Grant #394

Feed Hungry, At-Risk New Yorkers During COVID-19

April 13, 2020

Of All The Things People Need Right Now, This One’s Pretty Important.

We all know that the frontline people battling CV19 need personal protective equipment. Did you know they also need food? They may be doing superhuman work, but they have very human needs and food is one of them. Despite many donors’ good intentions, pizza is the worst for spreading the virus! So many hands!

Deepti Sharma’s company is called FoodtoEat, a thriving enterprise that partners with immigrant, women and minority owned restaurants in New York City, brokering business for them with corporate offices including Warby Parker, The Skimm, and Microsoft. Then, BOOM. The business dried up practically overnight as offices shut down.

Deepti has done a fast pivot and is now getting good food to frontline workers, shelters, and others in need.

This Awesome Without Borders grant has impact in so many ways that are important to us.

  • There’s nothing more basic than food in meeting human needs during crisis.
  • The food is being prepared by “mom and pop” restaurants, awesome entrepreneurs
  • Restaurants as an industry need business to stay open, this helps
  • Supporting frontline workers is vital (and so is feeding the vulnerable people FtE is serving)
  • FoodtoEat is a woman-owned small business weathering this crisis while helping others

If you’d like to contribute, there’s a GoFundMe where you too can get this five-point bang for your buck. There’s a feeling of helplessness faced with so many needs, so many requests for your money or your time, it’s hard to know what’s best, so “analysis paralysis” sets in and we do nothing. Even if this isn’t the way you want to help, we encourage you to just go ahead, choose something that feels like the most important thing to you. And if now’s not a good time for you, don’t worry. People will always need to eat.

Category: Civic Engagement, Community, Food, Health, Social Impact, Volunteer, Wellness, Women

IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT!

WE’RE AWESOMELY OVERWHELMED BY THE NUMBER OF APPLICATIONS WE’RE GETTING WEEKLY!

Starting May 15, 2023, we’re pausing accepting new applications. We will post here when we re-open the floodgates! Please do not submit any applications until we announce we are accepting them. We will not review them.

Be sure to follow us on Twitter (@AF_WB), Facebook (@AwesomeWithoutBorders), and here on our fab website for updates on our weekly grant announcements. You can also join our quarterly newsletter:

We’ll be back soon!

Cheers,
Team Awesome Without Borders