Community Voices: A Q&A with Alimentando al Pueblo

PCC’s mission is to ensure that good food nourishes the communities it serves, while cultivating vibrant, local, organic food systems. We’re proud to partner with organizations throughout the region and share their stories. One is Alimentando al Pueblo (“Feeding the People”), supporting the Latino community in South King County. The nonprofit was born during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 when executive director Roxana Pardo Garcia “had this overwhelming sense of doom—because I knew people in my community were going to die.”

Garcia spoke recently with Sound Consumer contributor Tara Austen Weaver about the nonprofit’s mission of addressing inequality and empowering people through culture, community, music, art and food.

How did Alimentando al Pueblo get started?

In the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, I overheard my aunt telling my mom that she needed access to food but was hesitant to go to food banks, because oftentimes they wouldn’t give her food that she was familiar with. I wondered “Why isn’t there a food bank that gives people the food that they eat?”

At the time there was an incredible synergy around mutual aid—neighbors helping neighbors. I was working for the City of Seattle, but I wanted to come back to Burien to help in my community. I called a friend who is pastor of the church that houses us, and I called other friends who are in charge of non-profits. We got together and started collecting donations.

Can you tell me about the program and the food boxes you provide?

We serve Latinos in the Highline area, Burien, SeaTac, Des Moines, Normandy Park, White Center, and Tukwila. The majority of Latino people in the area are Mexican, but there is a growing population of Central American folks. So, if we are meeting people where they are, we needed to have two food boxes.

About 80% of the products are the same in each box—rice, beans, oil, sugar, salt, oatmeal, a bunch of different spices. In the Mexican food box you have tortillas, pickled jalapenos, fideo (a vermicelli noodle), chile guajillo, tomatillos, Tapatio and more. It’s on the spicier side.

In the Central American box we have yucca and plantains and products that are more familiar to that community—coconut milk, condensed and evaporated milk, achiote, and purple corn. And during the holidays we give banana leaves for the Central American folks for tamales and hojas (corn husks) for the Mexican boxes.

I’ve heard your food box pick-up days are like a party. Can you tell me about that?

When I think about my culture, food is not associated with shame or stigma. Even at funerals, when there is food there is joy. We don’t want people to feel shame for accessing a food bank, we don’t want them to feel stigma for living in poverty. Food banks exist because there are systemic issues at play that make people hungry.

I thought about the babies that were going to be born from the people who experienced this pandemic. Knowing how genetic memory plays out, so many of these babies were going to be born with the feelings that we’ve all collectively experienced. And I don’t want my community to just survive. I want them to thrive. So how do we start to cultivate memories that are associated with abundance and community and innovation and creation? We embed art and music into all our programs.

That is really the heart of our work—the cultivation of healing and the creation of memories, so our future can thrive.

Where do you get your funding support? Has that been a struggle?

We got COVID relief money and that’s what sustained us. During the pandemic, a lot of people had disposable income and were giving so much to mutual aid efforts. Now that has completely changed. So we’ve entered this arena with other food banks where there was already scarcity.

That is one of the biggest challenges. There’s not enough funding to address the deepened inequities that the pandemic caused: hunger deepened, poverty deepened, debt deepened for a lot of our families. And it’s so expensive—inflation, gas prices, housing. The wages are not following those increases.

Do you think the need in your community is getting worse?

In June of 2021, I started to feel it, and that is when inflation started to take off. Folks who are living in poverty are the canaries in the coal mine—they are the first indicators that something is coming.

Things are a lot worse now than they were in the pandemic for people living in poverty. Especially for people living at the nexus of multiple identities. To be a person of color is one thing, and then to be a person of color and to be an immigrant and to be undocumented and to be living in poverty and to be a parent and you don’t have education—these things just compound.

What is the biggest challenge you are facing right now?

It’s actually the lack of empathy and care that we’re collectively experiencing.

We went through really horrendous things, and it was never acknowledged. And now it’s like “Alright, go back to what you were doing,” as if our lives weren’t changed forever.

We lost so many lives, so many lost loved ones, and we weren’t able to partake in our grieving rituals or ceremonies because we were forced to isolate. What that does to the psyche and wellbeing of people—people are burnt out, they’re fatigued. I don’t think the majority of people don’t care because they’re bad people, they’re just tired. How do you care for someone else when you yourself are tired and overwhelmed and fatigued and unable to process what just happened to all of us?

What do you see for the future of the organization?

I want to cultivate the gifts of my community so they can come alongside us and help demand a better world, so food banks do not have to exist. People do need food, we need to meet people’s basic needs in order for them to be active participants in their communities.  So, how do we align those resources with leadership development and power sharing so we can work together to pursue a different type of world for ourselves?

How can people get involved if they want to help?

We have a take-action section on our website. The biggest one is donating money and sharing with other people who have money. People can also volunteer with the food bank, or if they have technical skills they want to share, we’re a small organization and that’s really helpful. And people can share with their network and amplify the message.