Filling Hearts and Bellies with Empty Bowls

“I still get goosebumps with gratitude that I’m able to do this,” says Danyel Dean, who founded the Foodbank of Santa Barbara County’s signature Empty Bowls fundraiser way back in 1998. When the event takes place on Sunday, December 3, at the organization’s new Sharehouse in Goleta, it will be the 26th year Dean has chaired the event and the first time since the pandemic that soup will be served onsite.

Raising both awareness of and funds for hunger relief programs in Santa Barbara County has been the aim of Empty Bowls from the beginning. A ceramic artist and ceramics teacher for many years, Dean first got the idea from a student who first suggested the Empty Bowls fundraising concept to her after attending a similar event in Florida. The way it works is that donors stand in line — in a symbolic representation of the soup lines that food insecure people stand in every day — to choose a handcrafted ceramic bowl (many of which are still made by Dean’s students as well as artists from all over the county) and then get a bowl of soup, usually served by a prominent community member. 

“At the very first event, this woman came up to me,” Dean recalls, “and she said, ‘You know, I have been to every fundraising event in this community, no matter how much it costs, I go to all of them. And this is more meaningful to me than any of them. Because I have stood in line to get a bowl of soup.’ And she gave me a check for $1,800.”

From the beginning, “the level of giving in this community was remarkable,” says Dean. And it has continued.

The late Michael Towbes was another longtime supporter, shares Dean. “He just loved serving, and [his business] Montecito Bank & Trust was one of our very first sponsors, and they donate every year. I remember him showing up one time and looking at the volume of people and the energy in the room of everybody being so excited about the bowl and the soup. And he said, ‘Whoa, this is the place to be.’ ” she laughs. “They’re so enthusiastic and dear. You go from the wealthiest people in Santa Barbara to preschool kids, everybody gets to give a little something.”

And that includes Dean herself, who has been working with five of the same women on the committee for the past 25 years: Merrillee Ford (a renowned artist whose one-of-a-kind ceramic houses are part of an online silent auction gallery), Donnalyn Karpeles, Nancy Krug, Collette Mason, Elizabeth Olson, and Shanon Sedivy. 

The “newcomers” on the committee, most of whom Dean says have been volunteering for at least a decade, are Elisa Atwill, Sarah Hanna, Kat Knowle, and Peggy Shoemaker. 

“This project is an astounding amount of work,” admits Dean, who did our interview on the phone as she was finishing up deliveries of succulents to go in some of the ceramic pots that will be sold as part of the marketplace component of the event. “But one of the things that I’m grateful for is that the Foodbank has hired a really remarkable event planner, Ellie Iverson, and she has been working with me and our Empty Bowls committee for four years now.”

In the beginning, it was a primarily volunteer effort and now that Iverson is on board, Dean says, “it’s not making me as crazy. She is creating Empty Bowls and condensing it in a way that it will be sustainable past the women that are on the committee and myself.” 

One of the streamlined aspects of the event now is that it’s changed from soup being supplied by 25 restaurants all over town, which was, Dean admits, “phenomenally labor intensive.” Now, Food from the Heart will create three “delicious organic soups, so there will always be three choices available. But it streamlines the program so that it is sustainable, beyond the workaholic personality that put it together,” she laughs.

“Truly a fantastic aspect of this project is that it allows so many people, I mean, hundreds and hundreds of people to donate in a little way to create a big wave. Whether it’s elementary school kids, or high school kids, or professional potters, or wealthy individuals — we have tens of thousands of dollars in donations from individual sponsors and corporate sponsors and business sponsors, before we even sell a ticket,” says Dean. “And now I get to make stuff that feeds people.”

Even better, she adds, “You turn clay into dollars. And every dollar that’s donated to the Foodbank becomes seven dollars’ worth of food, because of the connection that they have with Feed America and other organizations. I feel so grateful.”

Dean’s skill set and life experience were particularly well suited for running Empty Bowls as it turns out. She began teaching ceramics in 1976 and had been a potter since 1967. She also had a bakery business in town, the New York Bagel Factory, for 14 years. Between her pottery connections and her adult ed ceramics students that would be willing to contribute, “that was all pretty wonderful in terms of the talent base that I could bring to it,” she says. 

At the time she founded Empty Bowls, our local Foodbank supplied food to 25,000 people in our county. “There are now over 230,000 people who get help from our local community from the Foodbank,” says Dean. Meeting with other Empty Bowls organizations around the country over the years, she adds with pride that, “It turns out, our little Santa Barbara has made more money than any other.”

To date, Santa Barbara Empty Bowls has raised 2.5 million dollars for the community.

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The event itself will be held at the Foodbank Sharehouse, 82 Coromar Drive, Goleta, on Sunday, December 3. Tickets are $30 and are available online FoodbankSBC.org/SBEmptyBowls.805 Community members who wish to volunteer for Santa Barbara Empty Bowls (set-up, service, clean-up and more) may sign up at: FoodbankSBC.org/VolunteerSouthCounty or email Kelly Smith at KSmith@FoodbankSBC.org.