Frontline Impact Project is a KIND Foundation initiative that matches specialty food, beverage and personal care companies wishing to donate products to frontline institutions, including those battling the COVID-19 pandemic. Frontline Impact Project vets the organizations receiving the donations of coffee, snacks, microwaveable meals, mineral water and personal care and hygiene items so that the donors know their products are going to the intended recipients.
As of the end of 2020, the project had more than 60 companies involved, and The KIND Foundation had vetted more than 600 institutions across all 50 states and coordinated the delivery of more than 4.4 million products to more than a million people. There’s plenty of room for more companies to get involved, according to Michael Johnston, The KIND Foundation’s President. “The support for frontline has diminished over time,” he said. “In the spring, people came out on balconies to cheer them for their courageous work. That work continues, but societal focus has shifted.”
The project started early in 2020 when The KIND Foundation, an independent charity founded by KIND Snacks Founder Daniel Lubetzky, first became aware of the scope of the public health disaster caused by COVID-19, Johnston said. When the folks at KIND became aware that health care workers in places where the virus was raging were working long shifts without access to regular meals or even stocked vending machines, the company started looking for a way to put KIND bars into their hands. “Restaurants had shut down. There were no more food carts – they weren’t allowed. The hospital cafeterias had closed,” said Adnan Durrani, the Chief Executive Officer of Saffron Road and an enthusiastic enlistee into the project.
Shortly after recognizing the problem, Lubetzky and team realized that The KIND Foundation did not have an adequate network of accredited frontline organizations that could readily accept a donation of KIND bars and get it to beleaguered health care workers. There just wasn’t such a list. That meant that lending a hand wasn’t going to be as easy as shipping millions of KIND Bars to someone who’d take charge of them and then maybe just calling a few friends like Durrani and recruiting them to do the same. “The challenge was that KIND didn’t have a network of health care institutions at the ready. They didn’t know how to efficiently reach the hospitals to deliver the product,” Johnston said.
And once The KIND Foundation was on the job, another realization came – that health care workers weren’t the only front-line workers whose welfare was being threatened by COVID-19: firefighters, EMTs and others were also exposing themselves to the virus to serve the public and help the sick during the crisis. So, first, the logistics had to be worked out. “The administrators of the hospitals and health care institutions were overwhelmed, so trying to build a list was hard,” Johnston said. “Within 72 hours, we stood up a website, developed the mechanics for vetting the institutions and started recruiting the people within the institutions to receive the products.”
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Durrani got involved when he happened to be on the phone to Lubetzky and started sharing his feelings about how there ought to be something that Saffron Road could do to help out. “I am doing something. Why don’t you join me?” Lubetzky said.
“In a coalition with a number of other companies, I believe the FIP ended up giving out almost 20,000 meals now [by the end of November 2020], especially during the surge,” Durrani said. Other companies joined in as well, offering everything from protein bars to keep doctors and nurses fueled for the fight to moisturizers and lotions to soothe the hands chapped by sanitizing chemicals and faces chafed by N95 masks. Companies like Headspace have chipped in with mental health services to help health care heroes deal with stress, and start-ups like ROWDY have offered virtual fitness classes that provide a break from the intensity of the work. “There’s been a broad range of donors,” Johnston said.
Mars, which acquired KIND North America this year, has contributed Extra gum to help resolve tensions that might otherwise be felt as clenched teeth and tight jaws and has promised another donation in 2021.
The project, originally envisioned by Lubetzky and Johnston as something that might be alive for a few weeks, has lasted far longer than that. Nevertheless, Frontline Impact Project will be continuing for as long as the pandemic demands and the health care workers, firefighters and emergency services personnel who’ve been thrown into the disaster need the help, Johnston said. “When we first started, it was primarily about providing nutritious food and snacks to health care workers. They’re now encountering very different kinds of challenges. They’re dealing with exhaustion, extraordinary stress and burnout,” Johnston said. “They still need us, so we’re going to be there all the way through.”