Through it Together: Our Pandemic Year

There’s not a feeling quite like looking at 2020 in the rearview mirror. It’s like we’re in 2020, the extended version.

It’s been a long, hard year — longer than a year, and impossibly hard for so many. With one foot in 2021, things are looking brighter in California. Businesses are gradually re-opening. More and more of our friends and families are now fully vaccinated, or soon will be, and case rates are so low we can once again consider eating in a restaurant, gathering with friends.  

The seeds of a mainstream racial justice movement are being cultivated in our workplaces, communities, and in decades-overdue public policies. 

Cautious optimism and patience are the watchwords of the day. 

We’re getting through this, our pandemic year, 16 months into it and counting. We owe it to ourselves and our neighbors to come out of it better and kinder. More imaginative, more generous, more grounded in what really matters to us. More resilient. 

That’s the best of us, and that’s what shows up in flying colors in our hot-off-the-presses Impact Report covering this year marked by an historic health and hunger crisis. 

We invite you to pause with us and reflect on the impact the pandemic has had on our communities, learn about CAFB’s response, and commit with us to ending the food insecurity that was here long before COVID-19, continues to affect some 8 million Californians today, and is predicted to remain at critically high levels through the long recovery.