LOS ANGELES, July 14, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Southern
California Gas Co. (SoCalGas) today announced the company has
donated $25,000 to local non-profit,
LA Conservation Corps for the organization's Food Waste Prevention
program. This program collects as much as 9,000 pounds of excess
edible and inedible food from local restaurants, grocery stores and
convenience stores per day. The edible food is then provided to
MEND, a non-profit who distributes the edible food to families in
need in the San Fernando Valley, serving over 33,000 individuals
monthly. The inedible food is donated to local community gardens
and in the future will also be given to LA Compost at Cottonwood
Urban Farm in Panorama City and
the Kroger distribution center's anerobic digestion facility in
Compton, for clean energy
generation. Please see photos of Corpsmembers picking up and
delivering food items here.
"The number of people experiencing food insecurity in
Los Angeles has grown at an
alarming rate due to the economic impacts of COVID-19," said
Frank Lopez, senior governmental
affairs manager at SoCalGas and board member at the LA Conservation
Corps. "By providing LA Conservation Corps with this grant, we're
able to enlist our youth to help us respond to the COVID-19
pandemic by feeding families in need and making use of food that
would otherwise end up in a landfill."
"We are so grateful to SoCalGas for helping us continue this
vital program, especially now as more and more people in our
communities are struggling with food insecurity," said Wendy Butts, CEO of the LA Conservation Corps.
"I am incredibly proud of and inspired by the selfless manner in
which our Corpsmembers and staff have answered the call to serve
those in need since the start of the pandemic. We hope to continue
to build innovative and meaningful partnerships like this to affect
real change."
Entering its second year of operation, LA Conservation Corps'
Food Waste Prevention Program aims to provide a comprehensive
prevention, recovery, and recycling solution to reduce food waste
and increase food security for people in need. The program
uses two refrigerated trucks, operated by two Corpsmembers to
collect as much as 1,100-4,500 pounds of food per day from 30-40
donors, four days per week and delivers the food to local
organizations who have a need.
The Corps Food Waste Prevention Program helped to increase
MEND's capacity by providing pick-up and delivery from additional
donors thus increasing the number of people MEND is able to serve
from 20,000 to 33,200 individuals per month.
MEND food bank distributes the edible food to individuals in
need in the Arleta, Lake View Terrace, Mission Hills, North
Hills, Pacoima,
Panorama City, San Fernando, and Sun Valley areas.
In the future, the Corps plans to provide any excess inedible
food to LA Compost at Cottonwood Urban Farm in Panorama City and the Kroger distribution
center's anerobic digestion facility in Compton. Residents in San Fernando Valley
neighborhoods such as, Porter
Ranch and Sylmar, who are
adjacent to the Sunshine Canyon Landfill, will benefit from the
reduction in landfilled food waste and emissions from
transportation to move food waste to the landfill. Composting at
the Cottonwood Urban Farm benefits the residents of Panorama City and the Kroger distribution
facility's anaerobic digester's production of clean energy benefits
Compton residents.
Since the program began in 2018, the LA Conservation Corps has
been able to;
- divert nearly one million pounds of food waste from
landfill
- rescue and distribute 787,500 pounds of edible food to those in
need
- compost 14,043 pounds of inedible food between waste hauler and
local community gardens
Last year, SoCalGas donated more than $7.6 million to
community organizations, local non-profits and other groups.
SoCalGas employees contributed more than $750,000 through
payroll deductions and performed over 24,000 logged volunteer hours
for various community groups throughout its service territory.
Please see SoCalGas's 2019 Community Giving Summary for
more information.
Since March, SoCalGas has donated more than $2
million to nonprofit organizations to support the region's
workforce, feed the hungry, provide bill assistance to customers,
and more as part of its COVID-19 recovery efforts. For more
information on SoCalGas's response to the COVID-19 pandemic, please
visit www.socalgas.com/coronavirus.
About SoCalGas
Headquartered in Los
Angeles, SoCalGas® is the largest gas
distribution utility in the United States. SoCalGas
delivers affordable, reliable, clean and increasingly renewable gas
service to 21.8 million customers across 24,000 square
miles of Central and Southern California, where more than
90 percent of residents use natural gas for heating, hot water,
cooking, drying clothes or other uses. Gas delivered through the
company's pipelines also plays a key role in providing electricity
to Californians— about 45 percent of electric power
generated in the state comes from gas-fired power plants.
SoCalGas's vision is to be the cleanest gas utility
in North America, delivering affordable and increasingly
renewable energy to its customers. In support of that vision,
SoCalGas is committed to replacing 20 percent of its traditional
natural gas supply with renewable natural gas (RNG) by
2030. Renewable natural gas is made from waste created by
dairy farms, landfills and wastewater treatment plants. SoCalGas is
also committed to investing in its gas delivery infrastructure
while keeping bills affordable for our customers. From 2014 through
2018, the company invested nearly $6.5 billion to upgrade
and modernize its pipeline system to enhance safety and
reliability. SoCalGas is a subsidiary of Sempra
Energy (NYSE: SRE), an energy services holding company based
in San Diego. For more information
visit socalgas.com/newsroom or connect with SoCalGas
on Twitter (@SoCalGas), Instagram (@SoCalGas)
and Facebook.
About LA Conservation Corps
Transforming Youth. Enhancing Communities. The Los
Angeles Conservation Corps (LA Corps) is an environmentally focused
youth development organization. For over 30 years, we have been
unleashing the power of youth to restore the urban environment and
preserve natural resources on the coast and in the forests and
mountains surrounding Los Angeles.
Every year hundreds of youth and young adults from all over the
Los Angeles area known as
Corpsmembers make Los Angeles'
underserved urban neighborhoods better places to live, work, learn,
and play. They build parks and community gardens, plant trees,
restore habitats, clean alleys, recycle and much more. In the
course of restoring the environment for future generations and
serving the communities they live in, youth are empowered to chart
their own courses towards new opportunities, newfound strength and
direction, and a meaningful career through access to education, job
training, and support services. For more information, visit
www.lacorps.org or connect on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram
@lacorps and witness the #lacorpspower of Corpsmembers.
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SOURCE Southern California Gas Company