Our Daily Bread Sunnyvale

I am proud to award Our Daily Bread Sunnyvale with the 2020 Mayor's Award of Excellence for group effort. Since 1983, Our Daily Bread has been serving free ho...t meals three days a week to hungry people without qualification or restriction. Participation in the program is the same for everyone, without regard to race, color, national origin, religion, age, gender, sexual orientation or disability. During the current pandemic, Our Daily Bread has gone above and beyond by providing to-go meals to keep the hungry and homeless safe. THANK YOU for providing meals to those most in need in our community for more than 35 years! See the Awards Video here: https://youtu.be/OAO3Pl5Fzlw?t=906 #ourdailybread #celebratesunnyvale #excellence #mayorsaward #awardofexcellence

ODB is grateful and humbled to receive this award from Sunnyvale Mayor, Larry Klein. Our work would not be possible without the generosity of so many generous volunteers and donors. Thank you all! <3

The online memorial celebration of Elaine Timm's life was held yesterday and well-attended by many from both St. Thomas and Our Daily Bread, all of whom remembe...r her fondly and miss her dearly. Enjoy the special Flickr photo album prepared by Pat Dare in honor of Elaine. Also in the comments below this post, we'll share some of her favorite music which was played at the memorial. With Pat's permission, we also share below a remembrance of Elaine as she was known to the Parish Events Planners (PEP) team that she was an integral part of for many years: PEP Remembrance of Elaine Timm Elaine Timm was born on December 9. 1934, and she had spent her early life in Boulder Colorado. She eventually moved to California and worked for Syntex Corporation until the company was acquired by Roche and later dissolved. She then worked at NASA, in Mountain View, until she retired approximately a year before her passing on August 1, 2019. She is survived by her younger sister and brother who still live in Colorado. They arranged to have Elaine’s ashes shipped home to be interred there. While working in the Palo Alto area, Elaine attended worship services at the Stanford Memorial Chapel. She was very moved by Dr. Wendy Smith who was serving as a chaplain there. When Wendy was called to become our rector in 1996, Elaine started to attend St. Thomas. I had met and recruited her to become a member of PEP (Parish Events Planners). The committee helps to stage social interaction opportunities for the purpose of fostering fellowship. It turns out that Elaine has a flair for providing hospitality, and she became a staunch and highly contributing member for all the years she was at St. Thomas. In addition to being a member of PEP, Elaine had served on the Communications Committee, served as a member of the vestry, and she had volunteered her time teaching a group on the ESL program. She was also an active volunteer on the Our Daily Bread program, and she had also served on the Board of Directors. My association with Elaine was mainly through PEP, and I would like to devote my remembrance of her from that perspective. 1. Joining PEP When Elaine Timm started attending St. Thomas, she often sat in the back of church near the organ. My wife, Claribel was the organist at that time, and I usually sat in same area to help her with some gofer tasks when it was needed. I had made an announcement concerning an upcoming PEP event, and Elaine asked me about that after the service. She seemed interested in some of our activities, so I asked her to join the committee. She readily accepted my invitation and soon became fully involved with all our activities. She has a flair for hospitality, but she preferred to participate in the planning and staging activities rather than in the orchestration of an event. We have often referred to ourselves as Martha’s Helpers. 2. Shopping Crew During our planning for events, she would often question the choices and quantities of each item that we were providing. Before long, she became one of my shopping associates for every event. She had also become a volunteer for ODB, and she served as one of the dishwashers on the Friday crew who called themselves Partners in Grime. I would pick Elaine up after her stint with ODB, and we would go shopping together. Our shopping pattern normally entailed going to Costco, Safeway, and Smart & Final with a coffee break somewhere in between. It was during the coffee breaks when we would often share stories about family, work, cars, her cat Aimee, and other matters. She confided to me about feeling sad when her niece had terminal health issues, and again when her brother-in-law had similar problems. Whenever Elaine felt down, she would stand by the entrance to Cowans Hall and look towards the office wing to see a grouping of three tall trees towering behind the building. As she gazed on them for solace, she would begin to recognize Jesus standing with Peter and John all smiling back to comfort her. 3. Owning the Dishwasher Although Elaine had a knack for providing hospitality, she always chose to do the cleanup task and run the dishwasher for all events. Because of her work with ODB, she had a reservation as to whether other people would handle the dishwashing chore correctly or would put dishes and other items back in their proper places. Because she wanted to get home in a timely fashion, she would often start to cleanup while our activities were only midway through. Even when we have offered to complete her task so that she could leave earlier, she always insisted on staying until everything had been put back in their proper places. 4. Contributing to the retrospective on events At our meetings, we always do a retrospective after each event so that we can gauge how our planning process went, and to make improvements for the handling of future events. Elaine always freely expressed her opinions, giving praises or critiques on each of the steps. One of our most difficult tasks is to gauge what quantity of food we should provide for an event. We always try to provide enough food, but we do try not to overbuy to keep our costs down. On a few occasions when we did run short of some items, although there was still plenty to eat, Elaine would get angry, and she would made sure that it was not going to happen again! In addition to doing planning on events at our meeting, we often engage in discussions on other matters outside PEP. Elaine rendered her opinions freely here also. Sometimes we do have disagreements that at times led to some heated discussions. We would eventually agree to try to respect our differing opinions, and then proceed to discuss other matters. 5. Priorities with Bluegrass Elaine was a dependable PEP member who attended meetings and participated in all activities regularly. Even when she had to miss meetings because of health, work, or other issues, she would catch up on our plans and join us in the staging of our activities. In recent years, she had developed a fondness for bluegrass, especially performances by the Bean Creek group that plays at Sam’s BBQ in San Jose on the same night as our meetings. She would attend performances with her neighbors first, and then leave after the first set to join us after our meeting had started. Her priority for bluegrass sometimes causes her to skip our meetings altogether. Nevertheless, she did not refrain from participating in the staging of our activities. We resolved her conflicting interests by declaring our July meeting as our Bluegrass Infusion Meeting in which we joined Elaine at Sam’s BBQ for an evening of bluegrass. When we were there, we can see that she truly grooves with the music. One of her favorite songs is, Lord, You Don’t Have to Move That Mountain, and she would always put in a request to have it played. Last year, Elaine was having some health issues and we decided not to have our Bluegrass Infusion Meeting without Elaine. Somehow, Elaine’s health markedly improved, and she told us that she would be attending and that she had also made reservations for us to attend. We were glad to have been able to spend that July evening with Elaine at Sam’s BBQ. Elaine was fiercely loyal to those she cared about and loved, and we appreciate her for who she was.

Please join us if you can this coming Saturday, August 1, 2020 at 2:00 PM Pacfic when we will be honoring the life of Elaine Timm with a virtual memorial on Zoom. Elaine was a faithful member of St. Thomas, the Parish Events Planners (PEP) team, and a dedicated ODB volunteer who is dearly missed by all who knew her. The Zoom connection details for the online memorial are provided in one of the attachments below.

This morning's update from Santa Clara County on COVID-19. The communication starts at about the 1m28s mark of the video.

It's important to be informed on the current state of the spread of COVID-19 in our county and in California as a whole. The latest from our County Health officials follows.

We are now in our fourth month of the "new normal" with ODB serving take-out-only meals. The article posted below gives an update on the process we are using to keep ODB's operations going. None of this would be possible without the amazing support of our special volunteer teams. We THANK THEM for their unfailing dedication and hard work. In addition, we are VERY GRATEFUL to our donors whose financial contributions are the lifeblood of ODB's mission.

An important message from our County Health Officer: "Silicon Valley has led the world in many ways, and our response to the pandemic is no exception. As COVID-19 rates across our state and region continue to increase, the County Health Officer is shifting to a new approach to contain the virus and protect the safety of our community. However, there is still a lot of reason to be concerned. We must all remain vigilant because each of us has a responsibility to be thoughtful w...ith our choices to protect the strangers we pass by at the grocery store or on the hiking trail, our neighbors, and the people we love. We cannot stress it enough that we must be selfless and be willing to make sacrifices to defeat the virus. We are the ones who have the power to stop it because it will not leave on its own. Read about the new Risk Reduction Health Order:" https://www.sccgov.org//order-health-officer-07-02-20.aspx See more

In the time of COVID-19, a small team of ODB volunteers has been gathering on Thursdays (a non-serving day at ODB). While engaging in safe physical distancing kitchen practices and donning masks and gloves, they provide a welcome head start on meal prep that makes life a little easier for the Friday crew.

Sunnyvale Mayor Larry Klein shares about how the Sunnyvale Farmer's Market is adapting in the time of COVID-19. More at https://uvfm.org/sunnyvale-saturday/

Watch the recording of this Facebook Live video which happened on Friday, June 12th at 10:00 a.m. on the topic of COVID-19. The event starts at approximately the 3:10 minute mark of the video. Santa Clara County Public Information Officer Maribel Martinez talked about what it is like to get tested and answered common questions about testing.

Catch up on the latest updates on Covid-19 and much more ...

Since mid-March, ODB has been operating exclusively as a to-go meal service in order to comply with the public health orders mandated in Santa Clara County aimed at reducing the spread of the novel coronavirus. This article by Our Daily Bread Board President Chuck Thompson describes in more detail how the meal service program has adapted over the past several months. A COVID-19 Q&A is posted on our website at http://ourdailybread-sunnyvale.org/... If you wish to make a donation to support our ongoing work of feeding the hungry, you will find details for the various donation options at http://ourdailybread-sunnyvale.org/donate/ THANK YOU to all who give of their time, talent, and treasure to keep our non-profit operation humming along. <3