Today's "Day in a Dozen" features a new, very exciting partnership with St. Luke's Community House.
Last week we launched a new partnership with St. Luke's Community House in West Nashville, serving 1,330 meals each week for St. Luke's preschool and mobile meals programs. St. Luke's Community House has been meeting the needs of families in The Nations community for more than 100 years. St. Luke's is a United Way Family Resource Center, providing a comprehensive list of programs and services for children and youth, adults, seniors, and families as a whole. As part of this new partnership, The Nashville Food Project has taken over St. Luke's large commercial kitchen, giving TNFP a second kitchen from which we can produce even more meals to feed our city and bring communities together.
We began serving meals at St. Luke's on Monday, March 28. Longtime TNFP volunteer cook Ann Fundis, who is helping to launch the partnership as Kitchen Manager, arrived bright and early at 6:30 AM to begin prepping breakfast for the preschool and getting the kitchen ready for the day ahead.
Here's Ann Fundis checking inventory of a donation of healthy snack packs.
Here are our meal counts for all of our St. Luke's meals.
We're in organizational heaven over here!
By 8:00 AM, Ann was joined by TNFP staffer Sarah Morgan who began serving breakfast in the preschool classrooms. Monday morning's breakfast was sausage biscuits with orange juice.
At 8:30 AM, the staff, joined by St. Luke's interim cook Mike, began prepping and cooking lunches for St. Luke's mobile meals program and the preschool. At 9:45 AM, volunteers Debbie Willis and Shellye Geske arrived to begin plating mobile meals lunches. The delicious lunch of baked ziti with meatballs, carrot and raisin salad and orange slices fed both the seniors receiving mobile meals and the preschoolers.
At 10:15 AM, St. Luke's mobile meals volunteers arrived to pack up the lunches and begin deliveries to seniors throughout the community. We loved sharing with these volunteers a bit about TNFP and learning more about why they give their time to this vital program at St. Luke's.
By 10:30 AM, all of the mobile meals were out for delivery, and our volunteers had some time to begin prepping for afternoon snacks for the preschool and other meals later in the week. Here's Shellye and Debbie prepping kale from our gardens for Thursday's meals.
At 11:00 AM, we begin serving lunches to the preschool classrooms. At this point, we've already served 200 meals, and it's not even noon yet!
Here's Sarah loading up a cart to deliver meals to classrooms.
And here she is setting up lunch in one of the preschool classrooms. There, the teachers will portion the food out and serve the kids this yummy lunch.
Once lunch is served, we clean up before the staff take a much-needed break. Then at 1:00, we begin prep for the last meal of the day - snacks! Today, the preschoolers are getting some of those healthy snack packs of cheese and crackers Ann prepped earlier along with some apples that Sarah slices before serving at 2:00 PM. Once snacks are served, the staff preps meals for the following day before cleaning up and heading home at 3:30 PM.
And that's a wrap! In our first day at St. Luke's we served 260 meals! We are so excited for this new partnership and how it will help us grow our reach in this community. We're honored to partner with an organization with a long history in the city of Nashville, and we can't wait to see all that this partnership will hold for the future of TNFP. For more information on this partnership, please contact us at info@thenashvillefoodproject.org. Be on the lookout for volunteer opportunities to open up shortly!