02 April 2024

More information about World Central Kitchen - updated re deaths in Gaza


World Central Kitchen was frankly not on my radar screen of charities (most of my favorites being medicine- or education-related) until Putin's war on Ukraine brought me information about their refugee relief efforts.  I appreciate the comments about WCK added to that post by several readers, and today I found more information about the group at Bloomberg:
Within hours of Russia’s invasion on Feb. 25, the nonprofit disaster-relief organization co-founded by chef José Andrés [in pic above] started dishing out food. World Central Kitchen has now established kitchens at eight of Ukraine’s border crossings with Poland, and has created meal distribution centers in six countries including Romania and Hungary. In Poland alone, says Director of Communications Strategy Lisa Abrego, WCK has served more than 37,000 hot meals including chicken and rice and pasta; the total was nearing 45,000 late on Tuesday. Everyone from fire fighters to nuns has pitched in to help cook and serve food.

“There are many ways to fight. Some people fight making sure people are fed,” said Andrés via email. “Those are our people, and we will be supporting them.” The chef was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize in 2019 and has pledged a portion of his $100 million award from Jeff Bezos to address the current crisis.

Inside Ukraine, WCK has partnered with local restaurants to feed people who have chosen not to flee. The organization will expand its work in the country as more shelters are established...

Rather than cold meals or MREs (meals ready to eat), the organization focuses on the dignity inherent in eating a home-cooked meal—and taking immediate action.
More photos at the link.

Most readers will want to do something concrete.  A simple Google search yields 50,000 hits.  I'm going to focus on World Central Kitchen.  I made my second financial contribution today (click here) in memory of my antiwar activist sister. 

Update from WCK on March 13:
With bombs still falling day and night, millions of Ukrainians continue to flee the country or relocate west to the city of Lviv. In response, WCK is rapidly expanding our #ChefsForUkraine response to distribute food—including hot, fresh meals—in five countries. We've now opened a kitchen and food supply depot in Poland, right on the border with Ukraine, and have multiple warehouses active in Lviv where trucks are filled with food to head east reaching cities like Odessa and Mykolayiv. We are also supporting more restaurants to serve meals in Ukrainian cities including Kharkiv and Kyiv, which remain under active attack.
The new WCK Relief Kitchen is located in Przemyśl—a Polish city just a few miles from the border with Ukraine that is receiving tens of thousands of refugees every day. From this kitchen, our team has the capacity to scale up and cook 100,000 meals per day utilizing 12 massive WCK paella pans and 12 large ovens...

Within Ukraine, we are now working with dozens of chefs and restaurant partners across 12 cities to provide meals to those who remain at home or are escaping to other locations within the country. More families are now beginning to stay in Lviv rather than leave Ukraine. The UN estimates over 2 million people are already internally displaced, so the WCK team, alongside our partners in Lviv and other cities across Ukraine, are cooking more meals each day. We are delivering the freshly prepared meals to 50 locations in Lviv alone, and that number goes up daily.
I repeated my gift today.  You can support WCK by clicking here.

Reposted from last year because of the catastrophe in Turkiye.  Our family sent funds to World Central Kitchen via Paypal today.  It only takes two minutes.

Reposted to replace the old photo at the top of this post with this new video, which I received in an email from WCK today.   Our family is going to send another contribution now, and I would encourage those readers who have messaged me in the past suggesting that I should add a tip jar to this blog so that they could express their appreciation of TYWKIWDBI in a monetary sense to consider the simple expedient of your sending that "tip" money to World Central Kitchen instead of to me.  


Several humanitarian groups said Tuesday that they would suspend their operations in Gaza after seven World Central Kitchen workers were killed in an Israeli strike, threatening already precarious deliveries to the aid-starved enclave.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu confirmed that Israel carried out the strike Monday but said it was “unintentional.” He vowed the military would carry out a “transparent” investigation and make the results public.

The attack on the aid convoy killed three British nationals, a Canadian American dual national, a Palestinian, and citizens of Australia and Poland..

The organization said the team was traveling in a “deconflicted zone” in two armored cars with the WCK logo branded on the roof, to make them clearly identifiable from the air, and a third vehicle. Images from the scene showed a blackened hole on the roof of one of the vehicles, puncturing the nonprofit’s logo.
The strike is the first of the war to kill foreign aid workers, but humanitarian officials say it is part of a pattern of attacks by Israel on relief convoys. Israeli limitations on aid deliveries, and its targeting of police officers that protected them, have put Gaza’s 2 million people on the brink of famine. The situation is especially dire in the north, where health officials say children have begun to die of malnutrition, and many families are subsisting on weeds and animal feed.

WCK said last month it had served more than 42 million meals since the war began and opened more than 60 community kitchens across Gaza.

25 comments:

  1. Thanks for doing the heavy work of vetting the organization. I'm often good for a few bucks in a crisis, but for international problems I often find it difficult to choose a valid aid organization.

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  2. I made a WCK donation just now... Thank you for reminding me of this awesome organization ~

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  3. Thanks so much for bringing this group to my attention!! Yet one more reason this is one of my three favorite blogs!

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  4. Thank you for recommending World Central Kitchen. I donated.

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  5. Just made a donation. Thanks for the info/link

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  6. I'm also sharing your blog link and sending $$ he's truly doing God's work and thanks for the research

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  7. WCK is AWESOME, and Jose Andres is an angel on earth ~

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  8. WCK is so amazing. They feed so many people. No questions asked, no bullshit.

    And Jose Andres has no patience for bureaucracy. After a hurricane went over the Bahamas and some islands were destroyed while others were still ok, he was seeking to fly to one of them with a plane full of food from Miami. The Bahaman government kept telling he could not go because they hadn't cleared the airport even though drone footage and people on the ground had said careful planes could land. At some point, he asked his contact in the Bahaman government to connect him to the prime minster with the question who was gonna stop him if he took off from Miami and would land on that island. People were hungry, and he was in a plane full of food with a pilot willing to land there.

    He is the Katie Porter of chefs.

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  9. I checked WCK out six ways to Sunday and can’t find anything bad about them online. That’s just impossible these days, try to find any organization the trolls haven’t attacked. But WCK gets the best score on every charity investigating site. The best way to donate with no worry about your money eaten up with advertising, “expenses”, or executive salaries.
    I got an email asking for a 5th donation since the war started, no problem except they want my phone number and won’t process my donation without it. That annoys me because they don’t need it. But they are still the one I trust to do the right thing.
    xoxoxoBruce

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  10. My area has seen some major disasters, including a fire that destroyed 14,000 homes. WCK came to help. People like the performative dimension. And the romance of the hot meal. But, I think the same money and time is better spent provisioning people with packs/boxes/bags of non-perishable food. In a catastrophe it's a calorie game, not a flavor game.

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    1. One difference that may or may not matter to you is that MREs are manufactured in factories far away and shipped in, while WCK purchases food from farmers and vendors in the local area affected by the catastrophe when possible.

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    2. Our local soup kitchen served hungry people every day. Seen as blight, it was destroyed by our city--and in a city of 100,000, very few cared. I was one of the few who cared. So, I'm not against kitchens. What did strike me as odd was that a lot of affluent white liberals in my area jumped onboard for a celebrity chef, feeding fire victims for a few days, but would come nowhere near championing a kitchen for the homeless. All that aside, in my ten years of trying to provision people on the streets, I've rarely had MREs. There are tones of alternatives to MREs. Locally sourced? Some are, like bread. But, the goal is to get food to people that can be eaten over several days, easily transported, etc. I'll admit I'm imposing a lot from my local experience. I can see how establishing food service venues might work if they are close to neighborhoods where people can access them multiple times per day. I'd have to see how straight-up provisioning would compare in the same setting.

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    3. In a catastrophe it's a calorie game, not a flavor game.

      The point of WCK is to reject that point. Their view is that there is always local healthy, fresh food around, as well as chefs that want to cook. So, instead of flying in calories from elsewhere they want to use local food, local chefs and fresh food.

      Their claim is that that way they can often operate faster than the Red Cross can show up with a plane full of calories.

      If you live in a place with disasters, you know locals are always faster than FEMA or the Red Cross. Someone is handing out sandwiches or pizza. WCK just amplifies those local people and cranks up that operation with amazing efficiency because those locals can not financially sustain handing out free food.

      Another point is that they don't only do a few days. They stay after other people leave. They've been in Ukraine since that war started. They fed people throughout the entire COVID lockdown in NYC and DC (and probably other cities). They do not want to provide cheap calories for that long. They want to make healthy fresh, local food.

      Remember how they started. Andres wanted to do something after the earth quake in Haiti. He found there was plenty of food, and plenty of cooks, but just no organization (mostly money, but also logistics) to get the food to the chefs and then to the hungry. Restaurants were closed, didn't have the money to get food, didn't could not pay for any food that they could get, etc). And that's what he does. He finds the local stuff and amplifies that with money and logistics.

      I'm very curious if they will ever explain how they do that.

      And finally, you are right that homeless people almost never get the services they deserve or need and are too often treated like lepers by even the most liberal firebrands.

      Homelessness is sadly seen as a moral failing of the homeless (oh, sorry a person experiencing homelessness), instead of a housing problem. Failing housing policy is the cause of homelessness.

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  11. Exactly, disaster strikes, restaurants close, WCK hires those out of work cooks/chefs, buys their food that would rot (especially with power off), brings immediate relief while setting up kitchens and supply lines from local sources. Help the people help themselves will produce more cohesion and a faster recovery.
    xoxoxoBruce

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    1. WCK emailed me in response to my complaint and over a day of back and forth information I was able to complete my fifth donation with no phone number... everyone can. This is another example of how great the WCK organization is. They listen and respond to people even petty complaints like mine.
      xoxoxoBruce

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    2. I donate through their website, and they have NEVER EVER hit me up for anything. One more reason why they are my favorite charity.

      I resent the infinite follow-ups, even when you ask to be removed. I once donate to some local charity across the country for a friend's wedding. They kept hitting me up despite me asking several times to please leave me alone. Please stop wasting your money be sending me your magazine! I also donating a decent sum once to UNICEF, and they plastered me as a VIP donor (it really wasn't that much) which came with all kinds of privileges. I told them to stop harassing me bu my "personal donation coach" kept getting in touch to make sure I was ok.

      On the other hand, you can't blame charities. Getting money is a numbers game. I have a friend who runs a sizeable animal rescue. And they just work on percentages. You get about 2% response from mail spam. A bit less from e-mail. They just buy address lists, and e-mail addresses in big numbers. They can't do cross checks on whether your address shows up again on a new list they've bought. Social media is a bit more varied on the return numbers.

      Nevertheless, charities should respect people's wishes on not being contacted again, and WCK is leading the way. (Except for their relentless ask to share my donation on Facebook, which I'm not even on).

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    3. I get occasional updates on new projects that are undertaking - but I've never opted out from communications. I agree with your view, and WCK is my favorite charity.

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  12. WCK in Maui. Worth another repost?

    https://wck.org/relief/hawaii-wildfires-2023

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  13. Good people delivering aid I paid for, murdered with weapons I paid for. I'm pissed!
    xoxoxoBruce

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  14. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/03/opinion/jose-andres-let-people-eat.html?unlocked_article_code=1.hk0.v7_H.B5O7ftzR5AVR&smid=tw-share

    Op-ed from Jose Andres in the NYTimes. Hope it's not behind the paywall.

    What an amazing piece. Clear concise language. No ambiguity.
    Politicians need to what an observe. This is how you lead.

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    1. Blogworthy. Thank you, Nepkarel.

      And I agree re your assessment of Andres. If I can succeed in getting Dolly Parton on the ballot for President, perhaps I can arrange for Jose Andres to be her V.P.

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    2. Blogged tonight. HIs words need to be heard.

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    3. Oh please don't get me wrong. I do not want Jose Andres to become a politician. That would be an enormous waste of talent. Let the man cook.

      But I do want politicians to see what he's doing and be more like him.

      This op-ed is just so beautifully written. Direct. To the point.

      And without any nonsense political phrasing. Politicians always worry about perception. Andres shows that if your goals are right, you do not need to worry about perception, because you have actual results to show for.

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