Food Distribution Aims to Help Hard-Hit Hospitality Workers

Share with Friends

As as Sonoma County restaurants, hotels and wineries slowly return to a semblance of normal, hundreds, perhaps thousands of the region’s hospitality workers remain without work and facing continued hard times.

Even with reopening underway, social distancing and other coronavirus-required measures have reduced staffing in restaurants, hotels and other places that cater to visitors, and recovery of those jobs will be slow, if it occurs at all.

On Friday June 12th, the Redwood Empire Food Bank and the Sonoma County Vintners Foundation will partner to distribute hundreds of food boxes to these workers in a three hour drive-through distribution at the American Ag Credit Parking Lot on Aviation Boulevard. The event is scheduled from 9AM to 12PM.

In the last two months Bay Area and North Bay food banks have seen demand for food assistance double and even triple in some areas. But, in recent weeks, an infusion of food deliveries through the Department of Agriculture’s Coronavirus Food Assistance Program has been helping Redwood and other food banks meet the unprecendented demand.

The CFAP program uses stimulus dollars to buy food from farmers, dairies and other suppliers and gets it into the hands of regional food banks that badly need it. In turn, producers, who lost much of their commercial and restaurant business for months, are able to sell their food at a fair price.

If you are a hospitality worker, organizers encourage you to drop in during the morning on Friday to receive the food assistance.