Just after 5 p.m. on a tepid April evening, the smell of simmering beef Bolognese and a lemony viridescent pesto drifted over the plaza at the Bolinas Community Center, where neighbors delicately balanced plates abundant with spaghetti, charred broccolini and vinegared greens on their knees.
Like most weeknights for the past five years, anyone who found themselves in Bolinas with an empty stomach and a yen for a hot meal could count on Feed the People, a pandemic-era mutual-aid collective that never stopped cooking.
Formed in March 2020, this dedicated team became food first responders, turning donations from places like nearby Star Route Farms into hundreds of dinners each week for the elderly, the unhoused, families struggling to make ends meet—anyone who showed up, no questions asked.
Similar networks sprang up nationwide in the early months of the pandemic in a wave of ungoverned reciprocity as Covid-19 pushed America’s economic disparities wider and deeper and the government’s benefit structure proved paltry. In response, many knitted their own safety net.
But a rift that has been burgeoning for the past two years between Feed the People and the community center that housed it finally ruptured this spring, when the center’s board of directors, acting on legal advice, severed ties. A terse, two-paragraph letter was sent to the collective’s organizers on April 1, minutes before it was circulated to the public.
“Following guidance from legal counsel, including a national law firm, the BCC determined that continuing the informal arrangement posed unacceptable risks to the BCC,” the letter said before announcing April 15 as the date for the last dinner under the current arrangement.
In a subsequent letter, the board said Feed the People had failed to adopt any of the proposed solutions that would have allowed it to stay—leasing the kitchen, securing a business license, and obtaining liability insurance and food safety certifications.
On that April evening in the plaza, Chloe McCullum, one of Feed the People’s organizers, read the board’s letters aloud to a few dozen diners who angled their chairs into a circle and leaned in to listen.
Organizers call the community center’s claims a smokescreen. They say they had already purchased liability insurance, completed food-safety training and drafted a tenancy agreement before the board pulled the plug.
“My feeling is that this whole letter is just a pretext for terminating your program here,” their attorney, Jack Siedman, told the crowd. “This is about interpersonal dynamics that aren’t working, some political things that are happening, and all that is being left unwritten.”
Summer Abdel, another organizer, was blunter. “Last summer, I received a call from a person who works in the nonprofit world in Bolinas warning me that there are wealthy people in this town who don’t like our program because it helps people that are at an economic disadvantage. They don’t want to see us—they don’t want us around.”
Bolinas has lately debated a string of other equity-related issues, from a new parking rule that could displace homeless residents to an effort to shut down the Bo-Linda Vista emergency R.V. park to a proposal to end free public preschool for 3-year-olds. Some see a pattern.
Ms. Abdel said she had been told that Feed the People was perceived as “pro-Palestinian”—a label that she says shouldn’t be a pejorative and one which the program has never embraced as a group, despite some organizers’ personal activism.
“This isn’t the first attack on community organizations that are the lifeblood of Bolinas from the same Zionist interests in the last few years,” said Leah Higgins, a local resident.
Week after week, tensions have mounted as the community center has dug in its heels and stonewalled its denizens. At a board meeting on April 15—which was shifted from in-person to Zoom at the last minute—dozens of outraged Feed the People supporters stormed the community center and pleaded with directors to reconsider.
Melinda Stone, a Bolinas resident and director of the University of San Francisco’s urban agriculture program, addressed the board. Every Monday, she collects unsold produce from Star Route after the weekend farmers’ markets and delivers it to the community center.
“When I talk to my students about models of mutual aid and serving community, it’s Feed the People that is an exemplar of what that can be,” she said.
By the meeting’s end, all had lambasted the board and lauded the program, and one had called for the center’s director to resign. All the while, board members stayed silent in their muted squares on the screen.
Since then, the internecine melee has played out on the neighborhood networking app Nextdoor, in Facebook posts and in the pages of the Bolinas Hearsay News. Plastered on Wharf Road are signs that read: “OMG RIP FTP WTF BCC BTW BRB LOL.” Yet outside of its five brusque open letters, the board members, who have signed non-disclosure agreements, have said little.
“My gut instinct is that there’s more to the story than meets the eye,” said one longtime community member who asked to remain anonymous because she feared social ramifications in town. “The community center’s board is made up of community members we know and love. I think we can try to trust the process and believe that maybe this isn’t some big f— you from the community center to the community.”
Despite the conflict, the Feed the People organizers are adamant in their desire for the community center to prosper.
“I care a lot about this community, this community center, and the individuals that are on its board,” said Ms. McCullum, who grew up in Bolinas and sat on the community center’s board for over a year. “These are lifelong connections.”
None of the board’s seven members could be reached for comment, including StuArt Chapman, the board’s longtime president, who resigned from his post last week “to focus on personal issues.” The center’s two paid employees, Randi Arnold and Kate Ryan Ross, did not respond to multiple interview requests.
“There clearly are wounds here, and we have to talk about it, and face each other and apologize and heal,” said longtime Bolinas resident Don Smith. “The same goes for Bolinas and Gaza and Washington. But we also need new blood in there. We need to pass the torch to younger board members who can chart a more productive course.”
Organizers say the first serious threat to Feed the People surfaced after last year’s Ramadan Iftar dinner, when an organizer sketched a Palestinian flag on the white board beside the evening’s entrée—the Levantine dish Maqluba, a pot of stewed chicken, tender vegetables and richly spiced rice.
Following the dinner, community members reached out to staff to complain about the collective’s alleged pro-Palestinian advocacy and threatened to boycott the center. One organizer said a board member confronted her at Smiley’s Saloon months later, warning that the group should “shut their f—ing mouths” before their antisemitism scared off wealthy benefactors.
“I think there are people who do feel uncomfortable coming down here,” Jennie Pfeiffer, a longtime resident, said of the dinners. “There is a certain heaviness and anger that you can feel sometimes that makes it seem that if not everyone is committed so strongly for every good cause, they’re somehow not being righteous enough.”
In conversations with the Light, several other community members shared similar sentiments.
“What I am hearing is people getting real angry about the community center,” Ms. Pfeiffer said. “We can’t do that in a small town. They are us. The community center is us. Feed the People is us. We have to love each other.”
Shortly after the Ramadan flare-up, the program secured a $40,000 Food, Agriculture and Resilient Ecosystems grant from the county—money earmarked to replace obsolete kitchen equipment and pay wages for work that was previously volunteered. The center acted as the fiscal sponsor, and negotiations at the time produced a detailed agreement that included Feed the People clearing future grant proposals with the center to avoid competition for donors.
By the board’s own admission, 2024 was a lean year. Though rentals and dues from its 165 members cover some expenses, the center depends heavily on a handful of government grants and successful fundraisers.
“The community center is failing to fundraise as much as it needs to function,” Ms. McCullum said. “They feel that people are giving us money rather than them. It’s this harmful narrative that we’re taking away money from them and giving it to ourselves.”
With the FARE grant, Ms. McCullum, like the other cooks, earned $30 an hour for five of the seven hours it took her to prepare each meal. She donated the rest of her kitchen time, and her fundraising, community outreach, volunteer coordination and social media work were unpaid. The center’s two employees earn $25 and $21.50 an hour.
Nonprofit organizations are typically governed hierarchically, with decisions informed by donors and board members. Mutual-aid projects, by contrast, tend to be shaped by volunteers and the recipients of the services. The philosophies seldom mesh.
Some have claimed that the community center could endanger its tax-exempt status if it harbors a project that makes overt political statements. But even if Feed the People were to make explicit claims about Gaza, under federal rules, a 501(c)(3) organization may speak out on any public-policy matter so long as the group remains non-partisan, avoids “excessive lobbying” and provides no “material support” to a sanctioned group. Calling for a cease-fire or condemning human-rights abuses is permissible; endorsing candidates or influencing legislation is not.
The afternoon after the plaza meeting, Ms. McCullum stirred twin stockpots of coconut-milk yellow curry—one with chicken, the other tofu. Helping others, she said, is her lodestar; she’s currently working toward her bachelor’s degree on her way to a master’s in restorative justice.
Mutual aid reflects the notion that every big political problem is rooted in our everyday lives, she said.
“It’s impossible to remove politics from feeding people because politics is why we need to exist to feed people in the first place,” Ms. McCullum said as she whisked sesame oil, soy sauce, lemon, garlic and mustard before dressing a mountain of Star Route Farms lettuce. “Being food advocates, we are also advocating for Palestinians’ right to eat.”
One of the first to the kitchen door that evening was Karmen Healsip, collecting two dinners—one for herself, one for her 76-year-old mother, Kathleen, who struggles with chronic pain. Feed the People delivers roughly 25 meals a day to those who are homebound—cancer patients, new parents, and residents without cars.
“There’s always such an abundance of colorful vegetables,” said Ms. Healsip, who, along with her mother, eats a plant-based diet. “It’s getting harder for my mom to cook for herself, and a lot of food just sits in the fridge until it goes bad.”
While Feed the People regroups, the community center will continue to run its Thursday food pantry. But, Ms. Healsip noted, “it’s not enough. Not everyone can turn raw ingredients into a meal—and not everyone has a kitchen.”