Almost as soon as the wildfires broke out last week, Our Big Kitchen Los Angeles (OBKLA) sprung into action, providing thousands of warm kosher meals, as well as their signature OBKLA chocolate chip cookies, to first responders and evacuees.
“We worked 16 hours straight on Wednesday, making those thousand meals, getting them distributed and setting up the infrastructure [to continue],” Yossi Segelman, OBKLA’s Executive Director, told the Journal. “Thursday had the same number of meals produced, the same number of volunteers, with hundreds of volunteers still on the waitlist.”
Funding for the first 1000 meals produced was provided by the Jewish Community Foundation of Los Angeles.
Founded by Yossi and Chaya Segelman, the organization, aka Margaret Feder Our Big Kitchen, usually prepares and provides kosher meals that are distributed to 43 community partners around Los Angeles.
“For the first time, we put out a memo that pretty much said, ‘If you need a meal, email us; we’ll get it to you,’” Segelman said. “Magen Am lined up volunteers and Wednesday there was just a rotating door of the volunteers, picking up the meals and transporting them.”
OBKLA then activated a WhatsApp chat, where people in addition to the Magen Am volunteers can offer to drive food to all over the LA area from Mount Olympus and the Pacific Palisades to Hollywood, West Hollywood and Hollywood Hills.
“What we are now putting together is the funding to be able to execute this emergency response plan for the foreseeable future,” Segelman said.
They are committing a 90-day plan of sending meals that are healthy, hand packed, nourishing and made with love to those in need; they will assess and review daily and weekly.
“OBKLA has the capacity to provide a quarter of a million meals at least this year,” he said. “As long as the need is there, we will increase both the number of meals we prepare and also the number of volunteer opportunities … where the community can come together [and] support each other.”
Volunteers, which include evacuees, participate in meal-prep sessions in two-hour slots.
“What these families are doing is coming here and transforming helplessness into hopefulness,” Segelman said. “That’s really what we’re trying to do, as a resource in the community, is provide people not only with nourishment and emergency meals, but also an opportunity to … take that energy and create something … positive out of this horrific tragedy.”
Segelman was in Pacific Palisades 18 hours before everything went up in flames.
“I dropped off my parents who went on a hike; they were visiting from London,” he said. “This is very personal because in addition to knowing a lot of people, I walked that ground just hours before, and it is still mind boggling that I’m looking out of my window and I can see it’s still smoldering.”
Segelman said he is “humbled” to be in this position to help.
“We’re simply doing what we do all day, every day, and it’s only because of our phenomenal team that we’re able to scale up this quickly,” he said. “As soon as we heard [what was happening], we activated what we call our OBKLA emergency response plan.”
They posted the need for volunteers, put the kitchen staff on notice that they were going to be producing a lot more meals, called up their partner agencies and started putting together resources.
“We sent out an email to our mailing list, which is about 16,000 people, saying that we will be hosting three volunteer sessions to prepare a thousand meals,” he said.
Within three minutes, every single slot was filled and they had over 400 people sign up for the waitlist.
“To have hundreds of people clamoring for an opportunity to come together for two hours and give of themselves to others is just awe inspiring,” Segelman said. “I am blown away; I’m truly honored.”
For more information, or to get involved, please contact OBKLA. Email info@obkla.org if you need a meal or go to OBKLA.org to sign up for the volunteer waitlist or make a donation.
