This Q&A is part of a series highlighting the work of the 2020 Funds to Feed Grantees, community organizations who provided critical food during the COVID-19 pandemic. Answers have been edited for clarity and length.
Social Spin founder Christy Moore sat down with LISC to talk about the impact of their Funds to Feed project.
What was your organization doing before the pandemic? What new opportunities opened up due to your Funds to Feed project?
Our organization, Social Spin, was already providing free, weekly laundry services to our neighbors in need, which primarily serves our unsheltered neighbors within a 2-mile radius of our laundromats. The [Funds to Feed] grant allowed us to layer on two things, one a hot meal provided by a local caterer and then we also were able to provide meal kits to families that had the ability to cook, and each meal kit provided 25 nutritious meals. We hired a food curator that went shopping weekly at local grocery stores and farmers markets. She put together not only the produce, she also made sure that they had spices and all of the ingredients that they needed. We provided menu and recipe options as well.
How did you use the Funds to Feed Grant money? What new partnerships formed because of the project? Where did you source your food?
With the grant funds, we were able to hire local women-owned catering businesses and food trucks who came on site to distribute nutritious hot meals. Some of them included Down by the Bayou and our friends over at Caring Case as well. So in addition to catering meals, they also provided our customers with backpacks filled with snacks, non-perishable snacks that our unsheltered neighbors were able to physically take with them easily and enjoy over the week.
Can you share the positive aspects of incorporating cultural practices and histories in your project and how the cultural focus helped reach new communities?
For us, Social Spin is already a purpose-driven, community-driven space. And what we mean by that is before we launch any new project or initiative, we collect feedback from our customers. So we were surveying our customers on the types of foods and spices and meals that they had hoped to prepare, and specifically shopped and sourced based on that feedback. Many of our customers are unsheltered, which means that they have some specific needs that we communicated to our vendors. So for example, dental issues, which require soft foods. Or spicy options on the side in case they didn't have access to over-the-counter medication like Tums if the food was too spicy.
Did the Funds to Feeds Grant and your project support new community leaders?
The success of Social Spin and this project is always through customer satisfaction, word of mouth. So we were able to engage new neighbors who also stepped up and offered to volunteer. We engaged a couple of different volunteers, both informal and formal. Formal being the Probation Department that allows individuals who have community service (requirements) to complete those at our site, and we're having them complete their hours by distributing the food that we receive and any other personal hygiene products. The other one is we have a regular customer, a single mom with a kiddo who is moving into a customer-to-employee relationship with Social Spin. She was a customer volunteer and now a permanent hire employee, and we certainly see all of these volunteers as leaders. And those leaders are coming from either a customer base or community service. We now have a volunteer sign-up sheet. We hadn't embraced volunteers much up until the pandemic, which is interesting because it became this whole other task that we're taking on. Our customers are there for two hours and eager to help. So it's been a great way to safely engage them.
Why is this work important to your community? In other words, how will this impact future generations?
We had two interns who worked on this project. One of them created a sustainability model, essentially documenting our policies and procedures and creating an easily accessible way for people to volunteer to cook and distribute the food. So, we now have a calendar of events allowing us to continue this feeding initiative past the funding, which has been phenomenal. We haven't had a gap in providing a hot meal since the funding was dispersed and ended, which is beautiful. What we noticed was people were coming sometimes just for the food, which was unexpected. We just didn't expect it. We just wanted to feed our customers, and now they're coming and asking for food. So, in addition to having the hot meals and the groceries, to store it, we had a commercial fridge donated. The refrigerator, which has caused us to start conversations with Mutual Aid of Phoenix to be a community refrigerator, which is amazing. Short-term we've been able to keep it going through neighbors, and then mid-term we want to be a more open community fridge. But even longer term for generations to come, and really what are ‘why’ is I: I have great memories of going to the laundromat with my mom and my sisters. But there's been a shift in ownership of laundromats. I say male, pale, still-wealthy individuals own them. It’s passive income, which creates this really disengaged owner to customer base. So, for us to be able to provide a hot meal or groceries for a family with kiddos is creating a memory of how safe and secure and fun laundromats are, and how that routine becomes not a chore, but a community-connection opportunity.
What is one thing you learned from this past year?
I think it brought awareness to the struggles of not just our neighbors, which we would see weekly, but also the small businesses around us. So those companies that we hired would tell us things like, ‘Oh, this is the most revenue we've brought in this entire month.’ We would pay them $15 per person, which was, as you know, a fair payment for their services. They’re walking away with $1,500 in revenue, and they hadn't seen that in months prior to being hired. That was an important message for us to hear. We also know that sometimes access to food means that it's unhealthy or non-perishable choices, and so we would hear often that customers had gone a week without a hot meal. They were fed, but they didn't have a hot meal to enjoy. I had thought that they would love, like, a three-course meal prepared by a local caterer, and they did. They loved it, but they love even more the home-cooked meals that our neighbors are providing. There's just like a little extra love there.