Open Heart Kitchen's Barbara Thomas bids farewell Open Heart Kitchen's Barbara Thomas bids farewell (October 14, 2005)

By Jeb Bing

When you're in charge of preparing and serving 3,000 meals every week for those in need, you deserve a break. That's what Barbara Thomas, executive director of Open Heart Kitchen, will be doing Nov. 1 when she leaves her post to join her husband Erik at the new country home they're building near Boulder, Colo. It'll be a big change for Barbara, a third generation Californian who had a career in catering before joining Open Heart Kitchen five years ago. A long-time volunteer who frequently attended board meetings to suggest ways of improving the organization, she accepted an offer to become executive director and bring her skills in food preparation and business management to Open Heart. Since then, she has guided the nonprofit, which provides free nutritious meals to local residents in need, through five years of tremendous growth. In 2001, Open Heart provided 9,000 meals a year from one site. Today, as Thomas leaves, she has increased the service to 90,000 meals a year from five sites.

Thomas' first task was to simply get the organization better known among businesses, churches, public policy makers and other nonprofits. As word spread, she started turning her food preparation work over to others in order to concentrate on grant writing and developing contacts with corporate foundations and religious groups that started providing more funding to grow the service. Those funds enabled her to acquire a van to transfer perishables into refrigerators and freezers at multiple locations. No more would she have to watch as an overload of hundreds of donated turkeys went to waste for lack of freezer space.

Thomas established two hot meal programs in Livermore, utilizing donated space at Asbury United Methodist Church and Vineyard Christian Fellowship. Later, Trinity Lutheran Church offered its fellowship hall for Thomas' new Pleasanton Hot Meal Program, which now serves more than 100 each week. Recently, she also negotiated a contract to provide meals at Ridge View Commons, a senior facility on Case Avenue. Since not all of the serving sites have adequate kitchen facilities to prepare large numbers of meals, Thomas talked Lynnewood Methodist Church on Black Avenue, which has a large kitchen, into allowing her organization full use of its kitchen facilities to prepare meals for the East Livermore, North Livermore and Pleasanton programs.

Always looking out for the hungry, Thomas has an open door policy with no questions asked nor forms to complete that might prove embarrassing to the needy. Quite a few homeowners and apartment dwellers in Pleasanton would be aghast to learn that the neighbors next door have little or no food in their kitchen cupboards and refrigerator. One family whose breadwinner was killed in a car crash came reluctantly to Open Heart, the mother embarrassed that she was seeking charity. Thomas assured the mother that there were many more like her, and then arranged for other nonprofits to help her find clothing and job counseling. Still another man comes for a hot meal every Friday at Trinity, but mostly lives on the streets, hiding from police who he thinks would make him leave Pleasanton. Thomas also recognized that children from low-income families who qualify for the free lunch programs at their schools were having little to eat over the summer months and on weekends. Open Heart now prepares box meals for them to take home on Fridays.

According to the 2000 Census, about 10,000 residents in the Tri-Valley live below the poverty level, unable to cover their basic costs, which often means they skimp on food and other essentials. To help them, Thomas has proposed establishing a Family Resource Center, a one-stop nonprofit center where the needy could come for meals, job training, mental health services and housing information. That hasn't happened, perhaps her only missed goal in five years of meritorious service to thousands she loved and fed with deep compassion. Clearly, our loss is Boulder's gain and we wish Barbara and Erik Thomas continued success in their new venture.
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