Angels at Our Tables

Ceres Community Project seeks additional youth volunteers to spread food, empowerment and healing throughout West County and beyond

Garden and Youth Program Manager Sara McCamant (left) and youth volunteer Luci Schweigman pause before a soup cauldron in Ceres’ Sebastopol kitchen.  (Photo by Mark Fernquest)

Braeden Richardson, a senior at Analy High School, has an extracurricular activity few may know about: He volunteers at local nonprofit Ceres Community Project once a week to garden and prepare food for the community’s seriously ill members.

“I’ve been here for a bit over a year,” Richardson said. “I started as a normal team volunteer. After six months, I got my green apron, which shows that you’ve been here for six months, and that you’re someone to look to in the kitchen for help. And then, after a year, I became a team leader. It’s just more of a leadership role, so I’ll lead more tasks, show new people around and step into more of a leadership position.”

Local high school senior Rosemary Blatter has volunteered at Ceres for the past two years.

“I just always loved cooking, so that was the first thing that brought me to [Ceres],” she said. But in addition to being a team leader in the kitchen, she’s now a paid intern engaged in a program where she teaches healthy eating to kids in local after-school programs.

Richardson and Blatter are two of 150 or so current youth volunteers at Ceres. Founded in 2007 in Sebastopol, Ceres has provided nutritious meals to seriously ill people in the local community for the past 17 years. Begun in a church kitchen, it grew over time to now include its own building and garden in Sebastopol, as well as a kitchen and garden in Santa Rosa, and a kitchen in Novato.

Named after the Roman goddess who represents agriculture, grains and the cycles of fertility, in 2022 Ceres “delivered 202,810 meals, trained 291 youth chefs and gardeners and served 1,319 North Bay clients and their families,” according to its website. And per the website video, “During COVID, Ceres increased meal delivery from 79,000 to 203,000 meals per year.”

The program is supported financially through individual and monthly donations, grants, business partnerships, “cause” marketing, in-kind donations and community events. Paid adult staff and volunteers oversee garden and kitchen operations, as well as deliver food to clients. The delivery people are known as “angels.” Each shift has one adult volunteer coordinator, known as a mentor, to work with the youth.

While all the current youth volunteers are greatly appreciated, numbers have fallen in recent times, and more volunteers aged 14 to 19 are needed at all locations.

Sebastopol Site Manager and Executive Chef John Littlewood (left) coaches student volunteers on the art of food preparation at the Ceres kitchen. (Photo by Mark Fernquest)

Director of Development and Community Affairs Deborah Ramelli said, “We have plenty of openings on afterschool shifts in this unique program where teens learn to grow and cook healthy foods, gain job and leadership skills, connect with their peers and caring mentors, and perhaps most importantly, develop their sense of agency and ability to make a difference in the world.”

Garden and Youth Program Manager Sara McCamant, a local food activist with over 25 years of experience linking gardens and kitchens, explained that the client program relies on youth volunteers to provide organic meals to 460 people and their families throughout Marin and Sonoma County who are experiencing serious illness. Teens typically work one three-hour shift per week.

“We give them organic, nutritious meals that are made from scratch, and teens are a big part of the cooking,” she said. “In a year, at all the sites, there’s about 325 youth. But at any one time, 150 to 170 youth are involved. We have four shifts a week here in Sebastopol in this kitchen, and there’s between six and 12 kids on a shift, and then we have the garden. So, some kids rotate between the kitchen and the garden. And some do only kitchen, and some only do garden.”

While Ceres actively promotes the Youth Program at schools, McCamant wants to reach out to parents, too.

“We have some of the lowest numbers we’ve ever had in terms of youth volunteering,” she said. “And we need to promote it more. We closed for a while, during COVID, and we think we lost some of the pathways that we had had in that closure, and we’ve never been able to really rebuild. We have a few shifts that just have four kids on them, and we’re used to 10 to 12. So we wanted to get the word out about the Youth Program and try to build the numbers up again.”

The kids invariably get a lot out of their experience at Ceres, not just in terms of gaining skills, but in terms of growth and fulfillment.

“It’s really cool, being able to help people and knowing that what you’re doing is actively making a difference. I really like that,” teen volunteer Braeden Richardson said. “I get a lot out of that and it just makes me feel good, I guess, knowing that I’m helping.”

“I thought I would try it for a little bit and then stop,” said student volunteer Rosemary Blatter, “but then I ended up really liking it.”

Ceres Community Project, PO Box 1562, Sebastopol, CA 95473. (707) 829-5833. info@ceresproject.org. www.ceresproject.org. Ceres is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit with Tax ID 26-2250997.