Quote: “Healing yourself is connected with healing others.” – Yoko Ono
Dinner is on The Table:
On June 7th, 2023, Table for Lou catered for our families at BJC’s Children’s hospital for the first time. We’ve been cooking up there every week since! We met so many wonderful families, some of which we only saw once, and many we continue to see every week. We’ve seen some of our regulars go home for good, and others come back after months away.
Just this week, one of our regulars couldn’t wait to tell us that her little girl finally got off her ventilator and is breathing real air again!
Sometimes it’s lost on me how much people grow to care about what we are doing for them. One night, a young patient was finally able to come down the see us on a Wednesday night, and she acted like she was meeting Taylor Swift! She gushed about how much she looked forward to seeing what kind of food we were bringing each week, and she had a list of recipes that she wanted from us. It melted my heart!
Cardinal Numbers:
How well has the program been going? Well, it’s been far more successful than I can wrap my head around. In the first year of operating, we have served over 2,750 families! To put that number into perspective, that is 1% of the city of Saint Louis’s population, as of 2022.
It’s also worth pointing out that the data collected was for “families” specifically coming to eat, and not individual passing through the facility. Mind blowing.. I am so proud of our Table for Lou crew!
I threw together some charts to paint the picture of how this year has gone:
This chart shows how many families have been visiting us over time! It’s still not a consistent number of families each week, but it is certainty trending up.
If you are curious how many families we serve each week, this chart shows the frequency of attendees. We had 3 nights with over 100 families, and 2 nights with under 20 (one of the slow days was the day after Christmas)
Last but not least…
Donate today or learn how you can help volunteer by emailing: Anthony@tableforlou.org . You’ll be amazed how much help just a small amount of money provides to our community. And don’t forget to to follow us on our social media for more updates!
Cheers!