Preparing meals for Everyone Eats
Vermont Everyone Eats! has served more than 1,024,000 meals to residents impacted by COVID-19. The program helped save an estimated 500 restaurant jobs and provided consistent business to some 200 eateries when that industry was dealt a severe pandemic blow. The meals — from chicken-and-leek pie with salad to chicken sausage with couscous and green beans — even include local ingredients.
Yet before the state legislature established the program in August 2020 with $5 million in CARES Act relief funds, a grassroots movement sprang up across the state to feed people in need.
These early efforts — swift business pivots that involved a collaboration of restaurants and nonprofits — included ShiftMeals in Burlington, organized by the Skinny Pancake; a partnership in Vergennes among the city's Boys & Girls Club, Bar Antidote and Three Squares Café; and a southern Vermont initiative, Nourishing Artists, conceived and organized by the Downtown Brattleboro Alliance. Together, the programs provided a model for government action when the need was clear: Food insecurity rose 33 percent during the pandemic.