Open Heart Kitchen was founded in 1995 as a grassroots effort to address hunger in Livermore. Today, the nonprofit serves free prepared meals and free groceries at multiple locations in Dublin, Livermore, and Pleasanton. Its offerings include serving lunch to seniors and a street outreach program. Earlier this year, the nonprofit moved its main kitchen, community meal program, and Open Heart Refuge adult shelter program to the Vineyard Resource Center, which was developed in partnership with the Housing Consortium of the East Bay and opened in Livermore last January.

Later this year, Open Heart Kitchen will be managing the Tri-Valley’s first large-scale food distribution site as a redistribution organization (RDO) partner with the Alameda County Community Food Bank (ACCFB). In 2019, ACCFB started California’s first urban-based RDO partnership program with Berkeley Food Network. In 2022, ACCFB recognized a growing need for hunger-relief assistance in the Tri-Valley, “one of the more underserved areas within our service area,” according to ACCFB officials, and agreed to partner with Open Heart Kitchen as its second RDO.

The new food distribution site will serve up to 20 food pantries and food assistance programs, according to Executive Director John Bost. “This creates a much more efficient, effective way for our partners to do food redistribution. It means they will be less dependent on waiting on shipments and drops from Alameda County Community Food Bank in Oakland or travel to Oakland with smaller vehicles. They won’t have to think about doubling the size of their facilities to store more food because we will have the space to do that. It also means a smaller environmental footprint because there will be fewer trucks and less traffic on the road.”

Open Heart Kitchen has served nearly eight million meals over its existence, with three million of those meals served in the past three years. “It really highlights the need that existed and continues to exist,” says Bost. “There is a perception that poverty exists somewhere else, not here in the Tri Valley, and that's just not true.”

In addition to serving meals, other services available through Open Heart Kitchen’s Vineyard Resource Center include free showers and laundry, mailboxes, case management, and housing navigation for unsheltered individuals. The nonprofit and its partners at the Vineyard collaborate to address the urgent needs of their clients that go beyond food insecurity, such as housing, healthcare, and even clothing. Such services are both critically important and expensive in terms of funding and labor.

Open Heart Kitchen relies on 600 to 700 volunteers monthly “to really make sure that all of our programs are running the way they should run and serve the people that we want them to serve,” notes Bost. It also relies on financial donations. “After almost thirty years of learning how to do this work better each and every day, we're not asking for people to donate so we can experiment with their money. We know how to do the work. We get more money, we hire more staff, we add more programs, we reach more people. It's that simple for us.” Bost adds, “There are multiple ways to connect to what we do, from rolling up your sleeves to making a donation to just getting the word out. If donating financially or being able to donate your time is not a possibility, then I love the idea of people being an ambassador and being proud that Open Heart Kitchen exists in their community.”

For more information about Open Heart Kitchen, please visit www.openheartkitchen.org, its Facebook page at www.facebook.com/OpenHeartKitchen, and its Instagram account at www.instagram.com/open_heart_kitchen.