Current and Emerging Needs in the Wake of COVID-19

Cooking and home-delivering medically tailored meals for the most vulnerable people in NYC is more important than ever during this unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic. The majority of our clients are seniors, many live alone, and all are living with one or more underlying conditions such as cancer, renal disease, and cardiovascular disease. Our home-delivered meal program is essential to their well-being. God’s Love remains open, having been deemed an Essential Services Provider by the NYC Office of Emergency Management. Our phones are ringing off the hook with increased requests for meals. We are adjusting our production plan to accommodate growth in our volunteer-driven program while taking every precaution to minimize risk to clients, volunteers and staff. The normal weekly demand for our program has increased five-fold. As we race to add up to 1,500 new clients to our program, here is what we are doing to maintain operations and reach as many people as possible in this very challenging environment:

• Shelf-stable food. We have delivered 21 days of shelf-stable food to all clients in addition to our regular meal delivery in case our service is disrupted
• Reaching more clients. We are ramping up operations to provide meals to more than 1,500 new clients, preparing up to 4,000 additional meals per day by the fall
• Temporary staff. We are hiring additional delivery, kitchen, office, facilities, and meal packaging staff to meet rapid growth
• Additional cleaning. We have increased the number of facilities staff who now clean the entire building multiple times a day
• Laptops and iPads. We are purchasing additional equipment to ensure more staff can work remotely
• Delivery vans. We are adding more refrigerated vans to our fleet which will be necessary at this time of incredible growth.

We are committed to doing all we can to ensure our vulnerable neighbors have the nutrition they need to stay healthy and safe. Thank you to all those who have helped support this important work. If you would like to fund any of the above efforts, we thank you, and ask that you reach out to David Ludwigson at dludwigson@glwd.org.

Thank you for your ongoing support.