Reflecting on one year of pandemic response with the help of One Voice Children’s Choir

Everyone’s date is a little different. It could be March 12, or March 14, 2020. Of course, we’re referring to the date when the world as we knew it changed. We all entered a new reality where social distancing and face masks became the norm and the threat of a new virus took hold. Since that date, it has been a difficult year of loss, change, and resilience. At Feeding San Diego, it’s been a year of working relentlessly to meet the rise in need for food assistance. Hundreds of thousands of people are facing hunger, many for the first time. On March 17, 2020, where we announced our initial pandemic response efforts. Since then, we’ve been working to actively identify and help those facing hunger caused by the pandemic. We’ve been able to distribute more than 32 million meals throughout San Diego County, with the help of more than 320 community partners.

As part of our efforts, we’ve purchased more food than ever before, expanded support and resources for community partners, launched large-scale emergency distributions in areas of most need, and enhanced online resources to make it easier to find food (see our Find Food Map). Despite having to reduce our number of volunteers to enforce social distancing and keep everyone safe—we went from 10,000 volunteers pre-pandemic to just 450 in March of 2021—we are still able to produce and pack even more with less volunteers by changing the way we do things to be more efficient. It has been a year of making quick decisions and figuring it out along the way.

To honor the stakeholders who helped make the tremendous efforts of the past twelve months possible, we worked with the internationally renowned One Voice Children’s Choir, comprised of children ages four through eighteen, to create a thank you tribute video. The song, “Good Job” by Alicia Keys, was chosen because we would like to say “Good Job” to all of our volunteers, donors, community partners, and staff for uniting around our mission to end hunger in San Diego County. We are beyond grateful for you. We couldn’t have done it without you.