Food and Love Are the Same Thing

Laura Jimenez-Diecks, Supervisor of Community Programs on Canal Alliance’s Social Services (SS) team, has an eclectic job.

Some days you might find Laura bagging chicken or veggies at Canal Alliance’s weekly food pantry. On other mornings she might be sitting with a client to complete an online job application, making business cards for a housekeeper, or filling out a CalFresh or MediCal enrollment form. The social services department works tirelessly to address Canal Alliance’s clients’ most immediate needs — housing, food security, health care enrollment, job access, transit system orientation, to name just a few — and they also go deeper, via our casework program.

After initial intake, Laura and the team schedule longer, private sessions with clients to explore what lies beyond their most pressing needs, referring them to other Canal Alliance departments for workforce training, English classes, immigration legal support, therapy, after school programming for their children, and more. As she puts it, everyone on the team serves as a way finder for clients, crafting solutions and recommendations based on each individual’s specific circumstances.

This role of “navigator” isn’t a new one to Laura; her own family moved from Mexico to the U.S. when she was just 18 years old. Her parents relied on her heavily for support with the tasks of daily life given she had the most proficient English in the family. She paid phone bills, called the doctor’s office to schedule appointments, and translated incoming mail. Though she felt the weight of this role as a teen, it now suits her, she says. An extrovert by nature, she finds face-to-face work with clients energizing. Client work speaks to something her father, who has now passed, taught her as well: to be of service. To do anything possible to make one person’s life even better whenever possible. “These values were instilled in us early,” says Laura, who now describes her career as a natural extension of who she is. It is also one that came about organically.

Laura began at Canal Alliance as a volunteer, first coming in occasionally to organize closets and support the intake staff at the front desk. She recalls one day, a client walked in with a jury summons and Laura vividly remembers his fear that if he didn’t respond accurately to the document, he would face jail time. She offered her help; they completed the summons together, and, she says, it was then that she began to feel that what her father had always told her was true – that one small act can make someone’s life a little bit better, and that that is enough.

Eventually, Laura joined the staff at Canal Alliance, first as an intake specialist, and eventually growing into a case manager role. She says what brings her back to work day after day is knowing — and witnessing, daily — the ways in which Canal Alliance’s services bring hope to clients. “So many people come to our doors terrified or feeling alone, feeling like they have reached a dead end. We treat them with dignity and respect and work to solve the challenges they are facing. We also make sure we do all we can to alleviate that feeling of aloneness. All hardship feels lighter when it’s shared,” says Laura.

Of the many joys her role at Canal Alliance brings her, the relationships she’s built via the food pantry are among her most treasured. “Clients come week to week, so there is continuity there I enjoy,” says Laura. “And at this point these are people I have known for years, who we have supported through some of the most difficult moments of their lives — arriving to this country, finding housing, finding work, healing from trauma. Some of the best hugs I’ve ever received have been on Tuesdays mornings at our food pantry. I think it is about the depth of the relationships we’ve formed,” she says, “but I think it is also about the food.”

“Food and love are the same thing in Latino culture,” she says. According to Laura, when she was a little girl and would stop by her favorite aunt’s house, her aunt would offer her ‘albondigas’ before hugging her. Laura’s childhood favorite dishes — ‘sopa de pasta,’ ‘arroz rojo,’ and ‘arroz con frijoles y pollo’ — she has now passed down to her children. “In my family, you have to know how to make good rice,” she says. Laughing, Laura recounts that for an upcoming trip to visit her son in Philadelphia, she’ll be packing her best cumin, oregano, and cinnamon sticks in her luggage; the cumin and oregano for the sopa de pasta he’ll beg her to make, the cinnamon for the Mexican coffee she plans to prepare. “Preparing food and eating together is how we show love,” she says.

As fall approaches, Laura is looking forward to her time at Canal Alliance’s food pantry. She says as the air begins to turn crisp the energy among clients begins to change as well, that just standing nearby she can sense the excitement about visiting family, time together at the table, and shared family recipes. “It’s a feeling of togetherness, of support, and of abundance in line at the food pantry in the fall and winter,” says Laura. “It isn’t one of scarcity as one might imagine.”

Laura herself relates to this feeling. As a child she adored when the seasons changed in Mexico City; she remembers the cooler days, the longer nights. She remembers a soft wool blanket in the living room and a safe, warm feeling of being closed in by the growing darkness of winter. And she remembers a hot bowl of sopa de pasta on the table in front of her.