Dear Feastlings,
November and December pushed a gigantic Pause button for us. Yes, we brought meals to Youth on Their Own, but the grand plans we had to feed scores of people throughout the holiday season had the rug pulled from under them as people started throwing parties and hosting catered events even as we hurried to cover shifts with what limited staff we had. The upshot was that we had to put our donation runs on hold while we took what business we could to keep our doors open, and now, with the holidays more or less behind us, we can regroup and get back to other other mission, feeding people who could use a good meal.
We’ll get to our whole list, eventually, but we’re kicking off 2022 with a donation run to one of the organizations that’s particularly won my heart: Sister José Women’s Center. There’s not an organization we deliver to that doesn’t mean something special to this entire community, but we have a staffer here who came to Tucson to find his disappeared mother here, shown up in Tucson from the East Coast with a traumatic brain injury, disoriented and homeless, and I’ve gotten to see firsthand the amazing kind hearts of the people at Sister José. Even writing this I find myself welling up with tears.
So we’ll start the year off with food for the women who rely on the Center in the midst of cold and rain, and a lonely, fearful life on the street. We’ll be going over on Friday, January 7, with a few days’ worth of food for both the lucky women who get fed there and the luckier women who can be put up there for the night. I was lucky enough to be walked through the Center one day and I’ve never seen anything like the restful sleep that comes with safety and security after having had none for an extended period of time.
We’ll be bringing food to other organizations over the upcoming months, but we made a promise when we received an extremely generous grant from Chase Sapphire and The Infatuation that we’d be trying to even things up a bit: throughout the pandemic, we’ve contributed a meal for every four meals donated by the philanthropic people of Tucson (and beyond,) but this one is on us.
You’ve all been amazingly generous with your donations these past 22 months, and we’re happy to take this opportunity to be the generous ones this time around. We’ll be donating more meals soon, so if you’re itching to donate again or for the first time, your moment will come, but for now, we’ve gotten a leg up and we want to reach a hand out ourselves. If you want to learn more about Sister José, you can take a look at their website here:
We’ll let you know where we’re headed next.
Love,
The people of Feast