Empty Bowls Event Draws 800 Foodbank Supporters

On November 10, about 800 community members turned out for the 27th annual Empty Bowls event, which raised funds and awareness for the Foodbank of Santa Barbara County. Organized each year by Danyel Dean and now by more than 100 fellow volunteers, the event was held under a big tent at the Foodbank’s new Sharehouse in Goleta.

Upon arrival, guests selected a bowl from hundreds of beautiful ones. Most were created by students in Dean’s pottery class at SBCC School of Extended Learning, a class she has taught for 46 years. Also donating bowls this year were teachers and students at Maker House. Yet more volunteers painted and glazed bowls supplied by Dean’s class, including students at Dos Pueblos, Cold Spring, and Carpinteria high schools and seniors at Casa Dorinda and Samarkand. Everybody can give a little, Dean shared, and there’s a huge benefit.

Guests had a choice of gourmet soups — Tuscan minestrone, sweet potato and butternut squash, or chicken and rice, prepared and served this year by Freedom 4 Youth participants. This nonprofit serves youth impacted by the criminal justice system and operates a catering program to train young chefs.

Gourmet artisanal bread was provided by Keld Hove’s Phoenix Bread Rising, another nonprofit with a noble purpose — serving communities struck by natural disasters. Hove goes in a few months after the disaster — when the acute relief agencies are leaving. He bakes and teaches baking, which provides healthy food and job skills and, according to Hove, reminds people that they have not been forgotten.

To provide the freshest bread possible for Empty Bowls, he baked for the 26 hours preceding the event, providing varieties popular from past events, including sweet potato and rosemary, old-fashioned Danish rye, and hatch chile/roasted corn. Hove recently retired from 25 years with the S.B. Police Department.

A popular Holiday Marketplace featured handcrafted ceramic items, including ones with succulent plantings. All proceeds benefited the Foodbank. 

Dean keeps the event ticket price relatively low — $30 — to enable more people to partake and to bring the whole family. She has a committee of 10 women, six of whom have been with her from the start. Dean is motivated, she related, by a love of serving the community with nutritional food, especially with a group of wonderful women and in a way that incorporates ceramics, which “saves her spirit.”

The Foodbank can certainly use the funds raised, as it has been experiencing a post-pandemic surge in demand. There was the initial surge in 2020 when COVID hit, then a tapering as government relief programs kicked in. With those programs ending and food prices having jumped and remained high, there’s been another spike in demand. In fact, the number of community members served in the last two fiscal years was on par with those served in 2020, at the height of the demand during COVID — in the range of 215,000 to 230,000 people each of those years.

While food and financial donations did increase with the pandemic, the number of food donations fell last year while the Foodbank’s costs increased.

The Foodbank’s primary food sources are: USDA (28 percent), grocery rescue operations (21 percent), other donated sources (26 percent), and purchases (21 percent).

Federal government aid (through USDA) is precarious because of the prospect of budget cuts. Already, there is a Congressional bill that would cut SNAP (previously food stamps) by $30 billion over the next decade. Many families, even those with both parents working, rely on SNAP benefits to meet the high cost of basic needs in our county.

In the year ending June 2024, the Foodbank distributed more than 12 million pounds of food, including 4.8 million pounds of produce. About one-third of the distribution was in South County (Goleta to Carpinteria). The Foodbank operates on a $28 million budget, with more than half of that being in-kind food donations.