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Made With Love Cafe & Grill
in St Bernard's Parish


The Made With Love Cafe and Grill

"Made With Love Cafe & Grill"

The all volunteer "Made With Love Cafe & Grill" operated by Emergency Communities in St Bernard Parish is now serving over 1300 meals per day.

St. Bernard Parish
, a New Orleans suburb that abuts the southeastern border of the city, appears as though little has changed in the three months since Hurricane Katrina covered the city in floodwaters. Though the waters have receded, several inches of muck still cover many thoroughfares. Nearly all 40,000 residences and businesses were inundated for days, and a large majority of the city's buildings have been deemed unrecoverable. Only a fraction of the city's 70,000 residents have returned, living primarily in FEMA trailers. The municipality has been unable to secure commitments from national grocers and retailers and is unable to provide even basic infrastructure to returning residents�a difficult situation made more difficult by concerns that many residents will return after emergency federal housing assistance ends December 1.

Emergency Communities will arrive in the area on November 28th, and create a kitchen in Sidney D. Torres Memorial Park designed to service 1,000 residents and volunteers daily. Through the experience gained by many of our volunteers running similar operations in  New Orleans proper and Waveland, Mississippi, we will provide a clean and secure space offering three meals a day, seven days a week. We will also cook nutritious meals, striving to use fresh ingredients, and creating a friendly and hospitable atmosphere that will make our kitchen a place people not just need to go, but also want to go - because we understand that dignity is just as much a part of recovery as a hot meal.

We will recruit our all-volunteer crew through networks of NGOs and friends. We will secure supply lines from farms, food distributors, food banks, and individual donors, and we will secure donated or lent equipment. We will fundraise to purchase all other equipment, provide support to our volunteer efforts, and make up for gaps in supply. And we hope to support other agencies and NGOs in their efforts to help St. Bernard Parish recover and rebuild.

Project Details

Emergency Communities will begin building the kitchen site on November 28 and will begin serving on December 5. For the first two weeks, we expect to feed 500 people daily, eventually ramping up to a capacity of 1,000 people served daily. Between December 5 and March 5, we expect to serve a total of 126,000 meals.

Having been asked by the parish to set up in St. Bernard, we have established a partnership with the local government, which is providing our site, fuel, potable water, and limited living facilities for the duration of our operations.

Many of our supplies will be brought from the New Waveland Cafe, a successful relief kitchen that we are shutting down on November 27th. However, we will need financial assistance to cover our daily operation costs, with everything ranging from food to medical supplies to fuel.

The possibilities of our services are endless. We have a flexible budget in that with more support, we can provide more to the community. A dome could be brought in to provide warm shelter while people eat; more medical supplies and volunteers could be found; we could purchase more tools with which we could dispatch teams of volunteers to assist in construction or demolition of houses. Every penny we receive will be put to use in assisting the community during this dire time.

The Made With Love Cafe will be the first action entirely started and operated by Emergency Communities. Many of us cut our teeth on various relief efforts around the Gulf Coast since Hurricane Katrina - from the Biloxi Buddhist Temple to the New Waveland Cafe to the New Orleans Welcome Home Cafe. The Made With Love Cafe and Grill will potentially be the largest relief kitchen yet attempted by an independent relief effort, and with your help, we will be successful.

 


The Count and Countess of the serving line at Made With Love Cafe

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