The lines were long, but the crowd waited patiently to receive one week’s allotment of groceries during the Thankful Thursday Giveaway hosted by Bethany Baldwin Community Development Corporation.
Seven hundred thirty families were served during the daylong event, which was held on the campus of Bethany Baptist Church of West Los Angeles on Saturday, December 11. According to BBCDC Executive Director Rod Miles, the number of families equates to approximately 2,900 individuals.
“We actually had over 1,000 people register for the event, but more came out. To each family, we gave a week’s supply of a variety of non-perishable items such as laundry detergent, liquid dishwashing soap, shampoo, strawberry jam, peanut butter, flour, salt, mushroom soup and more,” said Miles, who expressed appreciation to L.A. Regional Food Bank and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints for providing the groceries.
Describing the activity as “a pretty successful weekend,” Miles explained the reasoning behind the name, Thankful Thursday, when the giveaways actually occur on a Saturday. The answer lies in the history of the program, which initially launched in 2020 to assist families impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We were trying to help out parents and address food insecurity. We started distributing to 40 families a week, then it increased to 60 families,” recalled Miles.
“We started calling it Thankful Thursday because that’s the day we distributed it when we first started last summer. In the fall of 2020, we switched to Saturday, but the name, Thankful Thursday, stuck,” he said with a laugh.
Regardless of the name, it was the free food that drew crowds to the drive-through giveaway. A few pedestrians even walked up, pulling along wheeled carts to ferry the food home. Also, some of the families with children received gift cards as well.
Since the program’s inception, BBCDC has shared groceries with 700-800 families at each event. The nonprofit also unites with Council District 10 and L.A. County’s 2nd Supervisorial District to obtain items and identify people or families needing assistance.
“Recently, we began partnering with Kedren Vaccines and Charles Drew University to accompany their staff when they go to schools to offer vaccinations to the community. The BBCDC team goes along to distribute food kits and at Locke High School, we were able to feed 50 families,” shared Miles. “We’ll continue the distribution in 2022.”
Also on the agenda for next year is the reboot of the organization’s summer camp, which was closed down by the pandemic. The camp, conducted in partnership with UCLA, features a STEM curriculum where middle school students take classes in science, technology, engineering and math instructed by university graduates earning credits towards teacher’s credentials.
“We also plan to start our after-school summer enrichment program, which will offer classes in coding and robotics that will continue into the 2022-23 school year. The Bethany congregation is 100% supportive and we hope that students in our Bethany Christian Bible College will participate or lend their talents, too,” Miles said.
“Since it doesn’t look like COVID is going away soon, so we want to make sure that Bethany and BBCDC are good resources for people living in Baldwin Village and the greater Crenshaw community,” he insisted.
“Our organizing pastor, the late Rev. Dr. Rocellia Johnson, felt strongly about that. He always said, ‘The church should be a 24/7 operation to meet the needs of the people. The lights should always be on.’”
