Latino volunteers prepare more than 100 meals for a weekly Friday distribution at St. Anthony of Padua, near the border of San Francisco’s Mission and Bernal Heights neighborhoods.
The program has run for 20 years. On a recent Friday, volunteers cooked chicken with rice for people waiting outside the church. Both volunteers and meal recipients face pressures that include housing insecurity, high living costs and unstable work; for some, immigration status adds to those difficulties.
Maria Lopez, 70, relies on the weekly meal. Her husband was recently laid off, and she has struggled to find work since an injury in 2008. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that food and beverage prices in the San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward area rose 3.1% in August from a year earlier, following a 3.6% increase over the preceding year.
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