This fund will provide often requested, healthy, kid friendly meals and snacks to households in our network with school aged children, as families face returning to school during a pandemic.
Leader
Elina Malkin
Location
6901 Lynn Way Pittsburgh, PA 15208
This one is for the kids! Over 40% of the households helped by Pittsburgh Restaurant Workers Aid have children in their care, and we often struggle to fill requests for kid friendly meals and snacks. This fund will help us always have much requested items on hand, such as milk, eggs, pasta, sandwich supplies, and juice. These items will keep our kids healthy and happy as they go back to school, whether that be in the classroom or learning from home.
As our families are facing a return to school during a pandemic, many folks are still kept from work by ongoing restaurant restrictions, or only earning a fraction of their regular income due to decreased business. Many more parents and caretakers may not be able to return to work as school reopenings are uncertain or their childrens’ return to the classroom would be too great of a risk. PRWA aims to support healthy families during this difficult time, until the return to work and to school are safe for everyone!
Since the very beginning of Covid-19 related restaurant restrictions, Pittsburgh Restaurant Workers Aid has been collecting and distributing food resources to low income people in our community who have lost wages and tips. What started as a small group of caring industry workers dropping a few groceries or meals on porches has bloomed into a network that assists up to 200 households every week with food, baby care items, and pet supplies. Our volunteers deliver care packages directly to the doors of folks who can not access resources on their own, often due to lack of transportation, health concerns, or childcare responsibilities.
While many of our recipients’ needs are met by in-kind donations and partnerships with organizations such as 412 Food Rescue and the Western Pennsylvania Diaper Bank, we often have requests for kid friendly food that go unanswered. Approximately 40% of the households we aid have children in their care, and resources such as milk, eggs, proteins, and occasional treats are essential to their health and happiness. This fund would allow us to keep these in-demand items on hand, to include in the care packages going out to households with kids upon request.
This is especially necessary as families face tough decisions and uncertainty around the return to school. As Covid-19 health concerns continue, many caretakers will make the necessary decision to stay home from work to care for their families. If and when classrooms do close, parents and guardians will not have this choice. The uncertainty of access to safe classroom environments, as well as the halted supplemental pandemic uninsurance benefits that families were relying on to survive, are putting immense stress on the families of restaurant workers, who feel as if they have run out of resources. We need to make sure that these workers and their children don’t face hunger.
Pittsburgh Restaurant Workers Aid provides resources and community support to restaurant and hospitality workers who have lost financial, housing, food, and healthcare security. Built as a coalition of service workers in response to the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, our goal is to create a mutual aid network that can address the needs of workers in our industry, by distributing food, baby necessities, pet care items, and cleaning and hygiene products to one of the largest workforces in Allegheny County.
Our industry was one of the first to experience necessary restrictions and closures, and will be one of the last to safely reopen. Many of our workplaces will not survive this crisis, and workers are returning to the job to face both greatly increased risk and often lower earnings. In an industry with notoriously tight profit margins, sub-standard minimum wages, and a broad lack of employer provided benefits such as healthcare, paid leave, or retirement funds, our community has no safety net. PRWA is filling a gap where public benefits, such as Unemployment Compensation and food banks, have been inaccessible, inadequate, and untimely in serving the immediate and great needs of affected food and beverage workers. With continued support from our greater community, we will be able to help or colleagues stay healthy, housed, and fed through this crisis and beyond.