TRENDS Diary: Feeding the Frontlines

TRENDS Diary, a project of the Community Foundation of Boulder County, is a place for Boulder County residents of all ages to share personal experiences that relate to a pressing community need. The focus, for now, is on our shared need to connect and solve problems, despite the increased isolation we’re all experiencing during the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Dear TRENDS Diary,

It started on March 20, right as things were starting to get dire. I saw a blog post from the team out of San Francisco who started a similar program.

I retweeted the story and said, ‘Who is doing this in Colorado?’ I had a little back and forth with Vikas Reddy, Brad Feld and others in the community. At 8 a.m. the next morning, I got a call from Vikas who said, ‘We’re about to have a Zoom call with people who want to make this happen.’

It came together remarkably fast. Everybody was just so pumped to have an impact in our backyard. I think it took us three to four days to get Boulder Community Health Foundation to sign off. Then we were kind of off to the races.

The response has been overwhelming in the best sense of the word. In one week, we’ve raised $393,000 in donations: $193,000 of that is from community members. This outpouring of support will provide 300 meals every day for everybody at BCH for the next two months. But we’re already planning to rapidly expand to include meal deliveries for Boulder Police and Fire, senior care centers and other healthcare organizations servicing the parts of our community that need it most.

We’ve been just inundated with emails from other hospitals who want to set up similar programs in Denver, Fort Collins, Colorado Springs. I got an email yesterday from the city of Carmel, Indiana.

This isn’t something just localized to Boulder. Everywhere in the country is dealing with the exact same fallout. The hospitality industry has been decimated; folks in every hospital are going to be fighting this. This is a way to give them the fuel they need to keep the fight going.

– Kyle Judah, as told to Shay Castle

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