When Sylvia Barnard dreams, watch out. Her dreams have a relentless habit of coming true.
For a long time now, Barnard has dreamt about launching a food truck operation that sells food raised and prepared by the clients living in one of many Good Samaritan homeless shelters run by Barnard.
She can’t tell you when this dream first came to her. So long ago, she said, squinting into the past, she can no longer remember the details. But a while later, she remembered that it might have been inspired by Los Angeles’s Father Greg Boyle, whose successful and now legendary Homeboy Industries food trucks helped Los Angeles gangbangers find their way off the streets and into another life.
For the past 27 years, Barnard has also been in the redemption racket, her focus being the county’s burgeoning homeless population. Today, the Good Samaritan operation boasts 1,000 beds, 85 programs, at 40 locations that serves 5,000 people in the region a year.
This Tuesday, Barnard and a large group of assorted well-wishers and co-conspirators gathered at the steps of the Santa Barbara Mission under a gloomy noonday sky. Greeting them was the irrepressibly joyful Father Larry Gosselin, wearing the traditional Franciscan brown cassock, who blessed the brand new, green and white, 18-foot-long food truck with an electrically powered industrial-scale kitchen.
Next week, the truck will hit the streets, manned by Good Sam clients, selling soups, salads, and, as Barnard has dubbed them, “Good Samwiches,” using produce grown at a Lompoc farm operated by Good Sam, cultivated by Good Sam clients, and prepared in its revamped industrial kitchen located in Isla Vista’s Hedges House of Hope shelter (That building once housed oil workers and then a UCSB sorority). The first stop will be at the cluster of county government buildings out on Calle Real where workers have long been stranded far from places to eat.
Tuesday’s menu included turkey sandwiches with cranberry mayo dressing on oatnut bread, tropical coleslaw with pineapples and a coconut lime dressing, and quinoa arugula salad with orange balsamic dressing. Not your typical road coach bill o’ fare. All this is overseen by Executive Chef Don Hardin — with years of catering experience under his belt — who trains Hedges House clients in the culinary arts.
Glenn Bacheller, whose career in the food industry includes Dunkin Donuts and Jamba Juice, spoke to the crowd about a call he received from Barnard a few years back. “I’ve had this dream,” she told him. “About a farm. Food to Table. Jobs to Housing.”
“When Sylvia tells you she has a dream, you better listen,” Bacheller concluded. “When she asks you to help out, you better do it.”
None of this could happened without a $150,000 grant from the Women’s Fund of Santa Barbara, which has a long history of punching way beyond its weight with strategically targeted, small-ball philanthropy. (With the new kitchen installed and exterior Good Samwich logo and artwork painted, the truck cost $242,000.) Famous for the leave-no-stone-unturned thoroughness of its vetting process, Women’s Fund volunteers are trained to smell the difference between do-gooders with good intentions and those who can get things done.
All this happened against all the roiling uncertainty caused by looming changes in federal funding for homeless programs. It’s not just less money; it’s what programs will no longer be funded. Any with a whiff of Housing First or mentioning diversity, equity, and inclusion are getting the chop. Programs promising long-term housing will be cut drastically back with funding going instead to shorter term programs that emphasize addiction and mental health treatment.
The crowd in front of the Mission talked about these realities among themselves. Up by the food truck, Father Larry talked about “the creative compassion” of the Santa Barbara community.” He said, “A community that can dream something, that can hope something, then it can come about. We have to dream,” he said. “We have to dream. And incredible things can come out of that.”
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