By Bella Garcia
Sitting at her office desk next to a mug that reads “World’s Best Leader,” Kristen Cox hurriedly sends a message to the Long Beach Community Table’s new grant writer, recently hired to help with funding opportunities following the entrance of the recent presidential administration.
The words, stretched across the ceramic, represents Cox’s position as founder and executive director of LBCT: a nonprofit, workers cooperative with programs that source and distribute organic produce and basic essentials to people in need.
“This is political, but we don’t think of it overtly as being political, but it really is because we’re trying to do what the government is supposed to be doing, which is taking care of people,” Cox said.
In 2016, Cox ran the largest grassroots Bernie Sanders presidential campaign in the country and was a national delegate.
The more time Cox spent inside the political system during this time, she said, the more she came to realize the government was not really helping the people that needed it.
“The system is set up to work against [the poor] and it is intentional…” Cox said. “They’re very much trying to separate the very, very wealthy from everybody else. So we’re trying to be that stop gap in between that, and we started with people that are struggling the most.”
Wanting to focus her efforts in Long Beach, Cox founded the LBCT in 2018, when all of the nonprofit’s operations were run in her house and out of her minivan.
One stolen bus, two warehouses and seven years later, the mutual aid organization has developed and nurtured several programs, including their bus and pantry program, park program, homebound program and garden building team.
A box of cherry tomatoes from the Long Beach Community Table sits within their facility on April 12, waiting to be distributed alongside other vegetables and basic necessities to underserved communities in need. Photo credit: Justin Enriquez
Every week, LBCT’s volunteers distribute more than 30,000 pounds of groceries, fresh produce, clothing, hygiene products and more, to 3,000-plus homeless and low-income individuals and families including veterans, students, seniors and those who are homebound across eight parks and six homeless encampments.
Some of the fresh produce is sourced directly through the LBCT’s garden building team, where the collective builds and cultivates urban gardens around Long Beach.
According to Cox, during their weekend food and hygiene distributions, each park sees between 100 and 150 individuals, each one of them often collecting food for households of six or more.
Additionally, beyond physical aid, the group also seeks to provide education and resources to enable self-sufficiency.
“As you lift up people that are struggling, most everybody else goes up too. So who can be upset about that, right?” Cox said. “It’s a big push to be treating people with compassion and dignity, because in some ways, that’s even more important than the food.”
Joe Flores, a 46-year-old volunteer for LBCT, is one of these individuals the nonprofit has poured their energy into and helped get him on his feet.
Flores said he was hired by the LBCT “straight out of the system” while he was first re-entering society.
Between working at the nonprofit for now four years while attending school, working two additional full-time jobs and caring for his family, Flores said his time with the LBCT has been a commitment he gets the most pleasure from.
“It’s given me a purpose. It’s given me a responsibility, a connection with people I probably wouldn’t associate or talk to,” Flores said. “This has given me the opportunity– every race, every generation– to give back to them.”
From inside the Long Beach Community Table’s facility, Founder Kristen Cox describes how the nonprofit distributes shoes, clothing and food to those in need on April 12. Photo credit: Justin Enriquez
LBCT currently serves between 5,000 and 6,000 people a week, and as that number continues to increase, Cox said the need for volunteers and a larger warehouse to store the produce and products grows.
“The need for everything is really high, and we’re pretty sure that, within a year or so, we’ll probably be close to [serving] 10,000 people as numbers are going to go up, because the funding is being kind of left and right right now,” Cox said.
Like Flores, Rose Lynn has been with the LBCT for four years as a volunteer.
A self-proclaimed former “Venice Beach bum hippie” and known as Mama Lynn at LBCT, Lynn said the nonprofit’s warehouse is holding more food than they have room for, and the work does not stop until it is taken care of each day.
“When we’re through, we leave. We don’t get through, we don’t leave. That’s part of the rules, everything has to be put away or it’ll go bad. Until then, I belong to them,” Lynn said. “We run a tight ship.”
As the walls of the current LBCT warehouse grow too full to fit any more pallets of produce and necessities, they are looking to stretch their walls so they can provide for more community members, on the request of efficient funding and volunteers.
“Come, [you] will enjoy the experience. There’s nothing like giving something away to somebody else– it makes you feel so damn good you don’t know what to do with yourself,” Lynn said. “You almost break your back and your hand trying to pat yourself on the back.”
Learn more about how to receive aid from the nonprofit, each program and ways to volunteer at their website, the Long Beach Community Table.
