Around the Table

How The Nashville Food Project has pivoted to keep its mission alive

By Jennifer Justus

There’s nothing like a pandemic to help us realize how often food is served in community settings — the church potlucks, the bustling restaurants, the barbecues with friends.

At The Nashville Food Project, our mission is to grow, cook and share nourishing food with the goals of cultivating community and alleviating hunger in our city. So of course, we also shared many of our meals — preCOVID-19, anyway — in communal situations from passed pans and platters to buffets and other lively, convivial places where people gather for meals.

When the coronavirus came, and more of our neighbors lost jobs and wages, we knew the need for food would be greater than ever, but it also needed to be grown, prepared and served as safely as possible. That means more individual portions made from fewer hands and then delivered widely and safely.

By the second week of March, we knew we needed to suspend our volunteer program for safety concerns. It usually brings 380 people through our spaces to generously offer their time and talents. Meanwhile, a few frontline staff continued working to turn out thousands of meals. Then to increase our production, we partnered with Henley Nashville, the Midtown restaurant at The Aertson Hotel, to serve as a satellite kitchen. With funding obtained by Henley from Buckingham Foundation, some of the restaurant’s staff have been able to keep working while also preparing meals for our partners and allowing us to say “yes” to more people needing those meals.

The coronavirus has no doubt caused conundrums to so many of us — and then creative solutions out of necessity. So in this story, The Nashville Food Project would like to shine a light on a couple of our community partners who have made pivots of their own during this time to help us distribute meals in the community.

Homeless Impact Division

Metro Nashville’s Homeless Impact Division has been taking the lead in matching services like The Nashville Food Project’s meals to people experiencing homelessness. As coronavirus hit our communities, many of the communal-style meals usually available to those living on the streets had to end.

“It became harder for people experiencing homelessness to obtain food,” says Sally Lott, coordinated entry manager with the division.

But rather than let that void go unfilled, the Homeless Impact Division and outreach workers made a plan to encourage social distancing among the homeless population by taking food to homeless encampments in addition to other hot spots.

The Nashville Food Project now prepares 300 weekly meals (and thousands more to other partners) through the Homeless Impact Division. The meals break down to 50 hot, individually packaged meals prepared Tuesday through Fridays for sharing in encampments. Then an additional 20 meals for Open Table Nashville, Monday through Friday, for distribution at hot spots like Centennial Park and other locations.

Chef Director Bianca Morton includes fresh produce as often as possible in the meals, which have included chicken pot pie, lasagna and stir-fry, for example. “One outreach worker told me that a gentleman was so excited to have vegetables,” Lott says.

PHOTO COURTESY OF LEGACY MISSION VILLAGE

But it’s an effort that takes a community to serve community. In addition to the scratchmade prepared meals, folks also have been receiving food boxes in places where they’re more able to prepare their meals. Glencliff United Methodist with the help of Second Harvest Food Bank of Middle Tennessee, has been distributing about 300 boxes per week.

“A lot of people,” Lott says, ‘contributed to a lot of different pieces to make this work.”

Legacy Mission Village

Legacy Mission Village is an organization founded by refugees for serving refugees. It’s not a resettlement agency, though, but rather a collection of services based on the founders’ experiences coming to the United States following the1994 Rwandan genocide. The group aims to focus its efforts on all individuals in the household— from diapers distributed free every month in partnership with the Nashville Diaper Company to a kindergarten program, a high-school tutoring program to adult education classes focusing on literacy. “Unfortunately, once this pandemic hit,” says Director of Operations Tim Mwizerwa, “it made it very difficult for us to conduct classes or programs we typically conduct.” Workers immediately started checking in with families to assess needs during the disruption. “The first thing we kept hearing was food, food, food,” he said.” Even the families who had not lost their income.”

And so, they pivoted. “We turned offices and classrooms into a pantry,” he said, as well as a diaper distribution center. “We just had our first drive-thru diaper day yesterday. We distributed about 20,000 diapers safely to families in about 2 hours.”

“I love how the Nashville community has pulled together,” Tim Mwizerwa says. “Any time we have had a stressful moment where we’re like ‘how are we going to provide for these families?’ A community partner comes in as the missing piece.”

As for the food, the organization already had a relationship with Second Harvest, which helps provide pantry staples, rice and beans. The Nashville Food Project also stepped in to provide about 200 family sized, scratch-made meals from the satellite kitchen at Henley Nashville as well as fresh produce including vegetables from Growing Together, The Nashville Food Project’s market garden program for farmers who also came to United States as refugees.

“They were really craving that kind of sustenance — and traditionally relevant food to them,” Mwizerwa says of his clients. Not only the freshness but having that respite and not having to make a meal for their kids.”

Meanwhile, Mwizerwa and his colleagues also have been helping families who have lost jobs apply for unemployment (a cumbersome process even for native speakers) as well as determining if they can defer mortgages temporarily or apply for food stamps. They’ve also been helping financially with family members who have gotten sick while working in meat packing plants while they’re not able to collect wages, unemployment or risk leaving their job to find other work.

Despite all this hardship, Mwizerwa stays buoyed in partly by volunteers who sign up to safely drop meals off to families, not just in Nashville but in Smyrna too.

“I love how the Nashville community has pulled together,” he says. “Any time we have had a stressful moment where we’re like ‘how are we going to provide for these families?’ A community partner comes in as the missing piece.”