The Benefit Restaurant™ ProjectJanuary-March 2010: Fighting Homelessness
Our theme for the first quarter of 2010 is fighting homelessness.
Dine at The Elephant Walk in Waltham, Massachusetts during the month of of January and three percent of your food and beverage check will be donated to Mary's House, a family shelter providing temporary housing in Waltham.
Our February beneficiary will be announced on January 29, 2009.
Quarterly themes, monthly beneficiaries
We commit our efforts to a quarterly theme. This quarter we're part of the fight against homelessness; last quarter we we supported hunger relief efforts.
The first month of each quarter a benefit restaurant commits to a charity or non-profit organization [NPO] operating in the city or town where the restaurant is located. Month Two is committed to an NPO in the restaurant's region, and Month Three's efforts are on behalf of a national or global NPO.
For our first Benefit Restaurant™, The Elephant Walk in Waltham, Month 1 is always committed to Waltham and Month 2 is committed to Greater Boston.
Our first theme: Hunger Relief
Helping fight hunger is a natural choice for restaurants interested in philanthropy. It was for us the right place to open our flow of funds to charities and non-profits dedicated to solving fundamental social problems confronting every society.
When we think about our basic needs, we tend to rattle off the first three in this order: food, clothing, and shelter. - Imagine going without food? Even in America, the "richest nation on Earth," we have many millions of people in poverty [39.8 million in 2008, according to Feeding America].
But even MORE people - in 2008, 49.1 million Americans, including 16.7 million children - lived in what have come to be known as "food insecure" households. Food insecurity, as defined by the Hunger Task Force, is "a condition in which people lack basic food intake to privide them with the energy and nutrients for fully productive lives." These are astonishing, daunting statistics. It didn't take long for us to choose Hunger Relief as our first theme.
We embarked on our mission in September 2009 with the Bristol Lodge Kitchen, followed by Project Bread and the Walk for Hunger in October, The Greater Boston Food Bank in November, and Feeding America in December. [Our normal giving cycle is the calendar quarter; having started in September, however, we elected to commit our first four months to Hunger Relief to complete the calendar year.]