Los Altos resident Sanay Jiandani has witnessed the food insecurity plaguing the Bay Area since 2021, the year he began volunteering at Martha’s Kitchen.
One day last year, as Jiandani was handing out groceries alongside other volunteers at the San Jose-based nonprofit and soup kitchen, he said he noticed the line of people waiting to get their food from Martha’s Kitchen was long enough to wrap around the block. Another volunteer informed him that, despite these lines, there still existed a large population of people to whom Martha’s Kitchen was geographically inaccessible.
“I wanted to help find a solution to the problem of food insecurity,” the St. Francis High School senior said. “I realized the best way to do it (solve the problem) is to bring the food to those people in need. That was when I got the idea for a mobile food pantry.”
Since April 2024, Jiandani said he has been brainstorming and working on this project, transforming it from a mere idea to a tangible entity: He morphed a retired school bus into a mobile food pantry. The goal of this pantry, he said, was simple – aid Martha’s Kitchen by delivering food to previously unreachable areas.
This was all part of his Eagle Scout Service Project. Since 2019, Jiandani has been a Life Scout with Los Altos Troop 75. Life Scouts must complete an Eagle project – an impact-centered project demonstrating leadership and benefiting the community. These projects range in size and scale, though all must contain a proposal, a plan, a fundraising application and other required forms of information for all parties involved, according to Scouting America.
Martha’s Kitchen operations manager Trish Garcia said the nonprofit currently uses a fleet of large trucks to transport its food; however, weight limits and other local policies prevent these vehicles from accessing parks and certain residential neighborhoods.
“This entire project has been super important to all of us (at Martha’s Kitchen), really, because it’s opening up an avenue that we haven’t previously tapped into,” Garcia said. “We really didn’t even consider (a mobile food pantry) as an option, until Sanay came up with this idea and really knocked it out of the park.”
To turn a retired school bus into a mobile food pantry, Jiandani said he needed a team; this is where he used the service of his fellow Life Scouts in Troop 75 and the Martha’s Kitchen team. Garcia, he said, was continuously supporting him throughout the entire endeavor.
Jiandani said the multi-step process began with obtaining an old school bus. To do so, Jiandani and his team held car-washing events, cookie sales and partook in direct outreach to members of the community. Ultimately, Jiandani said he raised $14,000. He used these funds to purchase the bus, which he found on Facebook Marketplace.
The next part of Jiandani’s journey was to create a schedule, a plan and a blueprint of what the final product would be. These sketches, he said, turned out to be one of the more time-intensive portions of the project. To create his final floorplan, Jiandani was to measure the dimensions of the bus’s interior and exterior and get his designs approved by the Martha’s Kitchen team, so as to ensure they were on par with the Food and Drug Administration regulations.
“Martha’s Kitchen was helping me the entire way,” Jiandani said. “I was bouncing a lot of ideas off them, just to make sure, because the thing about the Eagle Project is it’s really about how the beneficiary wants it. So, I was just showing them my designs, getting their feedback from them and using that to make my project better.”
Eventually, Jiandani said the design had been approved and the bus was ready to be renovated. Alongside eight other volunteers from his troop, Jiandani spent three, eight-hour workdays completely refurnishing the school bus. According to Jiandani, the new bus is equipped with shelving, coolers, a custom-built warming cabinet and a battery to power all of its operations.
After the renovation in July, the bus remained on Jiandani’s driveway until it was picked up by Martha’s Kitchen on Aug. 1. Now in the hands of Garcia and the rest of the Martha’s Kitchen team, this pantry-on-wheels will be promptly integrated into the organization’s operations, Garcia said.
To donate to Jiandani’s effort to paint the pantry’s exterior, visit marthas-kitchen.givevirtuous.org/donate/mkgive
