San Francisco’s newest nonprofit, SF New Deal, will pair about 30 local restaurants with local food delivery sites to quickly feed the city’s vulnerable populations, including the homeless and people living in single-room occupancy hotels.

The program, which was introduced last week, was funded with a $1 million investment from Twitch CEO Emmett Shear and distributed about 400 meals on Friday. By Monday, the total ballooned to 4,300 meals, and more than 100 additional restaurants were requesting to participate. The program addresses food access and was also created to be a boon to a San Francisco restaurant industry crumbling amid mass layoffs and lost profits.

The latter component is a focus of Lenore Estrada, the owner of Three Babes Bakeshop, a minority-owned San Francisco bakery. As a founder and executive director, Estrada is overseeing the culinary component and finances of SF New Deal.

“One of the things we’re trying to do was figure out if there was a way to get private money to pay small businesses to keep workers employed,” said Estrada, who had to lay off 20 of her 26 bakery employees this month due to recent lost revenue. “Restaurants are a great way to start because food is needed.”

SF New Deal’s current food distribution partners include the San Francisco African American Faith-based Coalition, the UCSF Medical Center and a cadre of San Francisco small businesses. Funding for the nonprofit helps restaurants pay for ingredients from local farms, as well as providing paychecks to remaining kitchen staff. Each restaurant makes a set amount of daily meals for the program and delivers them to a distribution center at San Francisco’s Four One Nine events space. From there, the program connects with its distribution partners to determine where the meals should be taken in the city.

Many San Francisco residents struggled with food access well before the coronavirus pandemic, which spurred a shelter-in-place order in March that called for restaurants to pivot exclusively to carry-out and delivery service and closed nonessential businesses. The order was extended on Monday until at least May 1. According to 2018 data from Feeding America, a nonprofit food bank network, 11.5% of Bay Area residents — about 870,000 people — had limited access to food. Local chefs believe the number is climbing during the lockdown.

Jacob Bindman, director of Four One Nine, has been tasked with running SF New Deal’s daily operations. The program was an idea both he and Estrada had been mulling for weeks. He said Shear caught wind of the venture and said he wanted to contribute $1 million to jump-start the project.

Bindman said the process has been quick, including condensing the normally months-long process of creating a nonprofit — from filing paperwork with the Internal Revenue Service to establishing a bank account — into just a few days last week. It remains a fluid venture that will grow and change to fit the demand within the city, he added.

“The idea was to get cash to small businesses, especially women- and minority-owned businesses, as fast as possible,” he said. “Still, there are communities out here that have a long history with food insecurity, and some are newly being introduced to food assistance programs. The balance is trying to figure out the things our communities need six months from now while also thinking about what’s needed for people and businesses two hours from now.”

Pivoting from normal business activity for a restaurant and becoming more entrenched in community-building is just a sign of the times, said Kim Alter of the restaurant Nightbird in San Francisco. Alter has been working closely with Estrada on the coordination of food deliveries as well as purchases from farms and local farmers’ markets.

On Monday morning, the dining room of Nightbird was covered in paper bags filled with tan to-go boxes. Alter delivered the 400 meals — some of which included braised pork and kale — over the course of the day to a pair of San Francisco single-room occupancy hotels. Instead of prepping for a dinner service afterward, Alter said she would begin working on the meals to be delivered the rest of the week.

“It’s not something you would ever expect to be doing right now. I’m more like a cafeteria now than a restaurant, but that’s what people need,” she said. “We’re adding restaurants who want to help, we’re working with farms, we’re figuring out what specific communities need, we’re trying to do this so it helps everyone. It’s something we have to figure out as we go.”

Justin Phillips is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jphillips@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @JustMrPhillips