Commercial Kitchen Renovation
For close to 25 years, the commercial kitchen at Hearts has largely remained unchanged and has been preparing meals to serve those in need year after year. In turn, impacting the lives of thens of thousands of our brothers and sisters.
Originally designed specifically for the Hearts Mobile Soup Kitchen, the kitchen has become stretched to capacity and to its capabilities. As Staff and volunteers prepare meals using donated produce and other items, the kitchen's limitations are becoming evident.
We will be stepping out in faith to take on a significant kitchen renovation project that will benefit the ministry and community long into the future.
Where You Donation Goes
Choose to donate towards a specific piece of equipment to further our efforts in renovating the Hearts kitchen.
A commercial grade dishwasher will help us eliminate one of the most expensive monthly purchases of disposable aluminum meal trays that are used in our meal outreach programs. Meals that are prepared at Hearts then need to be transported to their final destination of either the mobile soup kitchen serving line in Downtown Buffalo or to a homeless shelter partner. Using the foil pans is our reality until we can provide our team with a commercial dishwasher to help with washing the dishes and meal trays while continuing to prepare for the day’s meals in the same space.
According to New York State Environmental Standards, in order to provide a safe food preparation station, a separate sink must be dedicated to washing vegetables to avoid cross-contamination and risk of food poisoning. This sink would allow us to adhere to the standards and allow us to ensure food safety for our staff and clients.
Out of all the meals we prepare for our mobile soup kitchen and for homeless shelters, roughly 75% of them are pasta-based. Therefore, a significant amount of time during the meal preparation process is spent boiling the pasta on our existing stovetop which is time consuming as the pots need to be regularly stirred and constantly monitored. The pasta cooker will be able to boil twice as much pasta in a shorter amount of time while saving stove space and commercial pots and pans to cook the rest of the meal at the same time.
The 1/1,000 Challenge
A donation of $10,000 has been made to Hearts to go towards the kitchen renovation.
The anonymous donor has proposed a challenge:
might you consider giving 1/1,000 of $10,000, which is $10 towards the kitchen renovation?