Volunteers close the trunk on 14 months of food giveaways at IKEA in Costa Mesa

Since the coronavirus pandemic began, the IKEA store in Costa Mesa has become a sought-out destination, not exactly for commerce but assistance, as employees partnered with the nonprofit Power of One Foundation to provide free food to families in need.

On Saturday, during a citywide day of service called “Love Costa Mesa,” team members distributed their last box of perishables, closing the trunk, for now, on a collaboration that grew to epic proportions during a time of crisis.

With the tide of the virus beginning to recede, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Farmers to Families Food Box program — a temporary relief effort that provided more than 171 million boxes of food to distributing bodies nationwide — will end May 31.

Born out of necessity and fueled for 14 months by record-high unemployment and food insecurity, the Swedish retailer and Santa Ana-based assistance organization first teamed up in April to provide boxes of perishable grocery items in a drive-through curbside format.

It was an ideal partnership. Power of One, which had hosted large-scale food giveaways in Santa Ana, could get supplies through its connection to Community Action Partnership of Orange County’s Food Bank, while IKEA had plenty of room and hands to help.

“IKEA was shut down partially, so they didn’t have the customer traffic and gave us the whole left side of the parking lot,” Power of One Foundation President and chief executive Andre Roberson said Friday. “Because the parking lot’s so big, we were able to create winding car queues.”

Strategy and placement were key as glad recipients moved through car lines at a rate of about 1,000 vehicles per hour.

Starting with two massive distribution events in April and May and continuing with curbside food pickup by appointment and free diapers and wipes to those who qualified, organizers estimate more than 17,583 families have been served.

“It was really an epic journey,” said Shawnee Witt, POOF’s vice chair and operations director. “We’d have our hearts warmed and our hearts broken everyday by the juxtaposition of everyone coming together to help their community with the sobering need that was in front of us.”

Witt credited IKEA with organizing a massive undertaking that allowed the Power of One Foundation to provide supplies and volunteers from across several local nonprofits, while store employees handled day-of logistics.

“The heart that they’ve had for helping the community has been revolutionary and, in my mind, should be an example,” said Witt.

Vanessa Pasillas, a loyalty manager for the Costa Mesa IKEA, said the corporation values community service and typically allows individual stores to select one of multiple areas of focus on which to concentrate their philanthropic efforts. In late 2019, the Costa Mesa store decided to shift from serving schools and educational causes to a new one.

“We’d made a plan we wanted to focus on homeless and food insecurity, and it just so happened the pandemic came the same year as the strategy we chose,” Pasillas said.

So, when Costa Mesa city leaders reached out to the retailer in the early days of the pandemic, employees were willing to assist however they could. During food distributions held April 23 and May 7, they passed out 2,400 boxes. Power of One Foundation helped train employees on the ins and outs of hosting a distribution.

“[Andre] came in and directed us...on how to set it up,” Pasillas said. “We trusted Power of One to lead us and help make it happen.”

POOF was founded in 2019 but sprang from another Santa Ana nonprofit — Official No One Left Behind, founded by Roberson’s mom Brenda Hall and grandmother Juanita Stocker — which has provided food assistance to low-income families for more than a decade.

That experience proved a rich training ground for Roberson who, with Witt, wanted to widen the model in communities throughout Orange County. By the time the pandemic hit, the foundation found itself handing out food to endless lines of cars.

“The first distribution, we had five miles of traffic, and by the third one, the police had to shut us down. They had to move us because our traffic kept getting bigger and bigger,” Roberson recalled of the initial response.

In addition to working with IKEA to coordinate the curbside pickup of food and diapers, multiple times each week at first and then slightly less as the pandemic wore on, POOF held several other distribution events.

Between March 2020 and May 1 of this year, more than 2.5 million individuals ate meals made with food provided through the Power of One Foundation. Diapers will continue to be distributed at the Costa Mesa IKEA into summer for families that qualify for assistance.

Now that the USDA’s Farmers to Families program is winding down and goods become harder to secure, POOF members plan to take a month or two to reset and consider their longer-term goals. But they will not soon forget the pandemic.

“You just saw the best in the community,” Roberson said. “Whether you were in need or weren’t in need, everybody saw the need to be there for each other.”

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