in the center’s kitchen.
Moore said her group serves three types of customers: the “social club,” referring to the community of folks who spend hours at the plaza, grooving to music and playing dominoes; the “hard-working 9-to-5”; and the down-and-out people who may be struggling with addiction or homelessness.
“There are people who rely on this—it’s their lifeline,” said Sue Mark, a neighbor and artist who’s volunteered with the program and is now working on a documentary project about it. “The amount of support this really small team does is kind of mind-boggling.”
The Self-Help Hunger Program occupies a strange space between established, grant-funded organization and grassroots guerrilla group.
“With one hand, they give us money,” said Tudose about the government, “and with the other they come and interrogate us.”
The program has pieced together support from several sources, including a grant from StopWaste and cultural funds from the city of Oakland.
Over the years, the group has received complaints from what Moore refers to as “the gentrifiers”—neighbors concerned about the noise, rodents, and cleanliness at the plaza. Loud music travels to the surrounding residences. And there was an issue with people relieving themselves on the park and its surroundings, Moore acknowledged.
About a decade ago, the program fundraised for an outhouse. This resulted in a high-profile push-and-pull with the city, which removed the toilet multiple times.
The predominantly Black group that hangs out in the park and patronizes the program includes people with long roots in the area. As the demographics of North Oakland and South Berkeley have inverted over the last decade, with the Black population dwindling and white newcomers ascendant, many in the plaza crew now come from far away or have lost their housing altogether. Moore herself faced a publicized eviction from her nearby home in 2017.
“Most people you see here grew up in the neighborhood,” said Broderick “BC” Crawford, 73. “Lots of us are more family than the people that are real family.” Crawford, who used to be homeless, said he’s among several people who’ve gotten housed through the program’s relationship with Bay Area Community Services.
Crawford’s role in the “family” he references seems to be parental. “I make sure there’s no conflict—people gotta respect themselves,” he said. He cleans up the place, too.
“The best way you can fight against gentrification is by picking up a broom,” Moore likes to say.
Hot meal service paused
Mid-February, the Self-Help Hunger Program received a visit from six government workers.
Previously, a city staffer had been emailing the group suggesting it would need to apply for an events permit. But the workers’ arrival at the plaza was a surprise. The volunteers and staff felt caught off guard when their visitors began questioning them.
A spokesperson for the Alameda County Environmental Health Department told The Oaklandside that several city agencies requested an “unannounced site inspection.” The city didn’t provide comment on why the inspection was initiated.
The visit set in motion a process whereby the program got registered as a Limited Service Charitable Feeding Operation with the county. This enables the group to distribute produce and serve reheated food, as long as it follows specific rules.
County spokesperson Troy Espera said the registration process is meant to help charity programs “provide safe and wholesome food to those in need in a safe and sanitary manner.”
After the visit, the program had to pause its hot meals. Newly registered, it aims to restart serving this week. But compliance comes with new costs and requires fundraising, so the hot meals won’t be easy to sustain.
“When the hot food program stopped,” said Netta Hill, enjoying her lunch at the plaza Tuesday, “it hurt a lot of people that really needed it.”
Neighbor Bahadra Chaudhuri said she’s been walking to the plaza for three years. Originally from India, Chaudhuri isn’t currently working and said the free meals and friendliness help.
In March, there was another setback. Someone vandalized the program’s storage shed, spraying messages like “Who killed white people?” The large blue shed is decorated in Black Panther iconography and text, painted by artist Refa One.
It’s since been restored, but the Self-Help Hunger Program feels as if it’s recovering from “battle after battle,” Moore said.
A party and a premiere
The program puts on an annual bash, with themes varying year to year.
This time it’s Father’s Day—a party on June 23 to celebrate Black fatherhood. Music, food, and a bouncy house are on the schedule.
So is the premiere of the video project from Mark and collaborators, featuring interviews with members of the plaza community. The short vignettes will stream on the HEAR/HERE digital billboard truck.
Monique Blodgett, one of the creators of the project, said the videos are designed to both honor the subjects and introduce them to outsiders, helping close a “rift.” Blodgett first got involved with the Self-Help Hunger Program as a participant who relied on the food, then later volunteered in the kitchen.
“Even though they’re so centrally located, they suffer from an invisibility that I think is really tragic,” said Mark. “My goal is, how can we reknit the community, making it accessible for new neighbors to understand the histories of the place that is now their home?”
Storytelling can be healing, she said. Much like a hot meal.
