“The governor’s order brought all that to a halt: “There was a lot of ‘what do we do now?’ says Sam Chesneau, site lead at the community center.
At the same time, Wasat, a Seattle nonprofit organization on whose board Chesneau sits, was facing similar challenges in providing hot meals to those in need after its main benefactor shut down because of COVID.
“We started thinking, how do we transition this work into something we can actually do, given all the constraints?” Chesneau says. “How can we provide that safety, where we’re not putting people in harm’s way or [at] risk, during the early stages when we were still figuring it all out?”