Month In Review/ Move To WWAca + COVID19

Dear Friends,

 

It has been a whirlwind month! In response to COVID-19, we’ve made a multitude of changes to our operations that we would love to share with you.

LOCATION
We quickly outgrew our Grant Street location as the need for food increased during the first few weeks of the shelter in place order. Woodward Academy graciously invited us to use their Middle School Cafeteria as our new base of operations. We are so grateful for the extra space to spread out, box food and line up deliveries.

MODEL
As you know, we have been a face-to-face and side-by-side operation since our inception. Needless to say, this high touch, community centric way of doing things could not continue under quarantine. Much as we miss interacting with our members and volunteers, we needed to iterate rapidly. We switched to a completely touch-free model. Here are some of our updates:

• Anyone who works or volunteers at Urban Recipe is masked.
• We maintain 10 ft of distance between people.
• Our co-op members remain at home and our small office staff has moved to logistics operations and the ‘boxer’ roles.
• We set boxes at least 10 feet apart, on the sidewalk at our pick-up site, for drivers to load into their cars.
• We have a fleet of volunteer drivers that deliver boxes all over the city!
• We were one of the first organizations in Atlanta to partner with Lyft Business to deliver our boxes to our families as a back-up to our volunteer delivery effort.
• We have also developed a relationship with UPS who will also deliver our shelf stable boxes anywhere in the metro area the next day.

VOLUME
Since the quarantine began, we’ve grown from distributing around 3,000 pounds of great food the first week to over 10,000 pounds in following weeks and this past week over 22,000 pounds! Because of Woodward’s partnership and the efforts of great volunteers, we expect this number to continue to grow as we continue operating under Covid restrictions.

THANK YOU
All of these changes are  possible because of you. We are so grateful for your generosity and care during this challenging moment and are thankful to be able to respond and serve more of our community in partnership with you.

 

 

With gratitude,
Jeremy