After the Food Action Plan was published in 2016, St. Mark's-in-the-Valley priest and rector Dr. Randall Day started to think seriously about how his church could activate its commercial kitchen for community use to address food action plan goals.
In the fall of 2020, St Mark's in-the-Valley, Community Environmental Council (CEC), Veggie Rescue, and Allan Hancock College began to collaborate and launched a Community Kitchens working group to support the further activation of kitchens throughout Santa Barbara County. Community…
Spearheaded by the Outreach and Implementation Coordinator, the Working Group developed a toolkit to provide mobile and commercial kitchen owners and users with critical resources, such as guidelines for permits and certifications, technical guides for kitchen appliances and California codes, health and…
St Mark's was awarded $9,000 by SBCFAN's Food System Grant program to hire an Outreach and Implementation Coordinator for the next phase of the community kitchens project.
In the Summer of 2021, the Community Environmental Council transferred the convening and coordination of the Community Kitchens Working Group to SBCFAN. Working Group membership expanded to a broad range of lived and learned experience to inform and address identified needs…
In November, they engaged with four identified community kitchens to better understand their capacity, needs, and surrounding communities. Kitchens included Allan Hancock College Culinary Lab in Santa Maria, Blue Sky Center’s Cuyama Kitchen in New Cuyama, and Santa Barbara Middle…
Veggie Rescue partnered with St. Mark’s in-the-Valley to hire an Outreach and Implementation Coordinator to conduct outreach, identify potential kitchens and users, deepen and accelerate community collaboration. The role reports to SBCFAN and partners in Working Group project coordination.