Winter is finally here in Kalamazoo but shots are going into arms at a faster pace. Kalamazoo County and the State of Michigan appear to be doing better in slowing the Coronavirus spread, and with our masking and distancing, hopefully we will keep that trend going. We are thrilled at Feed the Fight Kalamazoo to be able to feed the vaccinators, offering community solidarity to staff and volunteers with the County, Bronson and Family Health Center who are helping our community fight this virus and reduce the burden on our overrun healthcare workers.

 Here are the latest Feed the Fight Kalamazoo numbers through this week:

• • 8295 meals delivered 
  • 110 distinct deliveries this Fall/Winter, 132 in Spring/Summer for a total of 242 
  • 100 local restaurants that we have purchased meals from
  • 1 healthcare hero award from the Family Health Center
  • Well over 300 individual donations
  • Dozens of volunteers

We are delighted this week to be calling on restaurant number 100 to prepare meals for the frontline. The final three restaurants getting us to 100? O’Duffy’s, Sarkozy Bakery and Saffron Indian Cuisine. See a full restaurant list here on our homepage: www.ftfkalamazoo.org. 

As vaccinations continue to rise and hospitalization rates go down, it is our hope that we will be able to support more of the people giving us that protection we need to maybe have a hug outside our pods again. We have two deliveries to Bronson vaccination clinics planned for next week. 

We have 17 deliveries from 15 restaurants coming up this week and would welcome coverage of our volunteers and restaurant partners feeding the frontline, including the vaccinators. You can see a lot of what we have been up to on our social media feed. 

In the words of one of Feed the Fight Kalamazoo’s co-founders, Adam Strong-Morse at the FHC Healthcare Heroes Award Ceremony:

“Most of all, we want to thank the people who have been providing the healthcare work in the community, the frontline responders, in the difficult, scary work of dealing with this pandemic and we wanted to reach out to help them and the community really responded and came together. We had a huge outpouring of support and we were able to provide our support to the people who were really on the frontlines of the fight against Covid. And that is what makes us happiest about this – that we were able to make a difference in the community, we were able to allow the people in the community who wanted a way to help, to find a way that they could help the restaurants, they could help the community, and most of all they could help the healthcare workers and frontline people in the fight against Covid.”