#ChefsForAmerica Week 6: The people behind 3 million meals
After six weeks of WCK’s Relief Team working around the clock, our #ChefsForAmerica response to COVID-19 has served more than 3 million meals to vulnerable communities and frontline healthcare workers in over 155 cities in more than 25 states and territories. We are now serving nearly 200,000 meals each day across the country, and want to highlight some of the individuals we are fortunate enough to serve and work alongside every day.
Danny Barber has been helping WCK distribute meals in The Bronx since we began serving the borough over a month ago. He is the president of Jackson City Housing and knows every person on the block. During these difficult times, Danny is reaching out to the community and giving meals to anyone in need. He is the ultimate local hero, and we are proud to have him on the WCK team.
This week, we began relief efforts in the city of Baltimore. Partnering with the school district, we are handing out free meals to anyone in need at local schools multiple times a week. At one site, we met Steve, who lined up for a meal hours before we opened. He’s worried that his water bill may go up from increased hand washing and time at home. Steve has been getting most of his meals from food pantries over the last month, so we were glad to help with freshly prepared, ready-to-eat meals.
Additionally, every Saturday, we will be providing families with fresh grab-and-go meals using a drive-through system at beautiful Camden Yards, home of the Baltimore Orioles. On our first day of service, our founder José Andrés joined us as we gave out thousands of nourishing meals to the community.
In California, we’re working with the United Farm Workers Foundation to provide meals to farmworkers in California’s Central Valley. Partnering with local restaurants in Delano, the site of a famous farmworkers’ strike, we set up a drive-through site for the community to pick up meals after a long day of work. WCK is proud to serve those working so hard to keep our food system going during the pandemic.
After making the commitment to purchase 1 million meals from small, local restaurants to feed those in need, our team has been working to bring these eateries on board across the country. In Washington, DC, one of our partner restaurants is RASA, a fast-casual Indian restaurant. Childhood friends and co-owners Rahul & Sahil spent a lot of time as kids introducing friends to Indian food. Their fathers had a restaurant together and after stints in the corporate world, they decided to open their own spot. With support from WCK, they’re employing as many staff as they can, and have invited all those employees who were laid off to come in for food for themselves and their families. RASA is delivering hundreds of meals through WCK each week to the DC community.
In Oakland, we have partnered with Tee Tran and his Vietnamese restaurant Monster Pho. Tee has boundless energy (fueled by 3-4 coffees a day!), and his restaurant has become a fixture in the community – he offers free coffee to all health workers and has built a community garden for his neighbors to harvest from. Tee moved with his family from Saigon at a very young age, and he learned all of the restaurants’ recipes from his mom who works there right beside him (she, in turn, learned the recipes from her own mom). As a WCK partner restaurant, they are now cooking hundreds of meals a week for the Oakland community.
As unemployment numbers spike and the need for humanitarian relief becomes more profound throughout the country, WCK’s Relief Team is continuing to identify those communities most in need of warm meals. In the last week alone, we have begun working in New Orleans, Virginia Beach, Chicago, Detroit, Las Vegas and beyond, and we will keep working to evaluate need and resources to be able to serve as many communities as we can.
Latest updates about our work can be found on Instagram and Twitter. To donate to WCK, click here.
