This Med Student Has A Two-For-One Deal To Support Healthcare Workers And Local Restaurants At The Same Time

When coronavirus cases began pouring into emergency rooms nationwide, restaurants like the fast-casual franchise Melt Shop, didn’t hesitate to lend a hand by providing free meals to around-the-clock hospital workers on the frontlines of the pandemic. 

“So many restaurants were closing and we were hearing of some hospitals that actually couldn’t get access to any delivery,” says Melt Shop founder and CEO Spencer Rubin. “So we were donating meals out of our own pocket.”

But the restaurant industry—Melt Shop included—has been struggling during the pandemic, too. Three percent of restaurants have already permanently closed. 44% have temporarily closed, and 11% anticipate that they’ll permanently close within the next 30 days, according to new research from the National Restaurant Association.

That’s what prompted Natalie Guo, a med student at Harvard Medical School to create Off Their Plate: a movement aimed at restaurant and healthcare workers. Off Their Plate collects donations that go directly to partnering restaurants, who then prepare and deliver free meals to local hospital frontline workers. The amount donated to each restaurant is dependent upon the amount of meals they can commit to serving and delivering daily, and the restaurants agree to allocate at least 50% of the donation to staff salaries. That latter commitment is important in an industry where 5 to 7 million people could likely be laid off in the next three months.

“Off Their Plate was very early in seeing the need for both healthcare workers on the frontlines and the need to keep restaurants open that want to stay open,” says Rubin, whose restaurant was one of Off Their Plate’s first partners.

Since first launching in Boston on March 15, Off Their Plate has expanded to New York, D.C., Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle. By the end of this week, the more than 30 partner restaurants will have served 23,000 meals. So far, the organization has raised over $2.2 million but the team isn’t allocating those funds to partnering restaurants all at once. Instead, they are gradually doling out the funds using tools for budget forecasting, needs assessment, demand and supply matching and delivery logistics. The goal here is to remain sustainable, given the uncertainty over how long stay-in-place orders will remain in effect

“It’s our responsibility to pace with the cities as well,” says Guo. “We’re still anticipating more need in the coming weeks than now. So we’re trying to phase in appropriately.”

To that end, Guo, a former advisor for companies like Sequoia Capital and Goldman Sachs, recruited a coalition of more than 100 professionals from companies including CNN, J.P Morgan and Lyft. CommonWealth Kitchen and chef José Andrés’  World Central Kitchen also serve as fiscal sponsors for the initiative, and provide logistics support such as processing the donations and providing transportation for restaurant workers making meal deliveries. 

“I’ve worked with some really high-caliber institutions and this team rivals those teams that I’ve been on,” says Guo. “We have some of the most highly effective people I’ve ever worked with—and all pro bono.”

Off Their Plate has also helped hospitals help each other. Before even hearing about the initiative, Tama Baker, an emergency room nurse at Boston-based Brigham and Women’s Hospital, wanted to find a way to donate food to New York hospital workers grappling with higher numbers of coronavirus patients. “We had planned to send pizza and then after kind of thinking about it, we were like, pizza might not be a good idea, given that, you know, this is a pandemic and that’s sharing food,” she says. 

That’s when she came across the Off Their Plate, which helped her and her colleagues allocate the $1,600 they raised in order to donate their individually wrapped meals to healthcare workers at Elmhurst Hospital and Mount Sinai Queens. It wasn’t until after that Baker realized Off Their Plate had facilitating restaurant meal deliveries to her own hospital. 

“The meals were just kind of pouring in,” says Baker. “And then we realized, oh, they’re actually sending us food too.”

For Dr. Alexei Wagner, an emergency medicine physician at Stanford Health Care, and his team, the meals aren’t just nourishing, they’re a way to boost morale in the ER during dark times.

“It creates a fun buzz amongst the group,” says Wagner. “We all socially distance and enjoy a meal apart from each other, but, still, with the food comes camaraderie and conversation, and it kind of forces people to take a step back from the sometimes scary, sometimes anxiety-provoking clinical environment we live in.” 

Restaurants are also seeing tangible success from the partnership. At Mei Mei in Boston, the money has helped support staff, many of whom are either working remotely or can’t work at all. “We’re keeping 95% of our crew safe at home and just using a couple people to do the Off Their Plate work, with the revenue from it going to a fund for staff,” says Irene Li, owner and co-founder. Mei Mei is also piloting Off Their Plate’s grocery program, which delivers groceries to healthcare workers.

At Adda Indian Canteen in Long Island City, owner Roni Mazumdar says he’s needed to furlough 90% of his staff since the pandemic hit. But Off Their Plate has helped him pay his active staff “fairer salaries” he says, and he’s even been able to bring back a couple of temporarily laid off employees.

“We were desperately trying to keep our employees—as many of them as possible—engaged,” says Mazumdar. “I think this became a wonderful blessing for us to do that even further.”

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