KINCADE FIRE CHEF RESPONSE: SONOMA FAMILY MEAL
UPDATE: WE HAVE REACTIVATED FOR THE KINCADE FIRE! Sonoma Family Meal is serving evacuees in Petaluma, Healdsburg and Santa Rosa with produce we have purchased from local farmers and meat from local purveyors. DONATE LOCAL! Our chefs and volunteers work tirelessly for our community.
Please help us continue our mission. WE are a 501c3 non profit.
Sonoma Family Meal came together in the worst moments of the raging California Wildfires to feed a traumatized, recently-displaced population not used to asking for help, but desperately in need. Our Santa Rosa-based volunteer team provides healthy, nourishing, restaurant-quality chef-made meals at no cost for anyone affected by the fires, and anyone who needs a helping hand in the kitchen.
Between Oct. 15 and Nov. 15, we served an estimated 80,000 meals. As of Jan. 1, we restarted our program to focus directly on families who have lost homes. We currently have 35 families who receive 4 meals per week.
We value great food, and since launching have served vegan tofu masala, ahi tuna with farro, stuffed acorn squash and more. All made with ingredients donated by local farmers and ranchers, much of it organic, and prepared by local chefs.
Those local product donations -- organic fruits and veggies from FEED Sonoma (we have a fund to pay our local farmers), pasta from Pasta Etc., bread from Costeaux Bakery, proteins from Victorian Farmstead Meats, and literally hundreds of other other purveyors. We also work with the SRJC culinary program to intake large cuts of meat used in knife skills classes and other food that may have otherwise gone unloved. 
Heather Irwin, a restaurant writer in Sonoma County, created the nonprofit to bring families displaced by the fires together with hundreds of chefs who desperately wanted to help.
What started as a simple plan to hand out prepared meals donated by renowned restaurants like Single Thread in Healdsburg, Two Birds One Stone in Napa and San Francisco's Aster has now turned into a full-on professional cooking operation with a staff of more than 20.
All funds raised will be used to fund our operations to produce meals and go toward paying the local farmers, ranchers and chefs who have so graciously donated their time and ingredients to our cause.
Like any other fledgling organization, we have immediate needs, from buying equipment we can't get donated, to gassing up our donated vans, purchasing pantry items like sugar and flour, paying for extra garbage pickups. This is an entirely volunteer-run organization, so we are dependent on donations like this GoFundMe. Thank you!