Dear TNFP Family–
What a whirlwind, and what a hard couple of weeks for our community. After coming together as a city to respond to the devastation left by the tornadoes only ten days ago, we are now grappling with what it looks like to support one another when we are advised to no longer physically gather together. The warning is in direct conflict with our mission “to bring people together,” but in a time of so much unknown, we are taking both the needs of our community and the health and safety of our staff and program participants very seriously.
Our team is closely monitoring developments surrounding the COVID-19 outbreak, and out of an abundance of caution, we have made the difficult decision to suspend our volunteer program effective Monday, March 16 through April 5th. We will make a decision about re-opening our doors to volunteers based on guidance from experts and public health officials in the coming weeks.
For our kitchens this means that all cook teams, prep times, and volunteer truck runs are suspended until further notice.
For our gardens this means we will be delaying the opening of our community gardens and suspending all volunteer support times until further notice.
For our partners we will continue to work to support your ongoing programming and important work to the best of our ability. We understand that for many of you, shutting down your programs is an incredibly hard decision and will put a huge burden on the populations you serve. Please let us know of any changes to your ongoing programming so we can adjust our support as needed.
In the meantime, we are committed to meeting the needs of our community to the very best of our ability and stand ready to assist our city’s shelters, schools, nonprofits, and other front-line partners in minimizing the impact of this crisis. Our efforts to prepare weekly meals for our community will continue. We hope that taking this action now ensures the resiliency of our meal preparation and delivery efforts, as well as limits the risk of spreading coronavirus to both our staff and our community at large. We will continue to monitor developments and provide additional updates to you about how we are responding to this global health emergency.
Our love and thanks!