253 Bags in One Morning: Our First Produce Giveaway

On Saturday, September 12, 2026, around sixty volunteers gave away 253 bags of fresh fruit and vegetables, roughly 1,300 pounds, to 253 families in San Marino. Every pound of it was donated. The whole thing was packed up and finished before noon.

A Different Kind of Event

Our first three events were cooked meals. Eighty-six plates in April, eighty in May, one hundred and twenty in June. We are proud of all of them, and every one of them took a kitchen, a permit, a supervising chef, and a month of planning.

This one ran differently. No stove, no plates, no service line. We collected donated produce, sorted it into grocery bags, and handed a bag to anyone who walked up.

The two do different jobs, and we want both. A cooked meal is a meal, hot, right now, eaten in a room full of people. A bag of groceries is several days of food that gets cooked the way that family likes it, on the night they want it. What a giveaway adds is reach and frequency. It needs no kitchen, so we can run it far more often, and in one morning we handed food to more families than our first three events combined.

The Morning

We advertised a 10 AM start. The first family arrived on foot a little after nine, a full hour early, and two more showed up right behind them.

By 11:30 the last bag was gone, the tents were down, and the lot was clean. That is ninety minutes ahead of the finish time on our own flyer. Someone who drove over at one o’clock to make a donation found an empty schoolyard, which is a good problem and still a problem. If you are coming to one of these, come at the start.

What Was In The Bags

Apples, peaches, plums, cucumbers, bananas, melon, mangoes, pineapples, cabbage. Whatever our partners had that week, packed a bag at a time and handed to whoever came up.

No cost. No paperwork. No appointment, no ID, no proof of anything. If you walked up, you got a bag.

Where It All Came From

Not one dollar of this produce was bought. Four organizations made the day possible:

Social Justice Learning Institute in Inglewood, who filled an entire truck, roughly 450 pounds on its own
Hollywood Food Coalition in Glassell Park
Seeds of Hope
Trader Joe’s, who donated the paper bags that all 253 families carried home

This was the biggest surprise of the day, and it changes how we work.

Almost everyone who came, families and volunteers alike, found us on Instagram and TikTok. Not through a flyer, not through a mailing list, not through anyone we cold-emailed. In the week around the event our following roughly doubled and the videos were watched close to 100,000 times. Search the hashtag “free produce” on TikTok and we come up second or third.

The comments are the part that sticks with us. They are from people who got a bag, saying the produce was good, and asking when the next one is.

One volunteer saw a post at work and brought their kid along to help. Several others drove to a place they had never been, to help an organization they had heard of two days earlier, and spent their Saturday morning handing groceries to strangers.

What We Got Wrong

We had more volunteers than work.

That sounds like a nice problem. It is not. People gave up their whole morning, and because everything moved so fast there was a stretch where a lot of them were standing around with nothing to do. Kole ended up apologizing to about ten of them personally. If you take someone’s Saturday, you owe them something worth doing with it.

So the next one runs across two days. The larger group comes the day before to sort and bag the produce, and a smaller crew hands out on the day itself. That fixes the standing around, and it means every bag gets looked over by hand before it reaches a family.

What Happens Next

We are going to do this more often. The aim is a giveaway every other week, which is a real change of pace for us, and it is only possible because a giveaway is so much lighter to run than a cooked meal.

We are also still cooking. That was never in question. The plan is to run both, because a hot plate does something a bag of groceries cannot, and Kole is working out what that looks like alongside the giveaways.

Kole, before the first family showed up, on whether anyone would come at all:

Look, if we feed one, we feed one. It’s better than none. It’s one more than it was before.

Two hundred and fifty-three.

Thank You

To Saints Felicitas and Perpetua in San Marino for the space, and for saying yes to something nobody there had tried before.

To SJLI, Hollywood Food Coalition, Seeds of Hope, and Trader Joe’s, who gave us everything we handed out.

To Yali, who shot every photo and every frame of video you have seen from that day.

And to sixty volunteers, most of whom we had never met. You showed up for people you will never see again. That is the whole thing.

Come To The Next One

The next date goes up on our events page and on Instagram as soon as it is set.

Sign up to volunteer or make a donation to help us keep this going every other week.

Follow along on Instagram @seedtoservela to be the first to know when the next giveaway is announced.