You Are Not Alone originally started as a one-off delivery effort in April 2020, hoping to help those most deeply affected by the economic and health uncertainty of the global pandemic. We wanted to not just ensure that our communities were fed, we wanted to give them hope and let them know, you are not alone in this.

The first time we did this, our team and especially our Executive Director, Salah Elbakri, spent weeks negotiating with food merchants, importers, and wholesalers to get hold of food staples that were quickly flying off the shelves. Some sellers who had buy limits in place required us to get multiple team members and volunteers to individually cart around gathering supplies several times throughout the day. Our goal was to feed 600 families for a month. If Americans were fighting over toilet paper, imagine how much harder it was to secure foods like rice, flour, beans, canned goods, and cooking oil?

Our dedicated volunteers persevered despite CoVid-19 and collected 600 units of each item on our giant grocery list. The next step was to repack everything into boxes. We set up an assembly line at a local community center, the San Ramon Valley Islamic Center, and spent a weekend packing, taping, and stacking everything together for the final stretch: Delivery.

Due to CoVid-19 stay-home orders, not only were many families and individuals unable to leave their homes, many were also afraid to leave or simply did not have the means to get what they needed because of financial or logistic (food desert) circumstances. So we took names, we took numbers, and we recruited an amazing team of volunteers to take our 80lb boxes in their own cars and deliver them to each recipient’s door.