As an essential services provider, Rainbow Kitchen has remained open throughout the pandemic. We increased the scope of our services to meet the needs of newly-unemployed individuals in our community while continuing to serve our regular program participants, who were already struggling to make ends meet before this crisis. We modified our systems and procedures significantly – in some cases drastically – to ensure the safety of our staff, volunteers and program participants.
Our Food Pantry program serves low-income residents of six local communities. Pre-Covid, our in-house pantry distributions were held monthly, with large numbers of participants attending one of two monthly pantry dates, and “shopping” through our pantry area to select their own foods. We normally had a robust group of volunteers to assist with all aspects of the Food Pantry program. Since mid-March, we have been working almost exclusively without volunteers, and we are scheduling pantry participants to pick up their food by individual appointment. We have also worked out arrangements with the management of each of our off-site seniors’ apartment building pantries, to ensure that our vulnerable seniors continue to receive the food assistance they rely on. This new food distribution system is working out very well in terms of social distancing, although it is necessarily much more time- and labor-intensive. In the absence of volunteers, members of our staff are working increased hours to help with packing boxes and getting food to people in need, in addition to their regular daily work.
We modified our Breakfast program, normally an on-site served-meal program, to provide the daily meals as grab-and-go. All meals are individually packaged in take-out containers, and we distribute meals at our front door, along with beverages and snacks for later, and bread, baked goods, and fresh produce as available. Children of all ages have been coming to the Breakfast program, and we provide daily extras for the children, including child-friendly foods for an additional meal later, children’s books, nutritional education materials targeting children, and healthy snack items.
Our Kids Café program was temporarily suspended at the outset of the pandemic, when each of the program sites notified us that they were discontinuing their programs in adherence to safety restrictions. After a couple of almost-starts in early- to mid-summer, our Mon View Heights and Best of the Batch program sites were able to resume programming at a reduced capacity in the later part of the summer, and we are again providing daily dinner meals to both sites. We are looking forward to providing afternoon snacks for children at the Carnegie Library of Homestead when they are able to resume.
In addition to meeting the increased need for supplemental food assistance, we continue to provide Case Management and supportive services to help meet the many other needs of our low-income neighbors. Although we have not been able to invite other organizations to provide in-person outreach and education services to our program participants, we provide continually-updated information packets to everyone we serve. The packets include information about Covid-related issues as well as an extensive variety of services and resources that are available to help meet the great need in our community.