Giving Tuesday: An Update on Just Fare Community Kitchen
November 29th, 2022
Giving Tuesday: An Update on Just Fare Community Kitchen
we're recommitting ourselves and launching a new fundraiser.
As we look across the holidays to 2023 and the year ahead for Just Fare Community Kitchen, we believe now more than ever that everyone deserves equitable access to delicious and dignified meals, indefinitely. And so, we are renewing our commitment to supporting our community with donated meals, and we’ll do it in solidarity with the network of community partners that we’ve built relationships with since 2020.
To support this continued effort, we’re launching a new campaign to fund donated meals this week – A Meal a Month – in which we ask you to consider making a recurring donation to support one meal per month. We’ll track and report on these donated meals transparently, as we always do, sharing details about where meals are going each week and on our total impact.
LOOKING BACK
In 2020 when we launched, we won a contract with Alameda County that supplied 16 months of funding for us to donate and distribute approximately 6,000 meals per week to our neighbors in need through a network of community partners. In addition to acute food relief, these donated meals provided a runway for the community partners to develop programs and events around meals as a way to enhance access to the communities they serve, be that for health care, senior care, gatherings for the LGBTQIA+ community or basic services and care for unhoused individuals.
Our donated meal program is innovative in its approach to food relief, donating meals of the same variety and quality as our Workplace catering clients, and successful, resulting in over 400,000 meals donated to date. And because of our grassroots community partner network, it also reaches into communities frequently untouched by traditional social safety net services.
After numerous extensions and impassioned speeches from community leaders to the Board of Supervisors, the funding expired in January 2022, leaving a gap where the millions of meals, accompanying services and programs that it collectively supported used to be.
In anticipation of this, and wanting to ensure that Just Fare Community Kitchen had a mechanism for perpetual funding, in June 2021 we launched our Community Impact Program, which allocates 1% of Just Fare’s revenue to producing donated meals alongside workplace meals. This means that by working with Just Fare for tasty and nourishing Workplace meals, gorgeous and well-sourced Event catering or innovative and sustainable Design services, each of our clients has an impact on the community by adding to those donated meal totals.
the present moment
In 2022, we’ve tracked the 1% all year, disbursing meals in batches in April and then again in October through December, through 6 community partners: Third Eye Soul Kitchen, Queer Healing Arts Center, Punks with Lunch, Forever Commercial Cleaning, YesU Janitorial and the African Center. As of mid-November we’ve donated 3,703 meals across Workplace, Events and Design, and we’re on track to donate over 4,000 meals by the end of the year.
1% IS NOT ENOUGH TO MEET THE NEED
The bottom line for us moving forward is that we’re committed to serving our community, and although we’re excited that our 1% model is having an impact, the need for equitable access to delicious and dignified meals exceeds 1% of our revenue (and always will). It’s only part of the solution. So in 2023 we’re pursuing several streams of funding that we hope will ramp us back up to our donated meal production levels from 2020 and 2021. These include:
Our 1% model that’s in place as part of our Community Impact Program
A plan for long-term funding for 2023 and beyond
A Meal a Month campaign that asks anyone and everyone to make a recurring monthly donation that funds one meal per month for community donation
We’re excited to drive our innovative, caring and successful model for food relief forward. We hope you will be a part of it, and stay tuned for updates!
With Gratitude,
Just Fare