Community ResiliencE

2020

As news of a potential pandemic was brewing at the close of 2019, we were in the middle of our 2020 Census campaign. Thankfully, we were able to assist more than 1,486 households in completing the 2020 Census, however, not before implementing our COVID contingency plan and moving all operations to virtual assistance only beginning March 12, 2020.

Beginning March 12, days before the Shelter-In-Place was instituted, all worship services at Eden Church were moved online and the campus closed to the public, though our essential needs operations continued. All members of the worship team recorded their respective parts of the service, from the lay liturgist to the the pianist, including the pastors, and submitted them to a member of the Clergy Team who edited them into their final production for viewing by the public on Vimeo. Fellowship hour and Church School continued on Sundays via Zoom. The Eden Church Council authorized the formation of a COVID-19 Advisory Committee composed of demographically diverse professionals with substantial education and experience in cultural anthropology, linguistics, healthcare, community and public health, emergency services, accounting, actuary, and insurance in order to help leadership navigate the coming challenges of the pandemic. We were also treated to a clever virtual Easter Egg Hunt, among other innovative and interactive online worship modalities to keep us socially connected during our time of physical distancing.

As a result of the March 16 Alameda County Health Officer Order (HOO) to Shelter-In-Place, as an essential needs operation, Eden Church drastically scaled-up its essential services to the community. Before the HOO we served on average 75 families, mostly Spanish-speaking, at our semi-monthly food distribution, Comida Para Cherryland. Almost immediately following the HOO, we found ourselves serving more than 350 ethno-linguistically diverse families, providing for nearly 2,000 persons at any given distribution. We immediately transformed our client-choice indoor food distribution into an outside contactless drive-thru/walk-up, receiving full pallet deliveries from Alameda County Community Food Bank. We also transformed our 4,355 square foot air-conditioned fellowship hall into an essential needs and food warehouse. This community-led model of a pool of 94 volunteers enabled us to swiftly scale-up service.

In March, our Cherryland Computer Café pivoted to an exclusively on-line service. We checked-out our chromebooks to those in most need, while families waited for the school districts assigning of school chromebooks. We made a wifi public access point so those without could use it while they waited for the school districts to distribute hotspots. We created an online scheduler portal via Facebook so parents could schedule supports for themselves and tutoring for their children as we all transitioned to virtual learning and work modalities.

In May, we launched a Hot Meals Program for our UIY-CMF (unaccompanied immigrant youth and children in migrant families) neighbors. In just two months, with leadership from 43 community members, mostly from Mexico and Central America, including asylum-seekers, we had cooked and delivered more than 5,000 meals to those most affected by COVID-19 and its economic fallout. Through the deliveries we also were able to enroll more than 150 families into the P-EBT program. In order to scale up our emergency meal service even more, we expanded beyond our own commercial kitchen and partnered in receiving meals from Chef José Andrés’ World Central Kitchen and Stephen and Ayesha Curry’s Eat.Learn.Play. Foundation, as well as Mandela Partners and E. 14th St. Eatery + Kitchen (formerly Ashland Market & Café at Ashland Place), providing additional critical food security in an unprecedented time of uncertainty with the unemployment rate approaching 27% in our immediate neighborhood.

Due to supply interruptions and our community not being able to access essential needs, Eden Church was awarded a combined $100,000 from Alameda County Community Development Agency, 4Cs and First-5 Alameda County, in order to procure and distribute thousands of packages of essential groceries, diapers, baby wipes, personal hygiene and cleaning supplies. In addition, Eden Church members and volunteers drove around the Bay Area to procure food staples such as cooking oil, rice, and beans and essential needs, such as toilet paper, and separated them into family size portions for Comida distributions.

During this time Eden Church distributed more than $60,000 in rent relief to the immediate Eden Area (with help from the East Bay Community Foundation, The San Francisco Foundation, United Way of the Bay Area, East Bay Clean Energy, members and friends of Eden Church, and First-5 Alameda County). With our partners in My Eden Voice! (MEV), and the Ashland/Cherryland Basic Needs Working Group we raised even more funds to distribute. Rent relief and tenant protections became a central theme for the virtual Cherryland Youth Leadership Institute (ChYLI) program which partnered with My Eden Voice! during the summer. ChYLIs advocated for such protections for their community before the Alameda County Board of Supervisors in August, resulting in the passing a County-wide extension of the emergency pandemic eviction moratorium.

Through the work of the Newcomer Navigation Center and our Accompaniment Network, we also continued housing and sponsorship of a Nicaraguan asylum-seeking family that had been living at the church campus since May 2018. Thanks to unwavering support of our Accompaniment Network, wrap-around supports and case management persisted in spite of the pandemic. While most asylum-seekers are denied asylum, some of those who we accompanied were granted asylum, even amid a pandemic. Hope abounds!

Realizing the immense need and the long road to an equitable recovery, Alameda County Board of Supervisors (ACBOS), Alameda County Healthcare Services Agency (ACHCSA), Alameda County Public Health Department (ACPHD), Alameda County Social Services Agency (ACSSA), and Alameda County Housing and Community Development (ACHCD) increased their partnership with CBOs and FBOs, like Eden Church. We were awarded more than $6m across multiple public service contracts and private grants with service periods from 2020-2023 to build out our continuum of care model for the community. In addition, donations from members and friends of Eden Church and grants from private foundations have also bolstered our direct response efforts.

In September, we braved the wildfire smoke with N-95 masks to keep Comida going, launched the EUCC Case Investigation and Contact Tracing Team (CICT), and formalized our Quarantine and Isolation Supports Team (QIS). The CICT and QIS teams worked six days per week, Mondays thru Saturday, 8am to 6pm. Working on behalf of Alameda County Public Health Department, staff received regular trainings and certifications from ACPHD, CDPH, UCLA, and UCSF. CICT team members would contact: a) positive cases and inform them of isolation guidelines and assist them in monitoring their symptoms for severity ; and b) close contacts and inform them of quarantine guidelines. CICT team members proved instrumental in mitigating community spread of the virus in the early stages of the pandemic. The CICT Team also consisted of Resource Navigators who would assist cases with rent and utility relief, public benefits enrollment, and make referrals for quarantine and isolation supports to the QIS Team. The QIS Team would prepare isolation and quarantine care kits with face masks, thermometers, hand sanitizer, cleaning and personal hygiene products, and more, preventing cases needing to visit the local supermarket or pharmacy. In partnership with ACHCSA and La Familia, we also launched our Outreach and Healthcare Education Team (OHE), which helped inform the community of CICT services and how to mitigate community spread of COVID-19. Our OHE Team also was responsible for co-creating with the county much of our Spanish language pandemic response strategy and messaging.

In October, we also partnered with actor Sean Penn’s Community Organized Relief Effort (CORE) to bring the first community-based mobile COVID-19 testing site to Cherryland, one of the most disproportionately affected areas of Alameda County. Operations happened right on our campus. See this video that we made in Spanish language explaining the PCR test to would be community participants. Later we would continue COVID-19 PCR testing with local partner La Familia.

Also in October, in a partnership with Alameda County Social Services Agency, our food security ministries vastly expanded. We formalized our Emergency Food Delivery Team (EFD) and partnered with local food vendors to provide culturally appropriate food for our primarily Mexican, Mexican-American, and Latinx clientele. In addition to the above mentioned food vendors, we partnered with Cherryland Mexican restaurant, La Casita, to prepare 400 hot meals per week for our EFD team to deliver to those in isolation, quarantine, or otherwise adversely affected by the pandemic. We were able to acquire electric pallet jacks (up to this point everything was hauled by hand our handcart) and six commercial freezers and refrigerators. All team members received CA Food & Safety certification. We implemented an internal referral system whereby the CICT Team could make food delivery referrals directly to our Emergency Food Delivery Team (EFD), ensuring a 24-hr delivery window for cases and contacts, the quickest such service in the entire county.

Based upon our transformative ministries in the Eden Area, California Assemblymember Bill Quirk selected Eden Church as 2020 California Nonprofit of the Year for District 20.

2021

The winter surge of 2021 had all of our teams working overtime. Even though our doors remained closed, it seemed our operations never ceased. Due to our increased workload, we partnered with a local yoga instructor and a local bilingual and bicultural therapist to offer virtual Wellness Wednesdays sessions, alternating between Movement as Medicine and group sessions exploring secondary trauma and self-care.

In January, we celebrated Tres Reyes differently than in years past. In lieu of our community fiesta in Oliver Hall, we held a contactless Pandemic Pozole Drive-thru where we were able to distribute some 1,200 to-go pozoles with all the trimmings from La Casita for families to enjoy in the comfort of their homes. Thanks to a wonderful partnership with a local artist we were also able to send home with families the EUCC COVID edition of Lotería, a coveted fun and culturally-appropriate didactic tool and keepsake of our Outreach and Healthcare Education Team (OHE).

In March, in a partnership with Alameda County Community Development Agency (ACCDA) and Centro Legal de la Raza, we expanded our Rent Relief Team, servicing the Alameda Housing Secure’s COVID-19 Emergency Rental Assistance Program (ERAP).

In April we celebrated the 10th anniversary of Comida Para Cherryland. Many of the immigrant moms who founded la Comida were able to celebrate this milestone together. Their efforts then and now have made possible the expansion of our food security ministries. Unfortunately, supply chain interruptions persisted and so we continued partnerships with ACCFB, Daily Bowl, Bay Cities Produce, Mandela Partners, and Hope for the Heart to provide enough food for our increasing clientele. We also became a recipient organization for USDA food boxes. We surveyed clientele and quickly learned the additional essential need that would help community members the most was more diapers. And so we began commercial Costco deliveries of diapers on-site. Later we would partner with Help a Mother Out to help further liquidate this lack in our community.

Also in April, we started offering on-site vaccination clinics clinics, partnering with ACPHD, La Familia, Tiburcio Vasquez Health Center, and Haller’s Pharmacy. Our OHE Team also began to assist in staffing Alameda County’s Vaccination POD at Hayward Adult School in Cherryland. In 2021, our OHE Team scheduled 5,269 COVID vaccinations.

Thanks to a continued partnership with ACHCSA and generous donations from private funders, in July our Newcomer Navigation Center expanded to meet the increasingly complex needs of the growing newcomer population confronting an ever evolving landscape due to the pandemic.

Just when we thought we might would be able to catch a breath, during the summer, COVID surged with a vengeance in the form of the more virulent Delta variant. In August, our CICT Team became among the first CBO/FBO teams with ACPHD to join the Shared Portal for Outbreak Tracking (SPOT) in an effort to support our local schools with CICT services as kids transitioned back to their first in-person academic year during the pandemic. We also were blessed that a Mam-speaking community member joined our CICT team, which enabled additional outreach to this disproportionately affected Indigenous people group from Guatemala. Our EFD Team ramped up production in order to deliver more than 650 prepared meals and thousands of pounds of grocery boxes per week, along with KN-95 face masks.

In November, for Día de los Muertos, we were able to pause and gather outside on our main plaza at the corner of Birch and Grove in order to honor those who we lost and celebrate life abundant. Among the many family and friends recognized, both here and in countries of origin, was beloved community leader, María Cisneros, one of the immigrant moms of Cherryland whose tenacious trailblazing made all of this possible. Similarly, in December we braved the wet forecast to host an outdoors Nochebuena/Christmas Eve service on the plaza.

2021 came in with a surge and went out with one, the BA.1/2 Omicron wave. 2021 represented the apex of our pandemic direct response efforts, with a total of 54 EUCC team members, the majority of which called the immediate Eden Area home. We were a team serving our own community. The vast majority of our team members were (and are) Spanish-English bilingual and bicultural, however, in 2021 we consisted of speakers of 11 different languages, including Spanish, English, Shona, Swahili, Portuguese, Tagalog, Cantonese, Mandarin, Mam, French, and Russian. We were able to live into our advocacy for language equity and cultural humility during the pandemic like never before.

2022

Many had hoped that the pandemic would capitulate in 2021, but our close work with ACPHD allowed us to remain prepared for what 2022 would bring, the most intense surge of the pandemic yet. In January 2022, COVID cases skyrocketed due to the more contagious and more immune evasive Omicron BA.1/2 variants. On January 12, county testing sites administered 35,177 PCR tests in one day alone. One in five would result positive. Our local testing sites were inundated and were forced to close prematurely day after day. Cherryland’s local testing site reached a positivity rate of 43% and stayed above 30% for more than a month. Omicron simply outran our fastest CICT efforts. Our local school district returned to remote learning for a time as too many staff were out. We saw more cases in winter 2022 than we did the previous two years combined.

Despite this, we persevered. In January, we were able to add toys donated from Alameda County Fire Department to our second annual Pandemic Pozole Drive-thru Tres Reyes Fiesta. Partnering with La Casita again, we were able to increase our distribution to 1,600 pozoles! Given the extreme backup in PCR testing, we began acquiring at-home antigen tests and distributing thousands at Comida Para Cherryland, and with our emergency food and essential needs deliveries, among our other outreach activities and events. We were also able to ramp up our KN-95 and N95 face mask distribution.

January also saw the evolving of our Outreach and Healthcare Education Team (OHE) into our Vaccination Team (VAXX). This transition focused our trusted community messenger work on vaccinating the urban unincorporated area’s lowest vaccinated census tracts, including those in Ashland, Cherryland, San Lorenzo, and Hayward Acres, and also via our partners, those in South Hayward and Deep East Oakland. This work is being done in partnership with ACHCSA and in coalitions. Our partners are La Familia, Resources for Community Development (RCD), My Eden Voice!, Regional Pacific Islander Taskforce, Umoja Health, Tiburcio Vasquez Health Center, Ruby’s Place, Kidango, and HARD. Our VAXX Team members help staff and schedule appoints at our local Alameda County Vaccination POD at Weekes Community Center and also schedule appointments for La Familia’s SkyWest vaccination site. This Community Resilience Vaccine Coalition work will continue until at least the end of 2023, keeping the community informed and current with their COVID boosters.

In February, in less than two years, our Food Security programs, specifically our EFD Team, delivered our 50,000th prepared meal, and reached 1 million total pounds of food distributed. Our CICT Team also partnered with the Afghan Coalition in our CICT efforts, which also allowed for Farsi, Pashto, and Dari translation. Our EFD Team also partnered with Ghazni Afghan Kabobs of Hayward for the preparation of halal meals for our increasing Afghan newcomer clientele.

After the Omicron BA.1/2 wave began to subside, and after two years since we closed to the public and our COVID-19 emergency pandemic direct response operations commenced, in March we opened our doors again to the public and began hybrid worship in-person in the sanctuary (masks required) and livestream via Vimeo/Facebook.

In May we were finally able to gather all of our teams for an outdoor All-org Appreciation Luncheon. We paid tribute to those who we lost and recognized the truly gargantuan efforts made by each and every team member. In May we also bid a fond farewell to one of our Designated Term Associate Pastors and the Program Coordinator of our Vaccination Coalition endeavors, Nadia Tavera. Pastora Nadia was essential to the building out of our Compañeras programs during our response.

Our CICT services concluded at the end of June. The EUCC CICT team assisted 10,284 cases and contacts and our Resource Navigators processed more than $3m in social assistance, and 4,117 resource referrals for basic needs, including translation, nurse assistance, emergency food delivery, quarantine and/or isolation supports, healthcare and/or public benefits enrollment, financial, utility, and/or rent relief, workplace and tenant protections, and newcomer navigation. Our QIS Team also concluded its work, having delivered isolation care kits to 1,481 households. Lives were saved. Lives were changed. See here for the ACHCSA Thank You video to all ACHCSA staff and partners, including CICT members and partnering CBO/FBOs for their above and beyond efforts during the pandemic.

Despite the summer BA.5 Omicron wave, thanks to surveillance rapid antigen testing we were able to hold the ChYLI program in-person. In August, we were able to hold our annual Backpack giveaway at Comida. The Backpacks & Boosters event, made possible by generous friends of Eden Church, allowed the giving away of 450 Backpacks, school supplies, and the promotion of COVID boosters to our local community. Also in August, we distributed our 10,000th diaper pack!

As of December, our Rent Relief Team has processed nearly $23m in rent relief with Alameda County ERAP, and directly assisting 3,150 local renters and landlords. As we approach winter, our VAXX Team is also closing in on their 10,000th vaccine scheduled too! They aspire to meet this goal by the end of the year. Our teams have distributed some 45,000 KN-95 masks.

Toward the end of 2022, Eden Church was awarded generous capacity building grants that will help to strengthen our internal organizational systems and operations so that we might continue this transformative community resilience work in a more sustainable way as we endeavor together for a more equitable recovery in the Eden Area.

2023 and beyond . . .

With the anticipation of the COVID-19 pandemic transitioning to an endemic disease in the spring of 2023 comes many concerns. One of which is the continuing evolution of variants, another is the impending economic fallout that will come with the lifting of the COVID-19 State of Emergency, currently proposed to end after February 28, 2023. While we were all part of the storm that COVID-19 initially wrought, different communities navigated with different vessels. Historically, the urban unincorporated areas of Alameda County, including Ashland, Cherryland, San Lorenzo, and Hayward Acres have not received near the investment that their incorporated neighbors have had the privilege of receiving. The visibility of this structural inequity was brought into clear and sharp focus by the pandemic. These areas along with parts of Oakland and South Hayward were also the most affected in Alameda County by the pandemic. There remains much to be done in terms of equitable public investment, vaccination equity, food security, and tenant protections before and after the State of Emergency is lifted.

At the close of 2022, looking to 2023 and beyond, with new subvariants gaining terrain, such as BA.5/4.6, BQ.1/1.1, BF.7, BA.2.75, XBB 1.5, etc., still 1 in 3 persons in one of our neighboring census tracts have yet to receive the initial doses of the COVID vaccine, and only 1 in 3 of those who have received the initial doses have received their initial booster—not counting the new bivalent booster. As of this writing, there have been nearly 2,100 confirmed deaths due to COVID-19 in Alameda County, many preventable. And all of our combined efforts prevented many more deaths.

Our efforts toward greater community resilience will continue. Eden Church remains committed to its community with which it has partnered for the last 158 years, and will continue our food security and vaccination efforts, and continue to build-out our community-based Newcomer Navigation Center, being a place and co-creating space where all belong as we transition from emergency response to endemic response. Special thanks to all Team Eden members, the Eden Church Council, and all who have made this possible.

Thank you for partnering with us in this movement toward wholeness and belonging, toward a healthier and more equitable Eden Area! ¡Salud con dignidad!