The Park's Finest Heatwave Relief Fund

Twenty nine months ago, we reached out to the community to help us stay afloat, keep our team safely employed, and serve the people who were taking care of us during the initial and subsequent surges of COVID-19. With your collective help and angel sponsors in the Umami Fund, we were able to feed 100,000 hospital personnel and firefighters.

 

We encountered numerous frontliners who faced countless stresses and difficulties while trying their best to keep themselves and their families safe. The effort to maintain operations during these times was a challenge not only physically, mentally, and emotionally but like every single small business venture in the country, it’s been economically devastating. Finding every effort to pivot and meet public health concerns and criteria and our consumer and customer base's safety and comfort lead to expenses and expenditures not generally allocated for operations.

Since opening our doors, our margins have been razor thin, with many months sometimes taking a loss to just keep us moving forward to the following week. This recent heatwave has put us down on multiple fronts. Since last week, power has intermittently blacked out in our section of the Temple-Beverly Corridor and Angelino Heights. The loss of sales opportunities, the cost of labor and operating expenditures, the expense of canceling and refunding catering bookings, the purchases of relief needs such as generators, lamps, and dry ice, and the loss of discarded product has been a lot to deal with during these unprecedented circumstances. It happened again this Friday afternoon, September 9th, with conservative estimates for return of service later this weekend. This is a potential knockout punch for our business.

 

We need a lifeline. It’s embarrassing to reach out in this manner, but we’ve been rejected multiple times in our applications for government disaster relief because of the pandemic’s impact. And we look to lose out on an entire weekend based on our experience thus far with three days of closing operations during the rolling blackouts and popped transformers. We don’t know where to turn to except to our community. If there is anything you can spare, we appreciate it.

We thank you for reading this.

With the deepest humility,

Johneric Concordia

The Park's Finest