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The smell of warm tortillas and tangy enchilada sauce filled the common area room at the Ridgeview Commons senior apartment complex last Wednesday evening as residents filled a long line to pick up free meals provided by One Nation Dream Makers.
The free prepared meal service has been feeding about 100 seniors living at the complex every weekday and as of Friday, the organization has distributed nearly 6,000 meals since One Nation first kicked off the program 11 weeks ago.
"I've stopped a lot of things that I really enjoy because it's my purpose to get all of this set up," Ronnie Forbes, the founder of One Nation Dream Makers — a food bank based in Livermore — told this news organization. "This is not a Ronnie project. This is a community project that has started way back."
Ridgeview Commons, located right behind Pleasanton Middle School, is a senior living complex for seniors on low income. For about 20 years, the Tri-Valley food insecurity nonprofit Open Heart Kitchen had operated out of the Ridgeview kitchen and provided evening meals to the seniors who lived there.
But when the nonprofit announced that it was planning to move out of the kitchen and provide only lunches at the Pleasanton Senior Center main hall Monday through Friday, Forbes said he got a text from Ron Page, a resident at the complex.
"He said, 'Ronnie, what are we going to do? The seniors are not going to be able to (or) want to walk over there to get food and then they're not going to have any meals here,'" Forbes said.
That's when he forwarded that message earlier this year to Pleasanton Mayor Karla Brown and Alameda County Supervisor David Haubert so that they could all find a solution.
And after the years of waiting for Open Heart Kitchen to leave, Forbes got the OK to move in, sign an agreement and, with the help of Haubert's office paying the rent for the space for a year, took over the kitchen.
"I think the supervisor would say the work that Ronnie does for the community has been a blessing and we're very happy to not only be a funder, but also be a partner," Shawn Wilson, chief of staff for Haubert's office, told the Weekly. "We're proud of what Ron is doing. We support him wholeheartedly and we'll continue to find ways to partner with One Nation Dream Makers to make sure people are getting the food that they need."
Brown, who Forbes said has supported his vision 150% from the beginning, told the Weekly she appreciated the work he and his team have been doing mainly because she notices the great food being served that is not only nutritious, but tasty as well.
"It's a wonderful feeling to support a local hero," Brown said about Forbes.
Dublin Mayor Melissa Hernandez, who also took the time to check out the meal program on Wednesday along with Brown, said that it was very heartwarming to see the work One Nation has been doing in person.
"Ronnie has done such an excellent job in excelling what he initially started. So being able to have gotten to this point is pretty amazing," Hernandez said. "Not only are they getting a good healthy meal, but they're also getting different authentic meals as well."
But Forbes said he couldn't take any of the credit for the food. He said that all goes to Vicky Esquivel, the chef and owner of Tasteful Catering and Events, and her husband Abraham, who have previously worked with Forbes with the food distribution work he has done at the Tri-Valley Artisan Commercial Kitchen in Livermore.
While her catering business works separately from One Nation, Esquivel said the work they are doing at Ridgeview Commons is something that she enjoys doing.
"We've always done things with (Ronnie)," Esquivel said. "We worked together a lot with feeding the homeless So this is something that is more to my heart, what I like doing."
Page, who also helps Forbes run a farmers market every other Wednesday morning at Ridgeview similar to the one he ran at the Vineyard Estates complex before moving to Ridgeview, said that the work One Nation and Ridgeview is doing for the seniors was something he felt was severely needed.
"God was the one who sent me here to do what I need to do to help the seniors. There's a lot of them here that need help," Page said. "So with the help of Ronnie and all this working together, we try to make it comfortable for the people so they'll have somebody that they know that they can trust and knows that they will be there."
Lailonie Yates, the property manager at Ridgeview, told the Weekly that from when she first started working at the complex in August, which was around the same time Forbes got his meal program started, to now she has seen how important the evening meals have been not just in terms of feeding the residents but also in creating a sense of community.
"Just seeing everyone out and mingling and most of them don't come and leave, they'll come and they'll hang out down there as if it's a real diner, like a real restaurant," Yates said. "It's uplifting."
"It makes everyone more family oriented," she added. "It's like a big family dinner and it makes people move around and makes them just mingle a bit."
The free meal service, which offers food to Ridgeview residents Monday through Friday from 4-5 p.m., is only the first step in Forbes' many goals for his organization's future. He said that he wants to move more food throughout the county to people who are in need and eventually wants to be the main food distribution hub for the county's Supervisorial District 1.
He said that while the organization is in the process of writing grant applications for the city's of Pleasanton, Livermore and Dublin, he said that it's going to take funding and the support of the Tri-Valley communities to keep going.
"I was a homeless hungry veteran before, so now God has given me the opportunity to be able to reach out and help and I just want to be able to do more, but it takes money," Forbes said. "We believe that District 1 and the city of Pleasanton and (other partners) will be able to step up to do some things to help God's dream, not my dream."
