November’s Moment of Bliss Non-profit Spotlight shines on Nourish LA, a grassroots, volunteer-led nonprofit focused on providing food to hungry folks while diverting and reclaiming food waste. Founded in the early days of the pandemic by the tenacious Natalie Flores, Nourish harnessed the energy of collective action by enlisting volunteers, shuttered restaurants, grocery stores and food banks, and local growers. They handed out bags of produce and groceries to ever-growing lines of cars and distributed thousands of seedlings of edible plants. Natalie has long been passionate about urban agriculture and locally grown produce, as she witnessed and promoted the connection between gardening and personal health/ community health. She brings a big dose of sunshine and enthusiasm to any project she tackles, whether it’s creating a community garden or creating an opportunity for people to come together to help each other.
Nourish LA partnered with The Wood Restaurant
We at Bliss have given shout-outs to Nourish LA before, including in a Moment of Bliss post from December 2020, Holidays For The Heart, where we linked to them as an example of a local food pantry and mutual aid network, and then again in February 2021 when we highlighted their Valentine’s Day bouquet fundraiser on our Instagram. We will continue to support them in any way that we can, so that they can continue their mission of combating hunger and food waste.
On a personal note, Bliss co-founder Ruth is a friend of Sunshine, aka Natalie, and she is also in the process of reading A Paradise Built In Hell by Rebecca Solnit about mutual aid groups that form in the aftermath of disasters, and Natalie’s Nourish LA seems like another shining example of Solnit’s premise: that when the going gets tough, the human instinct isn’t to get tough, but instead it is to come together and nourish each other.
