It doesn’t take long to give away 1,000 peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in San Francisco.

“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” said a man in a wheelchair on Turk Street, who got one of them, along with a toothbrush, a pair of gloves and some cookies.

A woman in a green tent got one, and the woman in the red tent next door got one, and a man with a shopping cart full of dismantled bicycles got two, because he said he was very hungry.

For the 12th year in a row, six dozen friends from the suburbs came to the Tenderloin on Saturday armed with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and small backpacks full of drinks and toiletries. They call themselves Charlie’s Angels. They’re not a charity, a nonprofit, or a foundation — just six dozen friends with 1,000 sandwiches.

“I know I can’t solve anything,” said Maddie Hughes, 19, of San Mateo. “And it does feel a little weird, to walk up to someone and offer them a sandwich when you yourself have so much. But it’s something.”

“It sucks to see people outside,” said Cloey Selna, 19, of Hillsborough. “You run out of sandwiches in five minutes. You can never make enough peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.”

Charlie’s Angels started as a way for Hughes and a few pals to get service credit for elementary school. Then the idea caught on with their friends, and friends of friends. On Friday night, parents and kids spent an evening making sandwiches at home.

Eli Dudum, 11, spread the peanut butter on dozens of sandwiches, skillfully.

“The idea is to get the peanut butter into all the corners, because you don’t want people to bite into a sandwich and not get any peanut butter,” he said. “I don’t like it when that happens to me.”

On Saturday morning, they brought the sandwiches to Taylor and Eddy streets. Eli and his father, Tony, live in Lafayette, a town where fewer people require complimentary peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Homelessness in San Francisco, is more pervasive than last year, Tony Dudum said.

“Tents on every corner, every street, every alleyway,” he said. “It’s worse than it’s ever been. We allow this to happen. All of us.”

The young volunteers were told by their parents to “fan out” from Taylor and Eddy. They were also cautioned, by Tony Dudum, to “watch out for syringes and needles and other things you don’t want to step in.”

The fanning out did not require more than a few steps before the first load of sandwiches was gone.

They went to people in tents, in cardboard lean-tos and in cobbled-together structures of blue tarp. They went to people with dogs, with walkers, with crutches. They went to people lying on mattress pads and lying on ventilation grates and lying on bare concrete.

“My sandwiches didn’t even last one block,” said volunteer Chase Scandalious, 19, of Burlingame. “I need more sandwiches.”

Nobody who was offered one of the small backpacks with the sandwich inside turned it down.

“You made my Christmas,” said a man named Mark, when Scandalious handed him a red backpack. Mark said he had been living outside for two years.

Kim Hughes of San Mateo, whose family helped start the campaign 12 years ago with 50 sandwiches, acknowledged the whole thing was “one small blip.”

“But you have to try to do something,” she said. “This is the world we have.”

Steve Rubenstein is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: srubenstein@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @SteveRubeSF