Pay-It-Forward is Heating Up!
The Pay-It-Forward is quickly becoming a town favorite - we have people eagerly asking us when the next campaign is going to start. Since Good Bowls started Pay-It-Forward last June as a way to help both restaurants and families facing challenges from the pandemic, we’ve raised money for, cooked, and donated over 1,500 meals now.
Our January 2022 campaign was our biggest campaign to date with over 800 meals donated for local families struggling with food insecurity. This last round we teamed up with Greg and Maria from The Sycamore in Pittsboro, NC. The community was so excited to participate during this round we had people calling in to ask how close we were to certain milestones and then donating up to 150 meals at a time! And where it really counts, we had scores of people donating just 1 or 2 meals. With such broad participation, we hit a new Pay-It-Forward record.
Bowl production day is always a fun time for everyone involved. The volunteer crew from Good Bowls and PBO Eats showed up early to Greg’s kitchen down in Pittsboro and started cranking out bowls of coconut curry chicken, braised greens, and jasmine rice. After the last few campaigns we’ve really gotten the system down and can now churn out quite a few meals in a relatively short period of time….which is a good thing since we may hit 1,000 meals next round.
Tych Cowdin and staff at CIS Chatham with the stack of donate meals.
After the meals are produced, we freeze and deliver them to our community partner Tych Cowdin of Communities in Schools Chatham County. Tych and his team distribute all of the donated meals to families in the community at various events during February and March. Now that we are bringing in 800 meals in one round, Tych and crew are able to keep their freezers stocked for upwards of 2 months, all while distributing plenty of meals during all of their community events.
Good Bowls runs the Pay-It-Forward campaign every other month. When you donate a meal online, we work with a locally owned restaurant to cook up a healthy and delicious meal that is distributed to a food insecure family in the community. This helps keep the doors open at the restaurant and food on family’s tables. It’s a win-win. Stay tuned for our March campaign and help us hit 1,000!
