We Feed Cbus supporting healthcare workers, small restaurants during shutdown
COLUMBUS (WCMH) — Krizzia Yanga and her family have been bringing Filipino cuisine to Columbus for the last four years at Bonfacio. When COVID-19 started to spread, and restaurants had to close their dining rooms, Yanga knew she wanted to use her restaurant’s kitchen to help in some way.
“There are so many Filipinos in the healthcare space,” she said. “I always grew up around nurses and people in hospitals, so we started doing our own campaign to raise money for meals for those nurses and we got connected with the We Feed Cbus team.”
We Feed Cbus is a branch of the Can’t Stop Cbus campaign. It’s a group that began at the beginning of COVID-19 to try to combat food insecurity in Columbus and do so by utilizing restaurants who had to shut down and are struggling.
“We Feed Cbus is raising money to buy meals from small local restaurants owned by women and people of color, refugees, immigrants, and they’re buying those meals and giving them to community organizations that address food insecurities,” explained Yanga. “We’ve kind of been seeing that the communities that are hardest hit by COVID-19 are communities of color, communities that are maybe on the margins that don’t have as much access to resources, so the We Feed Cbus team is really focused on kind of honing in on those communities and those restaurant owners who may not have as much access to marketing and access to resources and spreading the word.”
Now, with restaurants allowed to reopen soon, the group is by no means slowing down; instead, it is shifting to see what restaurants will need to get back up and running.
“Something at We Feed Cbus that we want to do is we want to make sure the solution that we’re building, the way that we’re helping these restaurants during this time – we’re helping in a way that’s actually going to be helpful to them,” said Kim Nguyen, a lead organizer with We Feed Cbus. “We wanted to picture a long-term solution when the city starts to reopen again.”
Nguyen and Yanga both said that reopening isn’t going to be easy or seamless. In fact, Yanga said some restaurants may not be able to afford to open their dining rooms right now.
“Having a restaurant operate at basically 50 percent capacity, which is probably what we’ll see requiring six feet between parties, is pretty difficult with restaurants in general running on pretty thin margins,” she explained. “You pretty much need to have a restaurant completely full in order for it to be profitable, in order for your servers to make money and that’s definitely something we’ve been thinking about – how to make that work for us.”
“People are concerned for their safety and their wellness, and so restaurants are not going to experience the same amount of sales from what they saw right before COVID when they do open up again,” added Nguyen.
Yanga said Bonifacio has done well enough during this time to simply pay the bills, but she knows not everyone is that lucky. Even with having some business coming in, it’s been a stressful time, so being able to help other ethnic restaurants in some way has helped her breathe a little bit better.
“Having something to anchor us, like giving back and being able to participate in something that is making a huge difference in someone’s life definitely, you know, keeps us grounded and keeps us focused on the big picture,” she said.
To learn more about “We Feed Cbus” or to donate to help their initiative, click here: www.wefeedcbus.com