Let’s Get Ready: Your Impact x2 For When Crisis Happens—
We meet crises with cooking. Usually within hours. We never know when or where, so we can’t plan, but we do prepare. These days, crises are happening more often in more places, which means more people need a hot meal that tastes like home, especially if they’ve just lost theirs. That plate becomes one of hope and a reminder that people care.
Preparedness only counts if it happens first. With your help, we’re ready For When Crisis Happens—
Your gift goes 2x as far
Only through 9/22
The Story You Haven’t Heard
This scene is likely one you recognize.
People dicing vibrantly-colored vegetables or stirring giant pots. Piles of rubble are noticeable as the camera pans, and you recognize the location because the disaster has been all over the news, your inbox, and social media. You witness as people who have lost so much serve their neighbors a hot, nourishing meal, plate by plate.
But what follows is the story you haven’t seen, even though you’re in it. We’re widening the lens. We’re revealing the architecture that supports every meal we’ve ever served. Spoiler alert: it starts with you.
Individual donors like you make up 81% of our funding.
Make your gift now through 9/22 and your impact is doubled, thanks to a match from a group of generous donors.
In 2025, we responded 48 times. That’s a response almost every week of the year, amid drastic cuts in other disaster response services. Hurricanes leave destruction. Wildfires burn homes and infrastructure. Crisis compounds over time, and the aftermath outlives the disaster itself by a long shot. The need for emergency meals is greater than it has ever been.
We want to serve those meals. But the scaling required comes at a high cost, and we can’t do it without you.
So let’s go behind the scenes.
A Million Things Now in the Middle of the Night
It’s 4:30 a.m. their time. Their phone is blowing up with WhatsApp messages. A crisis has happened in their region, and we’re going. The Chef Corps member, Procurement Lead, Security Manager, and the rest of the Response team are jumping into the chat.
Our team deploys, a small word that contains a whole world of activity. The local WCK network is activated. Meals are on the way to those who need them most. All done in a string of WhatsApp messages.
But none of those messages would work if the relationships behind them didn’t already exist.
Community Is Our Superpower
The majority of the response team are local chefs, suppliers, drivers, and volunteers who live and work in the area and have networks of their own. This is what founder Chef José Andrés means when he says, “Everyone’s a part of World Central Kitchen.” These partnerships not only ensure a faster response, they’re also how trust gets built. And, trust is what makes this work possible. Those relationships are built and maintained long before anyone needs them.
“People need to know that we’re going to be there for them when it happens. And that’s really, really important because if we’re the first on the ground, if we are helping as quickly as we can, that is trust. And trust is the biggest thing that we can have on the ground.”
Chef Chris Miller, WCK Culinary Manager
The Infrastructure We Can Only Build Now
Preparedness for us looks like Response Operation Centers staged around the world, holding everything needed to build a kitchen capable of cooking hundreds of thousands of meals a day. Custom-designed Rapid Response Mobile Kitchens—think food trucks on steroids—stocked with emergency food and potable water, ready to roll.
“It’s calling like an old friend. It’s like just texting back when you need help.”
Miguel Tortosa Bordera, WCK Communications Response Manager
Technology capable of standing up a communications network when local infrastructure is down. And global staff, including over 630 chefs, living ready and prepared to cook when they get our call. None of it can be assembled after the fact. That’s the part that can only be funded in advance.
Then We Adapt
Once we’re on the ground and running, the plan meets reality. Adaptability is baked into our operating ethos, and it looks like having the flexibility, and the funding, to overcome constraints as they appear.
“We will do anything that is in our hands to arrive to a community. Sometimes it’s taking one plane, one boat, and one horse trip to ride to a community. We have done that and we will do it again.”
Juan Camilo Jimenez, WCK Response Director
Service Begins
We’re back to the part World Central Kitchen is most known for. Chefs and restaurant partners in action with their networks, staff, and recipes. Locally-sourced ingredients and communities working together to support one another day by day. Food is more than sustenance: it’s nourishment, hope, and agency. In times of uncertainty, not having to worry about feeding yourself and your loved ones relieves a portion of the stress.
“Comfort food is called comfort food for a reason. And people look for those comfort foods when there’s a disaster. They may have lost their home or a loved one. And the one thing that we can offer them is comfort in our food. That’s why I became a chef 25 years ago.”
Chef Chris Miller, WCK Culinary Manager
You Help Us Respond. We Cook the Meals.
All of us are here because we care deeply about meeting people who are living in the midst of a crisis with a meal that tastes like home. That’s why this is a call to action for right now. Urgency might live in the headlines, but the ability to respond is built between them.
Being Ready For When Crisis Happens— Hinges on You
“The biggest thing that I want donors to know is that the amount of preparation that goes into this work is more than what I realized when I first started. I thought it was what we see in the pictures where we get on the ground and we talk to people, and we learn what they want to cook and then we just cook. But the amount of prep that goes behind it is 90% of the job.”
Chef Chris Miller, WCK Culinary Manager
We’re hoping you see the critical role you didn’t know you were playing. You’re why the networks can be maintained, the kitchens can be built, and the food can be made. You’re why a response director can be on a plane within hours of the disaster. Readiness is a challenge only won yesterday, and we can’t win it without you.
Yes, we cook the meals, but your support is the reason why each and every plate is possible.
Give Now, While There’s Still Time to Get Ready
We can’t say when the next crisis will happen, but we know it will.
“Sadly, more crises are happening around the world year after year, more emergencies, more conflict is happening.”
Juan Camilo Jimenez, WCK Response Director
Your gift today is why someone whose whole community has been devastated will have a warm meal tomorrow, whether they’re your next-door neighbor or a family on the other side of the globe.
Food is care cooked and served, and with your help, we’ll be ready to respond For When Crisis Happens—
We can’t be ready For When Crisis Happens— without you.
Make your gift now through 9/22 and your impact is doubled, thanks to a match from a generous donor.
