Sankara Healthcare Foundation’s (
www.giftofhealth.us) COVID response has been simple - rally the community quickly, find out what the local needs are, and fulfill them.
Sankara’s HEAL (Healthy Eating and Living) project has been promoting a plant-based diet and a healthy lifestyle for over two years through which we provide hot meals to soup kitchens and shelters in the Boston and Seattle areas. Over the last two years, our amazing volunteers and donors have helped us serve over 5000 plant-based meals to the at-risk folks in these communities.
COVID Response
Once COVID happened, we started getting flooded with requests for food donations and there were some serious challenges to deal with.
Soup kitchens that we served at were closed and also disallowed food that was not commercially prepared. We had to innovate by providing a voucher system through which the soup kitchen would distribute vouchers and the recipient would pick up a take-out meal at a local restaurant that we had identified. We have touched lives at Seattle’s Gospel Union Mission’s Men's shelter, Sophia’s Way Women’s Shelter, Hope Place and East Boston Community Soup Kitchen and Community HealthLink in Boston.
The other big drive for our work is at local hospitals where the frontline staff are fighting this pandemic. Some amazing physicians and nurses and ER staff coordinate with us and we help by delivering food to individual units in various hospitals. We have played a small part in helping the front line workers at Winchester Hospital, Lawrence General, UMass Memorial, Harrington Hospital and the Boston VA in Boston, and in Swedish Pine Lake Primary care Clinic in Seattle. We will be serving at Evergreen Hospital in Kirkland, WA as well as other hospitals in the Boston area in the weeks to come.
We went from doing an average of about 2500 meals a year to having a request pipeline of over 2500 meals just for April 2020.
The response from the community has been overwhelmingly positive. But with each positive post in Facebook comes new donation requests. We were not planning to do a fundraiser, but realized that we needed help if we wanted to help all the people asking for help.
How to donate:
http://covidhelp.giftofhealth.us is the way to support us.
California
We now have volunteers helping coordinate meal donations to soup kitchens in San Francisco as well.
Masks
Our amazing volunteers have been busy making masks and supplying them by the dozens each day to hospital staff.
Get involved
There are plenty of ways you can get involved.
Connect with us and be part of our community
Short term
Help us make and donate masks
We still need a lot of masks. If you have time to give, and have a sewing machine, please let us know and we will coordinate with you on how to make masks.
Be part of our food donations
We are unable to take actual food donations during COVID. In lieu of that, we request that you sponsor hot meals by going to
http://covidhelp.giftofhealth.us/ and donating.
Long term
Project HEAL would love your participation in feeding the at-risk people with healthy meals. We would love to hear from you about new places we can serve at and make a difference. Reach out to us at heal@giftofhealth.us
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