On the Road: Getting Food to All Californians

In early May, many progressive policy advocates were astounded by Governor Newesom’s state budget revision proposal that included deep cuts and delays to various vital social services in order to alleviate the state’s $27.6 billion budget deficit. One of the delays pushed back the California Food Assistance Program (CFAP) expansion (aimed to extend CalFresh food benefits to older undocumented Californians) by two years from 2025 to 2027. Not only did this cut derail California from being the first state in the country to offer food assistance to undocumented people, it dealt a major blow to the Food4All coalition, whose members have worked tirelessly on the expansion.

I first learned about the Food4All campaign a month after I started my role here at the USC Equity Research Center back in late 2021. One of my first tasks was responding to a data request from the California Department of Social Services (CDSS) to generate estimates of undocumented immigrants in the state to help with the CFAP expansion. For the past two years, ERI has been supporting CFAP rollout efforts at CDSS by providing additional granular estimates and technical assistance. Because of our data expertise, I was also invited to sit in on various stakeholder meetings organized by CDSS on the CFAP expansion. From these meetings, I witnessed the cross section of organizations statewide and the work they put in to make sure the CFAP expansion rolled out as smoothly as possible. I am also currently working on another project on public charge and learned about California’s shadowy past with the passage of Proposition 187. Together, these two experiences presented me with a stimulating question: how did California transform itself in three decades from a state that enacted one of the most harmful anti-immigrant legislations to a state that is looking to expand public benefits to the public in its fullness, immigrants included? Or perhaps the question should be: who were the key players and how did they transform California to a state that guarantees everyone—regardless of immigration status—the right to a healthy life? 

To answer this question, I interviewed three policy advocates from two sponsoring organizations in the Food4All coalition. These advocates include Benyamin Chao (California Immigrant Policy Center, CIPC), Jackie Mendelson (Nourish California), and Betzabel Estudillo (Nourish California). I journeyed along with them as they took a trip down memory lane to remember how immigrants and advocates transformed California and initiated Food4All. Along the way, we reflected on lessons learned and envisioned a future where no one is hungry.   

Past: Organizing during Critical Times

The late 90s was a transformative moment for California’s immigrant movement building landscape. On November 9, 1994, voters in the state showed up in record numbers and passed the infamous Proposition 187. The legislation aimed to restrict undocumented Californians from accessing public services and sought to transform public sector employees to immigration enforcement officers by allowing public employees to report people who they perceived as being undocumented. Proposition 187 was struck down four years later through advocacy and judicial efforts from immigrant legal organizations. However, its impact can still be felt today. The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund describes the proposition as the “granddaddy” of anti-immigrant legislation, and it continues to serve as a model legislation for anti-immigrant efforts in other states such as Arizona and Texas. 

Two years after passing Proposition 187, a landmark federal social welfare reform—the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act (PRWORA)—was signed into law by President Clinton. The effects of PRWORA were enormous and wide reaching, but in terms of the impact on immigrants, the act posed additional eligibility requirements and disqualified previously-qualified immigrants from receiving various public benefits. According to social movements scholar Ellen Reese, Proposition 187 and PRWORA were two major political threats to California’s immigrant communities and spurred an era of immigrant organizing. The California Immigrant Policy Center (then the California Immigrant Welfare Collaborative) was created during this era, and along with Nourish California (then the California Food Policy Advocates) and other immigrant rights and food justice advocates, the coalition restored food benefits by creating the California Food Assistance Program (CFAP). This program appropriated state funding to provide monthly food benefits to qualifying immigrants who lost eligibility for federal benefits due to PRWORA. One of the interviewees attributed this early coalition and the creation of CFAP as the origin of the contemporary Food4All campaign.

Fast forward two decades, Food4All’s sibling campaign, Health4All, whose goal is to expand medical insurance to all people, was gaining traction during the Obama administration with the nation’s focus on affordable healthcare. Concurrently, food justice advocates were hoping to launch a similar campaign during this time by extending food benefits to undocumented Californians such as DACA and TPS holders. However, these efforts were largely unsuccessful and my interviewees noted the lack of political will during that time. Nevertheless, the groundwork that the Health4All campaign laid provided a solid foundation for the eventual launch of the Food4All campaign. 

In more recent times, the Trump administration and the COVID-19 pandemic presented new threats and opportunities for the Food4All campaign. Based on my interviews, the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant policies were met with fierce opposition from California policymakers and immigrant rights advocates. Organizers and movement leaders engaged in narrative work that focused on respect and equal opportunity for immigrant and undocumented Californians, and organizations also focused on capacity building. Concurrently, the COVID-19 pandemic also spotlighted the scale and severity of food insecurity in the country. Later on, the election of President Biden also meant a less hostile national political climate. These conditions created the perfect opportunity for advocates to officially launch the Food4All campaign in 2021 and continue their journey to secure food assistance for all.

Present: Lessons for Success and Reflection

After its launch, the Food4All coalition quickly scored various legislative successes and became a part of the state budget in 2022 a year later. Despite the current setback, I asked the advocates to reflect on strategies and lessons learned during the campaign process. 

1. Broad-based Coalition Building

Food4All is not just an immigrant issue or a food issue, and a critical element of the campaign’s success comes from its broad-based coalition with a diverse array of organizations:

Because the folks who make up the [Food4All] coalition represent so many different areas of work and so many different issues and so many different regions: Indigenous community members, community health workers, folks who focus more on anti-poverty, legal aid to immigrants. . . There’s just so many different ways that people come to this work, and that Food4All is at the intersection of the work that everyone is doing (interview with Nourish California).

Since the 90s, broad-based coalition building remains a core-value in the work of immigrant rights advocates in California. Narratively, the commitment to engage and invite members who are not typically considered as immigrant rights advocates helps break the immigrant rights movement out of its shell. Instead of portraying the lack of food assistance as an issue that impacts a particular population (undocumented immigrants), the broad-based coalition shows how the lack of food assistance is interconnected with other social issues (the connection of food with poverty, health, legal rights). Also, the lack of food assistance for undocumented immigrants impacts the broader community as undocumented immigrants are essential members of the community that they live in. Knowing the power of broad-based coalition building, Nourish California invested early in the coalition building process by providing funding and training for coalition members—many of them who are doing direct service provision and are thus resource constrained—to engage in advocacy work.

2. Storytelling as Testimonies

A lesson that the Food4All campaign learned from its sibling campaign Health4All is the power of storytelling. In particular, the campaign is committed “to center the experiences and stories of community members who are most directly impacted by being excluded from CalFresh” (interview with Nourish California). The stories from community leaders and members who are most directly impacted by the issue act as powerful political testimonies in the legislature. Benyamin Chao said that storytelling transforms the legislative process from a disembodied conversation to an arena where politicians are confronted with the lived experience of their constituents and are compelled to respond. Chao also described building community members’ capacity to tell their own story as the “cultural work” of organizing, and it’s a critical strategy to “make [political] conversation accessible to people who aren’t privy to insider knowledge in Sacramento” (interview with CIPC). 

3. From Storytelling to Narrative Shifting

Individual storytelling forms the catalyst for larger narrative shifts surrounding food assistance, citizenship, and deservingness. Interviewees attributed the success of the Food4All campaign to the groundwork laid by the Health4All campaign. Specifically, the Health4All coalition started to shift the narrative that undocumented immigrants are undeserving of rights (in this case healthcare as a human right). As evidenced by the campaign’s effort to center storytelling, Food4All has been continuing this narrative shift to change the conversation. In addition to this narrative, Food4All, along with other advocacy efforts in the food justice movement, is challenging how food assistance is viewed (interview with Nourish California). Food assistance has always had a lot of stigma attached to it since its introduction. The stigma is racialized, anti-immigrant, and negatively impacts immigrants’ willingness to accept social benefits to avoid being perceived as needing help. Food4All thus aims to transform both narrative streams to frame food as a human right and undocumented immigrants as deserving of that right. 

4. Political Pragmatism, Values, and Compromises

A reality that the Food4All coalition is dealing with is the age group-based approach that policymakers have decided to take with the CFAP expansion. This means that instead of removing food assistance barriers for all undocumented immigrants all at once, the CFAP expansion will roll out more slowly by age groups (e.g., ages 55 and older in 2027 and another age group years later). Although the coalition has always wanted the CFAP expansion to include everyone, regardless of immigration status and age, the coalition also recognizes why policymakers chose the age-based approach given California’s fiscal reality and political process.

The Food4All coalition has seen this before with the rollout of Health4All. Since its inception, the Health4All coalition has always wanted to improve healthcare access for all undocumented Californians. Yet, the policy position faced opposition from members of the legislature who were reluctant to expand health insurance to undocumented people. Given the political constraints and the nature of California’s legislative process, the Health4All coalition, along with policymakers, decided on an incremental approach based on age to push forward the campaign (interview with Betzabel Estudillo, Nourish California).

An unintended consequence from this compromise is that policymakers are now once again looking to use a similar approach to roll out the CFAP expansion. For the Food4All coalition, this means that the coalition needs to deal both with California’s fiscal constraints and the question of how to expand the expansion so that all undocumented Californians, regardless of age, can access the food benefits they need. When asked what lessons were learned from the Food4All campaign, Betsy Estudillo reflected on the importance of “having a really honest conversation” early in the process to create opportunities for coalition partners and community members to influence campaign goals and values, especially what the coalition are and are not willing to compromise on.

Future: Realizing a California Where No One is Hungry

The fight for Food4All is far from over. When asked about the immediate plan for navigating California’s rough political landscape ahead due to the budget deficit, Benyamin Chao explains the silver lining:

With the expansion being delayed to 2027, that means that our communities are going to have to wait longer to see this benefit for the first time. So a lot of our advocacy will be focused on reversing that delay and trying to move it up. When the governor announced this delay in May, he used CFAP as an example of a program that he supports, and that he would support moving up or expediting if the budget improved. So we want to hold him to this promise and next year–if we don’t get it next year, following years, we’re going to try our best to follow up on the implementation date and also make this benefit available to as many people as possible.

Working to reverse the cut is a top priority and advocates from the Food4All will continue to hold politicians in Sacramento accountable to the promises they made. The coalition is also strategizing to move away from the age group-based approach and expand food assistance to all. In addition to working to transform California locally, Food4All advocates and their effort is also serving as a model for similar food assistance expansion efforts in other states as well. 

Perhaps California will lose to Oregon or another state in the race of expanding food assistance to undocumented immigrants, however, the Food4All coalition will continue their work of realizing a California where no one is struggling over food. The slogan of the coalition echoes true: No Exceptions, No Exclusions, No Delays!

To Learn More About the Food4All Campaign:

• The Bill
• Data on Food Insecurity among Undocumented Californians
• Join the coalition
• Storytelling of the Impact of Food Insecurity on Undocumented Californians:
  • Feeding the Golden State (Part 1) 
  • Feeding the Golden State (Part 2) 

Acknowledgements

The interviews were conducted via Zoom by the author and transcribed by Ubiqus On Demand. I would like to thank Eunice Velarde Flores for coordinating the interview transcription. I would like to thank Rhonda Ortiz and Shannon Camacho for connecting me to the interviewees. I would also like to thank Gladys Malibiran and Shawntae Mitchum for feedback on the draft. Lastly, I would like to thank all interviewees, Benyamin Chao, Jackie Mendelson, and Betzabel Estudillo, for generously sharing their journey on the Food4All campaign with me.

About the author:

Eden holds an interdisciplinary B.A. & Sc. degree from Quest University focusing on cultural anthropology, human geography, and political economy. Eden’s research interests lie at the intersection of racial, economic, and education justice. Trained as a human geographer, Eden is knowledgeable about quantitative, qualitative, and spatial analysis. Prior to joining the Equity Research Institute, Eden conducted a research project on the charter school movement in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In particular, Eden used narrative interview and archival research to examine why various community leaders and educators joined the charter school movement and created alterantive schooling spaces.

Eden was born in Shanghai, China, moved to the United States during elementary school, and grew up in the San Gabriel Valley. Eden is a first-generation college graduate, and their passion for social justice developed during sophomore year in college when they encountered works by Black and women of color feminist scholars on intersecting systems of oppression. Eden has worked with several nonprofit organizations that seek to address social inequalities by contributing to these organizations’ research and programming effort.