My name is Emma and recently I saw on Facebook where a friend named Mamie Giller had raised money where she lived to get pizza delivered to health care professionals. I loved that idea! So I reached out and asked her how she was doing it. She’s now on her 4th week, and has raised over $2000 and delivered pizza to three hospitals.
I decided that if she could do it, I could too! I sent out a message on Facebook to see if anyone else would be interested. I wanted to use a local business, and since my son, who is a Junior in high school, had worked for a local pizza company, I immediately thought of them. They hire a lot of high school kids and support the local community. The owner’s son, who manages the store, had recently been forced to lay everyone off due to the pandemic and also because he did not want to be responsible for any of his young employees getting sick. He’s a fun guy and a role model to these kids that work for him. So it just made sense to ask him.
He agreed…and said that he and his girlfriend could not only make them, but deliver them as well. Meanwhile, on Facebook people kept sharing my post with friends, and within three days we had raised all the money we needed.
We coordinated with a friend at the hospital, who told us that the ER was getting bombarded with help, but the night shift was not receiving much at all. So we arranged for pizza to go to the COVID-19 unit, ICU, respiratory units and security guards.
Another friend who is a nurse received the pizzas and delivered them to all the units, since only hospital personnel are allowed inside. We were able to provide 300 pizzas for three different night shifts.
The hospital workers were thrilled and responded by sending us photos of them with the pizza. WE have already received requests to do it again…not just here in our city…but even from surrounding towns.
I was speechless at how people responded to my request. It touched my heart to see how kind and generous our community really is. I would encourage you that if you have the tiniest idea of how to help in this crisis, then do it! You have nothing to lose, and so much can be done safely and through social networking. There are a lot of people out there just like you who want to do something and are just waiting for an opportunity. It took an hour of my time to arrange this. If you can help one person, and they can help one person, it all adds up to something bigger than you could have imagined.
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