COVID-19 - Emergency Food & Farm Delivery Program
Donation protected
We are raising money to bring food to people into the epicenter of the COVID-19 Pandemic in the United States while simultaneously helping farms who have been left without any market outlets and face insolvency and going out of business for good.
We will accomplish our goal by aggregating food from local farms and initiating an emergency service that will deliver produce boxes to peoples' neighborhoods and homes in the Puget Sound Region. Our initial focus will be the greater Seattle area and Whatcom County.
We are asking for your help because we seek to get this program going in the immediate future and we lack the necessary resources to implement and commence the effort alone. Our farm, too, is struggling just to make ends meet and we need this project just as much as other farms.
Our farm is has considerable experience aggregating food from local producers and bringing it to drop-off locations throughout the region, so we feel compelled to respond to our current crisis quickly, professionally, and without hesitation. In just a matter of days we have built a coalition of both consumers eager for this service and farmers eager to supply it.
Your donation will help us get this project up and running quickly, and will help farmers stay in business while simultaneously feeding at-risk populations.
Why the urgency?
We are seeking to commence as soon as possible because people have been ordered to hunker down, limit social interaction, and avoid groups of people. People are afraid to go the grocery stores. People are trying to practice social distancing, and are being asked by our governmental leaders to stay at home. But, everyone has to eat. At the same time, most local farmers currently have no outlets to sell their food because farmers markets have been cancelled and restaurants have been closed down except for take-out and delivery. So, our project will do two necessary things:
1) Bring food to those who need it most
2) Aggregate and deliver food from farmers who have no other outlets.
Donated funds will go toward staff time to get the project running, assembling the basic supplies needed to fulfill the project in a safe and professional manner, paying for the packing facility/cold-storage/vehicles needed to aggregate product, pack up orders, and deliver them, and also provide short-term loans to farms in dire need of money right now who can then can pay back the loan via produce that they grow and we deliver.
The response to this project has been overwhelming so far, and in addition to us delivering food to neighborhoods throughout the region, we are also engaging citizens in neighborhoods to "pay it forward" through community engagement. In this case, the community engagement is that site-hosts who receive food boxes for their neighborhood are also volunteering to accept food boxes and then take it from there by delivering food boxes to their neighbors who may be without transportation, sick, immunocompromised, elderly, and/or otherwise unable to leave their homes.
We will accomplish our goal by aggregating food from local farms and initiating an emergency service that will deliver produce boxes to peoples' neighborhoods and homes in the Puget Sound Region. Our initial focus will be the greater Seattle area and Whatcom County.
We are asking for your help because we seek to get this program going in the immediate future and we lack the necessary resources to implement and commence the effort alone. Our farm, too, is struggling just to make ends meet and we need this project just as much as other farms.
Our farm is has considerable experience aggregating food from local producers and bringing it to drop-off locations throughout the region, so we feel compelled to respond to our current crisis quickly, professionally, and without hesitation. In just a matter of days we have built a coalition of both consumers eager for this service and farmers eager to supply it.
Your donation will help us get this project up and running quickly, and will help farmers stay in business while simultaneously feeding at-risk populations.
Why the urgency?
We are seeking to commence as soon as possible because people have been ordered to hunker down, limit social interaction, and avoid groups of people. People are afraid to go the grocery stores. People are trying to practice social distancing, and are being asked by our governmental leaders to stay at home. But, everyone has to eat. At the same time, most local farmers currently have no outlets to sell their food because farmers markets have been cancelled and restaurants have been closed down except for take-out and delivery. So, our project will do two necessary things:
1) Bring food to those who need it most
2) Aggregate and deliver food from farmers who have no other outlets.
Donated funds will go toward staff time to get the project running, assembling the basic supplies needed to fulfill the project in a safe and professional manner, paying for the packing facility/cold-storage/vehicles needed to aggregate product, pack up orders, and deliver them, and also provide short-term loans to farms in dire need of money right now who can then can pay back the loan via produce that they grow and we deliver.
The response to this project has been overwhelming so far, and in addition to us delivering food to neighborhoods throughout the region, we are also engaging citizens in neighborhoods to "pay it forward" through community engagement. In this case, the community engagement is that site-hosts who receive food boxes for their neighborhood are also volunteering to accept food boxes and then take it from there by delivering food boxes to their neighbors who may be without transportation, sick, immunocompromised, elderly, and/or otherwise unable to leave their homes.
Organizer
Clayton Burrows
Organizer
Everson, WA