After eight years of diligently serving the community and overcoming every obstacle in its path, a local nonprofit has a daunting new hurdle it needs to clear.
Long Beach Community Table (LBCT), which feeds around 6,000 people a week, is asking the community for desperately needed financial support due to a recent sharp decline in available federal funding.
“We’re in tighter circumstances than normal,” LBCT founder Kristen Cox said. “But you know, we’re gonna make it work. Because one thing LBCT has always done is we’ve been up against the odds before, and we always pull through. […] We all just kind of go, ‘We’ve done this before, we’ll do it again.’ You know, somehow, we don’t know how, but somehow a miracle always happens, some kind of miracle, or whatever you want to call it. […] Time after time after time when we thought, ‘This is it,’ it always works out.”
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Shortly after President Donald Trump came into office in January of 2025, his administration halted several federal grants, specifically aimed at health care and food access. The acting director of the Office of Management and Budget, Matthew Vaeth, said it was necessary to pause the distribution of federal grants to ensure this funding only went to organizations that align with Trump’s ideals, which included “ending ‘wokeness.'” Although a federal judge later unfroze federal grant funding, many grants were still delayed or cancelled.
“Normally, I would be writing a grant against maybe 25 people,” Cox said. “Now it’s like 2,500 people, which means competition is a lot more difficult […] so it’s just harder to maintain the same level of funding.”
Cox became motivated to form LBCT after working for Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign and becoming disillusioned after the delegates in the Democratic primary chose to back Hillary Clinton over Sanders.
“It was after finishing up the Bernie campaign and realizing that we couldn’t really make change through the electoral system at all, or even through the political system,” Cox said. “The whole thing is geared to help wealthy people and not poor people and that’s not why I got involved in politics. So we all shifted our focus to what can we do in our own community to help people more directly, instead of trying to get policies changed or whatever, because there’s no interest in changing the policies from the wealthy people that actually own the government and the parties.”
She then switched her focus to filling the stomachs of some of Long Beach’s most food insecure residents, heading into local parks to hand out meals, clothing and hygiene products to unhoused neighbors.
“[We] just gave them the dignity of knowing that somebody cares about them, that somebody will look them in the eye instead of going, you know, ‘Oh, he’s funky or whatever.’ Like, the shame and the stigma that goes along with being homeless or being housing insecure. […] We make a very big point of letting them know that they’re part of our community,” Cox said. “We care about them just as much as we care about our next door neighbor.”
Long Beach Community Table distributes food at eight Long Beach parks every weekend, and also delivers food to bedbound individuals at 600 local households weekly. In total, the nonprofit serves around 6,000 people every week, making it a vital resource for the community.
“We always say food is freedom, but basically what we mean by that is it’s at the intersection of everything, and if you can get free food or very cheap food, as opposed to the very expensive food that’s in the grocery stores or the restaurants, these days, you’re in a much better position to be able to put gas in your car, which may seem like a minor thing, but if you can’t get to work, then you lose your job.”
Long Beach Community Table founder Kristen Cox
Cox stressed that if LBCT had to halt its food distributions, it would result in a far-reaching ripple effect, leading to health and public safety hazards for many residents.
“If, for example, 6,000 people in Long Beach were suddenly unable to get healthy, fresh food, it would be devastating for Long Beach,” Cox said. “Honestly, it would be. It would create a huge crime wave, it would create a lot more pollution, because people that are food insecure become people that are housing insecure, and then they end up getting sick, they don’t have adequate restrooms, and that kind of thing. So then you’re seeing feces on the sidewalk or whatever. It’s just much more likely that you’re going to come in contact with something that’s going to cause disease.”
In spite of a lack of funding, Long Beach Community Table remains steadfast in its mission to serve the community, even more so now that the public is facing inflated grocery prices and a troubled job market. The nonprofit is searching for a larger (and hopefully less expensive) warehouse that can support the increasing needs of the community.
Cox said while they appreciate donations of hygiene products, financial donations will be able to help more people because LBCT can use them to buy items wholesale.
“We know how to get everything in bulk so your dollar is going to stretch a lot further,” Cox said. “We’ll have people that will bring in like five bottles of shampoo […] — what they don’t know is that that same $25 could have probably purchased 100 bottles of shampoo.”
Those looking to make a financial donation to LBCT, can visit bit.ly/give-lbct.
