I haven’t provided an update in the past two weeks. That’s mainly because things have “slowed down” relative to the pace we were operating at for the first 6 weeks of our response.
Our covid-19 relief food delivery program is still underway, but far more manageable as we have successfully moved hundreds of households over to weekly supermarket gift cards through the end of June. We’ve received great feedback from many who have received the cards. Others, who are still receiving food delivery, have requested gift cards instead. Unfortunately, we can’t provide this service for everyone but were able to increase the number we could support to 1,000 households versus our initial plan of 400. Huge thanks to the City of Cambridge for splitting the cost of these cards, making the increase possible!
We successfully rolled out our expanded covid hunger relief support to Chelsea, Lynn, Waltham, and Revere. Check out the details here. We’ve also added a 3rd site in Somerville —Prospect Hill Academy— where we are delivering weekly orders of food from the Greater Boston Food Bank. The food bank has also connected us with the Seaport Hotel who is providing packaged meals – this week over 800 lasagnas – that we’re picking up and distributing to sites in Greater Boston, and likely some of our family meals sites going forward.
We are extremely excited about new partnerships with the Boston Area Gleaners and Costa Produce, both of whom submitted proposals to the USDA and were awarded grants. They will be working with local and regional farms to purchase fresh produce and packaging that into boxes or bags. We will be collecting over 4,000 packages each week to distribute to our food pantry partners and other agencies and cities distributing food. More on this to come!
We’ve begun our planning for the summer which will include expanded free markets of some sort and a larger Home Delivery program. Please stay tuned for more detail in the coming weeks.
Once again, we are so grateful for all of the support we’re receiving, whether it’s financial contributions, volunteering, a kind post on Facebook, or a new partnership. We couldn’t do this alone and we are lucky that we don’t have to!
