“Jeet Yet?”: Feeding the Frontlines in Pittsburgh
How we fed 165 healthcare workers in under nine days
It all starts with an idea💡
Back in late March, a coworker of mine put out a call asking if anyone would be interested in helping his friend with a project to help connect restaurants to local healthcare facilities. The idea was based on an effort in San Francisco where folks were buying pizzas from local restaurants and having them delivered to the nearby emergency rooms and ICUs overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients. Given Pittsburgh’s reputation as a leader in medicine, we knew our local hospital units would soon be swamped by the coming wave of hospitalizations — as such, we wanted to build our own platform, then dubbed Feed the Front Line.
A couple days later, our scrappy team of four were in our first conference call, quickly talking through how to actually build this from the ground up. Initially, we planned to build a website from scratch, going so far as to generate sitemaps and user flows and wireframes in just 48 hours. However, after some competitive analysis, we soon discovered that another organization, Frontline Foods, had beaten us to the idea by one week (great minds really do think alike!). We soon set up an intro call with their team, and within minutes of their platform walkthrough, we were completely blown away by the sheer amount of work they had accomplished in such a short period of time to build their platform and business model. Our team resolutely chose to join Frontline as their newly minted 🎉Pittsburgh chapter🎉, and we haven’t looked back since.
🏃♂️A Need for Speed🏃♂️
Now that we were officially a chapter with a mission, the next two weeks were a race against time to find the right connections around Pittsburgh to make these deliveries happen. With the governor issuing warnings to the state of Pennsylvania that the worst of COVID-19 was coming in the next two weeks, we wanted to be sure our infrastructure was airtight before hospitals were overwhelmed. Every day, our small crew was cold-calling restaurants and hospitals, emailing connections left and right, and messaging folks we barely knew on every social media platform trying to find local restaurants and hospital workers. The process really hammered home just how closely knit the city of Pittsburgh truly is — it seemed all the right people you needed to talk to were just one or two phone calls away and more than happy to help out their fellow neighbors in need.
Through some friends of friends (and friends of their friends), we were able to land connections at UPMC and Allegheny Health Network, two of the largest healthcare providers in Allegheny County. Shortly thereafter, we had generated a list of potential restaurants interested in feeding the frontline, all the while amassing over $5,000 in small donations from the community to help fund our meals. A flurry of emails, several stand-ups, and many long nights of planning later, we had done it: our first two deliveries were set for April 12th, Easter Sunday and also (more poetically) 4/12, Pittsburgh’s primary area code. #412proud
Your order is on its way! 🚚
The day of April 12th started as a typical spring day by any Pittsburgh standards: cloudy and gray, with any hope of sunshine immediately dashed by the occasional sprinkle of rain. However, heading to the hospital, one couldn’t help but feel energized about the day’s agenda (and not just because we finally had an opportunity to leave our houses for once). Our phones were abuzz with different delivery group chats, Slack pings, and ongoing email chains from our partners and media connections. Slapping on the proper PPE and some flashy high-vis vests, my teammates rendezvoused at the designated delivery points (maintaining a proper social distance, of course), with half starting at our first delivery from The Warren at Allegheny General Hospital and the other half meeting at the second delivery from Spoon and BRGR at West Penn hospital. When the last meal was unpacked and wheeled up to West Penn’s emergency room, it finally hit me: in just nine days, we’d successfully planned and executed the delivery of 165 meals from three local restaurants, with many more planned in the months to come. Our first beta-test was a complete success and we were on the path for more deliveries and scaling to something even bigger.
So what’s next?
While we’re barely a month old as a team, we’ve accomplished a ton in these short weeks and will continue to dedicate our efforts to feeding our healthcare workers and supporting our local businesses. This week, we have more deliveries planned amounting to 300 meals, and deliveries planned in the week after that covering nearly 600 meals (for those of you keeping score at home, that’s nearly 1100 meals in just four weeks!). We are so humbled by the support of our Frontline family and look forward to continuing to feed our frontline workers in Pittsburgh. If you haven’t already, please consider donating today — remember, full kitchens fuel heroes.
Follow us on our journey to feeding our neighbors
- Our page: www.frontlinefoods.org/pittsburgh
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FrontlineFoodsPGH
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/frontlinefoodspgh/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/FrontlinePGH
Shout-outs to our local restaurants The Warren, Spoon, and BRGR for helping us feed our frontline workers at Allegheny General Hospital and West Penn Hospital. Special shout-outs to our friends at Allegheny Health Network for helping us coordinate the first of many deliveries to come. And of course, the highest of shout-outs to our brave and fearless city lead, Anne Kelly, without whom this operation would have never been possible.