Mutual Meals: Week One Update

After talking to various partners and seeking opinions on how best to help provide food to those who need it, we decided to start a free dinner meal delivery service in the 80214 zip code this past Monday.

The Mutual Meals program has three goals:

Provide a delicious dinner meal for folks who need extra encouragement
Help create cashflow for local restaurants
Create volunteer opportunities for community members

Thanks to great volunteer delivery drivers (John, Alicia, James, Dawn, Renee, Erin, Greg, Casey, David and Becca), we were able to deliver delicious dinner meals to 86 community members who needed a little encouragement this week. These included seniors, families from our local schools, healthcare professionals and other community members impacted by job losses. As our delivery drivers dropped off the meals, and kept their physical distance, they greeted the recipients of the meals because we value the social connections as well as the meals delivered. Social isolation can be hard on many of our community members.

Special thanks to Cody and the team at Providence at 5280 for providing delicious meals that folks raved about each night. Our goal is that this increased business from the deliveries will help Providence keep their cashflow going so they can cover their costs and pay their employees.

We are so thankful for how the community has stepped up to support this project financially. As of this afternoon, community members have donated over $5,100 to support the Mutual Meals project.

Based on the success of the program in its first week, our goal is to keep the program going through April and May as the community rebounds from the COVID-19 pandemic. This next week we expect more deliveries as local students head back to online learning and we receive more referrals for family meal deliveries from teachers and staff.

Online ordering and referrals are open from 8 am-4:00 pm Monday-Thursday for an evening delivery from 5-7 p.m. We post the link on our main program page here each morning.

Here’s our schedule for meal deliveries next week: