Food For Thought’s 19th annual fundraiser is going virtual this year. The Forestville food bank’s funds help bring groceries to the front doorstep of many Sonoma County residents living with HIV, AIDS and now COVID-19, in addition to other serious illnesses. Food For Thought (FFT) provides free healthy meals, vitamins, supplements, nutritional counseling and groceries to over 2,000 clients, according to its website.
Ron Karp, the nonprofit’s executive director, said this year’s campaign is called “Dining IN For Life” as a play on its usual title, “Dining Out For Life” due to restrictions under the pandemic. The fundraiser runs all day Dec. 3 at the 60-plus restaurants participating throughout the county. Those interested can go to the nonprofit’s website for the complete list.
Karp said the restaurants will pass out envelopes for the fundraiser’s raffle for anyone pulling up for takeout. Patrons can fill out the form and slip cash, a check, or credit card information into the envelope and mail it back to FFT to be entered in the raffle, he said. Anyone who returns an envelope back will be entered in the drawing regardless of whether they donate, although the envelopes list how patrons can also donate at the food bank’s website or over text, according to Karp.
FFT’s website presents three prizes, including a $500 gift certificate for Oliver’s Market and $320-worth of a five-course tasting menu for four people at Gravenstein Grill in Sebastopol. The grand prize is a mini wine cellar of 36 bottles of Sonoma County wines worth $800. The food bank will inform the winners by Jan. 15 and participants must be at least 21 years-old, the website said.
The “Dining In For Life” fundraiser comes at a time when the local need for food access is heightened by the pandemic, as those infected isolate at home and locals take the financial hits of various industries. Karp said the fundraiser seeks to support local businesses that in normal years donated anywhere between 25% to 100% of their proceeds on the day of the annual fundraiser. 2020 is, well, different.
“You know, nobody’s going to be eating outside in December. So the restaurants are doing takeout, and not to mention they’ve been so terribly affected by COVID, [so] we didn’t feel like we could ask them for a donation,” he said. “It’s kind of us giving back to them, and we’re asking our donors to go out and get takeout food and make a donation for Food for Thought.”
The Forestville nonprofit has seen bigger changes than raising funds online in the last eight months since the coronavirus seeped throughout Sonoma County.
“It feels like it’s a cyclone that goes through here everyday and all the food gets sucked up and removed from the building and then we have to load it back in so that the next day we can do it all over again,” Karp said. “It’s just astounding how much food comes in and out of this building every day.”
Karp said FFT got a call from the Public Health Department in May that a family of eight all tested positive for COVID-19 and needed help getting food. Thus, the COVID-19 Nutrition Program was born. The program has reached over 1,200 people with the virus since. “We’re serving more and more people each week, so this is a huge need in the community to provide this type of service,” he said.
“We’ve done okay this year, given the way people have stepped up,” Karp said. “It’s kind of like a year to year thing. We don’t really know what next year looks like right now, we don’t know whether or not the government is going to provide the kind of stimulus that they did this year to help people with COVID. We’ll certainly need that in order to serve as many people as we did this year. We’ll need help in order to do that.”
