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What does that mean? JEM Organics has organized #BendAid, a group of Central Oregon-based food and beverage brands that are coming together to support the doctors and healthcare workers on the front lines in New York City fighting the COVID-19 Pandemic.
What are we doing? Together with our colleagues at Bend-based Picky Bars and Bird Seed Granola, and in conjunction with our friends at #FoundersGive in NYC, we are rallying local Central Oregon food brands to provide donations of food and beverage products that will be supplied to the break rooms, lounges and cafeterias of hospitals across New York City including Lenox Hill UES, Lenox Health, the NYCHH system including Elmhurst, Bellevue, Brooklyn and Queens locations, the NewYork Presbyterian system, NYU Langone, Mount Sinai, and others. The current hospital count is at over 15 hospitals in the area and growing. There is a great need - for example, Lenox Hill alone has 4000 staff and 50 break rooms at their location. We are joining together with over 70 different brands who are contributing over 100,000 units of food and beverage items to this cause. The first of daily deliveries to the hospitals is scheduled for Monday, March 30th to Lenox Hill.
How are we doing it? We are accepting and consolidating donations at our facility in Bend and coordinating with #FoundersGive to ship products to their warehouse facility in Long Island City, NY. From there, the products will go directly to these hospitals and the health care workers who could not only use healthy snacks and food options to keep them going but also the little boost that we hope they get by knowing that the country (at least our part here in Central Oregon) is behind them and so appreciates what they are doing.
We are focused on shelf-stable, single-serve, individually packaged healthy snack-sized products, packaged in easily shipped boxes for delivery via UPS or USPS. For example, in the first wave scheduled to ship on Friday, March 27th, JEM, Picky and Bird Seed will be shipping over 300 units of product, including jars of various flavors of JEM’s all-natural nut butter along with 3oz bags of Bird Seed Granola and an assortment of Picky’s healthy and functional energy bars.
We hope that what we are doing inspires others and we would like to grow #BendAid into a larger effort that can continue to support NYC but also other areas around the country where health care systems and medical workers are overwhelmed with COVID-19 cases.
How Can You Help? If you are a food brand that produces a product that fits the description above, especially one based in Central Oregon, please contact us at bendaid@jemorganics.com. If you are not a brand but have some favorite foods that you think NYC doctors and hospital workers would love to have in their break rooms, lounges and cafeterias, please let us know and we will follow up with those brands.
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Special thanks to the people at #FoundersGive coordinating the deliveries and working with the #BendAid group of brands to distribute these much-needed products throughout the NYC area.
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Thank you for all you're doing to #flattenthecurve and stay healthy!
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You can find us on Instagram and keep track of the companies and partners who are helping with #BendAid at @bend_aid |
