Look for the Helpers: Cooking for comfort, supporting local business, signs of encouragement
As our area is faced with ongoing changes due to a growing pandemic, we are bringing stories of people doing good in the community during a time of uncertainty.
Look for the helpers.
Mister Rogers
Cooking for Comfort
A Santa Barbara global humanitarian organization launched an online cooking network to keep people connected through food.
Shelter Box created a Facebook community called Cooking Through Corona. ShelterBox President Kerri Murray and guest chefs are hosting live Facebook updates about the organization while cooking comforting meals like “Solitude Soup, the Quarantini, and Sequestered Saint Patrick."
“Out of conversations with our ShelterBox staff, we knew we could do even more to help put politics and panic aside, and we had an idea of creating an online community to connect and bring comfort to people around the world who are homebound and working remote," said Murray.
ShelterBox provides emergency shelter and essential household items to communities devastated by disaster and conflict. You can find Cooking Through Corona on Facebook. The page already has more than one thousand followers from all over the country.
Keeping Small Businesses in Business
Two local realtors have created a Facebook page to connect local restaurants and businesses with the community during the coronavirus outbreak.
Joe Parker and Avi Becker say they created the page so local businesses can share their stories and struggles.
The Facebook group is called Support Santa Barbara Biz Online and in just a few days has hundreds of members.
“Hey everyone so as social distancing is kicking in we wanted to create a platform that allows these businesses to tell their stories. And give us as consumers a centralized place to scroll these local businesses and reach out to them and help them,” Parker said in a video message.
“This period is super weird and it’s going to pass. We want to make sure that all of our amazing community those business owners especially in the service the food industries, we want to keep them afloat as best we can. So join this Facebook page and help the community out,” Becker echoed.
On the page you’ll find out which restaurants are offering discounts and the phone numbers to call to order to go. Many restaurants says they can even bring the food out to your car. Restaurants and businesses are also offering discounted gift cards.
Sign of the Times
Two little kids are bringing joy to their neighbors while self-distancing at home during the coronavirus outbreak.
5-year-old Madison and 2-year-old Beau Dudley are staying home with their parents in Carpinteria.
Every day they draw pictures and make signs and hold them up in the window for people to see as they walk by.
The kids say they just want to “cheer people up and make them happy.
Their parents say it’s working.
