Ending Food Insecurity with Dignity

Food insecurity and access to basic needs

Expand existing project, program, or initiative (expanding and continuing ongoing, successful work)

Manos Que Sobreviven was founded by an LGBTQ+ undocumented immigrant with firsthand experience in how dehumanizing it is to struggle for basic survival. In gratitude for his own safety, Alberto Galvan was determined to give back. He started by preparing food for people living on the streets of Los Angeles. A retired civil servant named Andrew Montealegre joined the cause to help expand Alberto's vision. Although Alberto and Andrew were already primarily focused on food scarcity and connecting low income residents with health care and transportation, Covid-19 changed everything. Suddenly, many families who had previously been secure found themselves in dire need of food and support. Alberto and Andrew were grateful for the work of other similar non-profits, but they were concerned about the lack of fresh fruits and vegetables available for struggling families. They also noted that many families felt ashamed taking hand outs. Thus, they decided to focus on charity with dignity.

Manos Que Sobrevian is already a robust program with many supportive community partners, including the Los Angeles Food Bank, Super A Market, Unidos por NELA, and Children's Hospital. We have a successful partnership with Irving Middle School, a Title I school located in a low income neighborhood that is heavily impacted by gang violence. Each week, we distribute food to over 500 North East Los Angeles families. We also provide connections with vital services, like affordable health clinics, vision care, and discounted passes for the Metro. In 2022, we distributed 362,922 lbs of food to 31,749 households and indivuals.
This next year, we hope to partner with 2-3 schools in addition to Irving Middle School. Ideally, we would like to partner with Community Schools. Community Schools connect with local businesses and non-profits to help provide vital resources to their families. We believe we could be a tremendously valuable asset to many communities across Los Angeles. We have a model that works, we simply need the financial and community support to help us grow.

Imagine a Los Angeles where no one has to go hungry. Our goal is to provide charity with dignity. There are currently similar programs to ours here in Los Angeles, but we believe our model overcomes some of the challenges in this arena. 1. Instead of pop-ups at different locations, which can be challenging for families without a car, we focus on reliability and community connection. 2. Instead of offering packaged, processed food, we try to also include a selection of healthy fruits and vegetables. 3. Many of our recipients also volunteer with our organization. This provides a sense of accomplishment and pride and instills a sense of ownership in our program. Other social service providers now regularly attend our weekly distributions, because they know we get a big turnout. We also have an excellent training program in place that included safe food handling, and treating everyone with dignity and respect.

We regularly keep track of the number of families who access our services each week. This data allows us to measure outreach and see if we need to get the word out to more neighbors.
We have a system for tracking our deliveries to make sure that items do not go missing in-between our deliveries and our distribution.
We track our volunteers and give more frequent volunteers positions with increased responsibilities. We currently give volunteers rewards, like first choice of food, but our hope is eventually to be able to expand our program and have more paid positions. In order to expand, we plan to reach out to other resources, such as Trader Joe's and other local supermarkets.
Each year, we track the amount of food we distribute to, and the number of recipients.