Between May 2020 and June 2021 East York Rotary Club members cooked and delivered over 1200 hot meals to the Bethany Baptist food bank, and during the winter of 2020, to help them abide by Covid-19 restrictions and maintain the distribution outdoors we did a separate fundraiser to purchase a tent and two heaters to ensure the volunteers and recipients would stay warm and stay safe.
- Butterfly Pasta in Pink Sauce with Tuna & Green Peas
When the pandemic first hit we had to rethink how we could be useful to our community. With restrictions on gatherings, in-person volunteer opportunities dwindled and our flagship fundraiser events were all put on hold and ultimately cancelled. When we reached out to our community partner organizations, what was made immediately apparent is that the need had risen greatly, one community partner in particular, The Bethany Baptist Church & East York Strategy runs a weekly food bank in East York, before the pandemic began they regularly served 175 people per week, this number has increased to over 400 people.
In May 2020, we decided to direct all our available funds to local organizations and make food security a priority, we donated $7000 directly to East York Strategies to ensure they could continue running the food bank and to support their camps programs later in the year.
But it still felt like we could do more, and our members wanted to do more hands on work, so we came up with the idea of doing a virtual group cook, where we would decide on a recipe beforehand, distribute 10-20 containers to each participant and then meet on zoom on Monday night and one member would guide us through the recipe. This was a lovely fellowship event, and we managed to recruit friends and family who were eager to pitch in and give back by helping us prepare meals. Our team of delivery drivers would collect the frozen meals by Wednesday and deliver them to Bethany Baptist Church in time for distribution on Thursday.
Between May 2020 and June 2021 we cooked and delivered over 1200 meals to the food bank, and during winter 2020, to help them abide by Covid-19 restrictions and maintain the distribution outdoors we did a separate fundraiser to purchase a tent and two heaters to ensure the volunteers and recipients would stay warm.