Blog

Welcome to our new website which we opened yesterday without announcement or fanfare. This isn't false modesty. We're still making sure the little pieces all fit together and link to the right places. But if you're reading this in the last week of October 2020 without being directed here by announcement, then welcome! A special heartfelt welcome. You are one of our first visitors.

As we look back on a successful year, we also recognize that many things have changed. The questions we have asked ourselves in the past two months would have been unheard of in 2019. How do you rent a kitchen in the middle of a pandemic? An unthinkable question that suddenly became extremely relevant when we lost our kitchen due to covid concerns and had to find a new one quickly. With the help of supporters like you, we found one after three weeks.

Publishing these cards is a group effort with an undercurrent of chaos. Technically these stories aren’t anyone’s job. Usually Meggean, our Operations and Training director, conducts or arranges an interview and finds us a picture. Interns or others on our team might be sitting in and need help. A translator might not show. I usually compress a write-up of the interview from a page or two to 175-200 words. Rebecca, usually catches my spelling errors.

There has been a lot of news lately about the Cares Act and the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) designed to help small businesses retain their employees during the pandemic. Like many other non-profits, we applied for these funds. And like many others, we were not funded in the first round.

We’re writing to share what the process has been like for us so far. This seems important since the PPP involves public funds. We’re a non-profit, partnering with and representing the public in our mission.

Some of my earliest memories, either real or imagined, came from that bunker. For some reason I remember the light down there as a beautiful emerald green. I remember a cylindrical kerosene heater with pretty blue flames. My dad had been in ROTC and part of a reserve unit, so he knew enough to make a guessing game of estimating the distance and counting down to the boom of mortars.