The food distribution helped residents like Hunter get a prepared meal. And the program also provided an income to restaurant workers who had been laid off from their regular season jobs because of the pandemic.
Rachel McCandless, the Health and Nutrition Director for Feeding Northeast Florida, said the Project Share prepared meals program was a pandemic response effort that was only supposed to last for 10 weeks but was extended for nine months.
The Project Share program allowed Feeding Northeast Florida to hire restaurant workers, some of who were laid off due to the pandemic, as independent contractors and paid their salaries through private donations and through contributions by philanthropists.
Eldora Wilson wishes she could turn the clock back to the 1970s. She remembers not only when ground beef was just 90 cents a pound, but when she didn t have to leave her New Town neighborhood to buy groceries.
As she recalls, everyone in her neighborhood did their grocery shopping at the Daylight Grocery store on the corner of Myrtle Avenue and Kings Road, a short walk from her house on Steele Street.
Most weekends, Wilson said, the store was crowded with shoppers, many from her neighborhood. That was good, because my daddy used to go there and he had an account set up with them, Wilson said. He was a railroad man and he got paid every two weeks, and that s when he would pay on the account for the food we got. They had everything, and it was convenient for everybody.