As techworkers keep house, San Francisco meals banks scramble for volunteers
The day Mayor Breed announced that City Hall staff would be working remotely because of the coronavirus pandemic was the day Cody Jang, Head Community Engagement Manager at San Francisco-Marin Food Bank, knew his job would change.
Three thousand volunteers canceled their shifts in a single day. Even the volunteers they could sign up had to work in smaller groups. And tech companies that used to be a constant source for large groups of volunteers were nowhere to be found.
“Nobody wanted to be held liable for sending their employees on a voluntary basis,” Jang explained.
Before the pandemic, the San Francisco-Marin Food Bank planned volunteer shifts three to five months in advance. The nonprofit organization’s two main camps ran food wrap shifts seven days a week, with between 30 and 80 volunteers per shift. Every day there were between two and four shifts. They provided food to around 34,000 families a week.
Today, only seven to ten people are committed to each camp shift. And yet, says Jang, they have to look after 16,000 additional families due to the increased need, a total of over 50,000 families per week.
That increase the tracks with data from the US Census Bureau. The Food Scarcity Pulse Survey found that 6.4% of households in the San Francisco metropolitan area did not have enough to eat between September 29 and October 12, compared with 5.7% in December 2018. But with the increase in teleworking Many technology companies are t no longer voluntarily sending their workers to blackboards. To close the volunteer void, boards are revising their processes, putting their employees on the assembly line and begging for individual volunteers to add a little extra weight.
Volunteers pack delivery bags at home in the SF-Marin Food Bank. (Kevin N. Hume / The Examiner)
According to a study by the Bay Area Council Economic Institute, 51% of workplaces in San Francisco are “remote-enabled”. As previously reported in the Examiner, about 20% of SF-Tech vacancies were for remote work in September – more than any other sector in The City. Even companies that at some point will call San Francisco employees to return to the office won’t reopen immediately. Salesforce and Uber, for example, are waiting for a full reopening until January 2022, while Airbnb is postponing it until further notice in September 2022.
For the past few years, Tafel have relied on some of these companies to find volunteers. For example, Salesforce employees get seven paid days of voluntary time off each year and volunteered more than 20,000 hours at SF-Marin Food Bank between 2016 and 2018 alone.
Zendesk has a remarkable and well-documented relationship with the nonprofit tenderloin social service GLIDE, which supports them with financial donations and volunteer technical staff who package groceries, safe injection kits, or provide human resource development and IT services. Food banks interviewed by the auditor said Twitter, Airbnb, Doordash and Amazon are also actively recruiting volunteers ahead of the pandemic.
There are many reasons technology companies have volunteered so much, especially with food distribution. For one, posting large numbers of workers to fight hunger and homelessness has certainly helped counter the narrative that tech companies are responsible for inequality in the region. But many of The City’s tech companies are also located downtown, either in the Financial District or SOMA, near many food banks and nonprofits that specialize in providing meals to the area’s homeless.
The food banks have also made it easy for them to volunteer. Whole teams can work on the same assembly line in a warehouse at the San Francisco-Marin Food Bank, for example, and there are shifts every day. Lillian Mark, GLIDE Community Safety and Education Manager, says she works directly with companies to create a bespoke volunteer “experience” for their employees based on a team’s specific interests and skills. Julia Sills, Director of Volunteer Services at St. Anthony’s, similarly works with companies to find shifts that go well with any schedule.
In the meantime, the panels are restructuring their way of working. Meals that were previously served in large dining rooms at GLIDE, for example, are distributed to-go with significantly less staff. The other most common tactics are simplifying food preparation – ham sandwiches instead of chili, for example – and closing common areas that require more maintenance and cleaning.
The biggest shift, however, comes in employee responsibilities. Once administrators have provided coordinated services, they get their hands dirty and do the services themselves, often working overtime and foregoing long-term planning for more immediate needs. “We have IT staff making sandwiches and executive assistants handing out meals,” said Mark.
Foster Farms frozen turkeys donated for holiday meals sit on a table in the SF-Marin Food Bank. (Kevin N. Hume / The Examiner)
The need escalates this holiday season. SF Marin Food Bank, GLIDE and St. Anthony’s all have special vacation programs that they need extra hands on. The days after a major public holiday, such as Black Friday or December 26, as well as the months of January and February, are always understaffed, even in times without a pandemic. “We are very concerned about early 2022,” said Jang.
But while some in The City fear tech companies will ever return to the “meat room,” the Tablets are reluctant to make permanent changes. The main solution they long for is the return of more volunteers who are returning of their own accord.
“I don’t feel like we’re in damage control mode because I’m optimistic,” says Sills. “Regardless of what the future of work looks like, whether you work from home, hybrid or not, connecting with the community you live in is important and fulfilling and something these workers want to do.”
virwin@sfexaminer.com
