Food Education Fund NYC’s Response to COVID-19

March 26, 2020

The Food Education Fund (FEF) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that works hand-in-hand with Food & Finance High School (FFHS). As NYC’s only culinary high school, Food and Finance High School provides a unique educational opportunity to students and families in the community.

Like all schools closed recently in the New York City region due to the coronavirus pandemic, The Food Education Fund has taken steps to address their FFHS students and alumni groups with valuable information and next steps.

Below is the letter from Eliza Loehr, Executive Director, Food Education Fund:

Hi Community!!! We miss seeing you IRL! AND we’ve been so inspired by the thoughtful and quick work you’ve all been doing over the past week to support your communities!! We hope you’re all staying safe, feeling well, and taking some time to breath and pause as we start to take stock of what this all means for us, for our families, for our communities, and for the world. We wanted to fill you in on our response and our next steps:

WHAT WE’VE BEEN UP TO

1. Direct Support to Alumni

As we gathered information from our alumni, we found that COVID-19 has thrown MANY alums into a financial crisis, leaving them unable to pay bills, rent, and for food. To this end, we’ve decided to redirect our alumni scholarship program and will be providing grants directly to alums in need of support. We launched the application an hour ago, and have already had a huge number of responses. If you would like to contribute, please consider making a donation here to support these efforts.

2. Food Distribution

Thanks to our amazing partners at Goya and Colavita, we were able to give out nearly 20,000 meals to the students of Park West Campus this past week! Check out this link for some of the coverage on this.

3. Creating the Food Hub & Food Map

Check out the links above if you haven’t already for more info on how toget help and resources as well as how to give help and resources. We’re excited that both of these have been a helpful resource to the 15,000+ folks who have viewed them over the past week!

4. Transitioning Programs Online

Today we launched the online version of many of our programs directly to students, and have also been working on connecting one-on-one to see how our students are doing and how we can best support them.

OUR NEXT STEPS

1. Continuing to Support our Students and Alumni

We have created an email hotline for our students and alums to ask any COVID-19 questions they have, and we aim to tap into our resource network to help them along. Areas of need are knowledge of employment law, HR, PR/media, mental health resources, personal finances, and much more! If you are an expert in any of the fields above and willing to help answer questions for our students and alums, please let me know!

2. Redirecting Resource Hub for Longer Term
While we were glad to be able to be a resource as the uncertainty unfolded early last week, we know that in the long term our organization is not the most equipped to lead the relief efforts. We are working closely with many larger organizations who are creating longer term relief plans, and our aim is to use our resource hub to direct people to the great resources they are creating.

THANK YOU! We just wanted to say THANK YOU all for being our tireless, supportive, and grounding community!! We hope you all are safe, healthy, and finding a few positives in this forced reset amongst the chaos!

To learn more about the Food Education Fund and Food and Finance High School, visit their website