Health workers at Boulder Community Health and across Boulder County are gearing up for battle against COVID-19. At the same time, local independent restaurants that are a big part of our community are suffering from the devastating economic impact of the virus.

We are members of the Boulder community that decided to do something to support both frontline health workers and local independent restaurants. We’ve created a program that lets the community donate meals from local restaurants to health workers on the frontlines. Health workers get a nourishing meal, and local restaurants get badly needed business to keep running and keep staff employed.

We need your help! Please donate here: bch.org/feedthefrontlines

We’ve already raised $200,000 to kickstart the program from Brad Feld and Amy Batchelor, Dan and Cindy Caruso, John Goldsmith, and an anonymous donor. This covers the first 30 days of meals for the hospital but we need more help. Our goal is to raise at least an additional $200,000 from the Boulder community to keep meals flowing from local restaurants to BCH for at least 60 days.

We’ve partnered with Boulder Community Health and several local restaurants including Salt, Big Red F Restaurant Group, Kitchen Next Door, Japango, Blackbelly/Santo, and Community Kitchen Table to get this off the ground. The food services partner at the hospital, BCH Food Services, has generously offered their trained staff and facilities to help receive, distribute, and store the meals delivered by the restaurants.

Once we get this program off the ground, in the coming weeks we’ll look at expanding further across Boulder County to support other health care workers as funding allows and also add to the list of local restaurants participating in the program.

We need your help to get to 60 days of meals! Please donate here: bch.org/feedthefrontlines

One more ask: Boulder Community Health also needs sealed/unopened boxes of masks, gloves, unopened hand sanitizer, or other PPE. You can drop off PPE at Foothills Hospital Information Desk at 4747 Arapahoe, Monday thru Friday 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. and weekends 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Please include your name and full contact information with your donation. When you arrive at the main Foothills entrance (do not go to the Emergency Department entrance), call the Information Desk at 303–415–7010 to let the know the staff you are outside. They will meet you at the door to pick up your donation.

Are you a restaurant that wants to join the program?

If you’re a Boulder County independent restaurant wanting to participate, sign up here on this form. We’re working toward a diversity of geography and ownership as we roll this out.

Want to run this in your community?

Here is a program outline we created to help.

The goal isn’t just to help Boulder and Boulder County. Once we show the program working here, we hope it can serve as template of how to roll this out across Colorado.

We’ve been working to also make sure we “open source” everything we are doing and figuring out. Feedback is very welcome, and please let us know if you start using it!

Local resources for COVID-19

Here’s a website about COVID-19 from Boulder Community Hospital that is a great source of trusted information.

Want to help or reach out to us?

You can email Vikas Reddy at v@vikasreddy.io and/or Kyle Judah at Kyle.Judah@colorado.edu .

Inspiration and gratitude

We were inspired by this amazing effort in San Francisco by Frank Barbieri and Ryan Sarver. We greatly appreciate their advice and sharing of materials which helped us get something up and running in Boulder.

Grant Besser, President of the non-profit BCH Foundation has been amazing to work with, and the BCH Foundation team has moved incredibly quickly and creatively to help us pull this off in just about 1 week.

The first set of restaurants and owners have been very helpful in getting this program up and running. Thank you to Dana and Dave Query at Big Red F Restaurant Group, Bradford Heap at Salt, Hosea Rosenberg at Santo/Blackbelly, Isabel McDevitt at Community Table Kitchen, Jon Banis from Japango, and Kimbal Musk - CEO of The Kitchen Restaurant Group.

We also want to give a special shout out to Frasca Hospitality Group who is not currently operating in Boulder, but allowed Erin Pommer to work with us on this effort. Erin has been instrumental in making this happen.

Most importantly, for all the health workers at BCH Foothills or anywhere on the frontlines in Boulder County, we want you to know that while you’re caring for us, the community also cares about you. Thank you for your service during this crisis.