Food4Heroes is a non-profit organization formed in reaction to the coronavirus pandemic that brings local catering companies and volunteers together to deliver high quality, nutritious meals to front-line healthcare workers in the UK. Their goal is to ensure that all National Health Service (NHS) front-line workers have access to healthy and delicious meals, despite marathon shifts, for as long as the COVID-19 pandemic continues.
The problem
The onset of COVID-19 has brought fear, economic uncertainty, and a new set of challenges to almost every industry around the world. While some businesses have been forced to close their doors, hospital staff have been working overtime to accommodate the influx of coronavirus patients. NHS frontline workers are struggling to maintain their own health while working around the clock.
A viral video posted by one such critical care nurse captured the raw emotion of what it’s like for NHS workers to finish a grueling shift and head to the grocery store only to find that it’s been stripped of all healthy, essential foods. These 50-seconds of footage were what inspired IT consultant John Brown, and his sister, caterer Helen Stocker, to create Food4Heroes.
While Helen’s catering company experienced a sharp decline in business as a result of COVID-19, her passion for serving others was still intact. She and John decided to organize a program to prepare and deliver hot, healthy, and delicious meals to the NHS front-line workers at hospitals who so desperately needed them. They established a donation base for Food4Heroes through social media, grant applications, and on popular crowdfunding platforms. They put out a call for recently furloughed chefs to help prepare the meals and volunteers to help serve them.
What started out as a kind gesture for one hospital quickly grew to a 300+ meal-per-hospital operation for over 30 hospitals in the area. Given the rising scale of Food4Heroes, they knew they’d soon require a more formal, paper-work heavy onboarding and agreement process for volunteers, catering partners, and the hospitals they served.
The solution
The ability to make an impact on the lives of its customers is one of the three major values PandaDoc and its employees live by. So when Food4Heroes reached out in need of a document management system integrated with HubSpot to manage hundreds of volunteers, PandaDoc donated two business licenses to the non-profit.
With PandaDoc, the volunteer, catering, and hospital agreements Food4Heroes needed to create were easier than ever to build, customize, and send for electronic signatures. The improvements to the Food4Heroes document workflow, speed of transactions, document insight, and recipient signing experience provided them with the critical infrastructure needed to expand the reach of their operation.
The result
Food4Heroes has already served 150,000+ meals to NHS workers and plans to achieve their goal of a quarter-million meals served by the end of June 2020. To reach their goal, they will heavily rely on PandaDoc to onboard even more volunteers and chefs to serve an even greater number of hospitals.
The timeline regarding how much longer hospitals will be overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients is unclear, but thanks to PandaDoc, Food4Heroes is prepared to continue making the lives of NHS workers a little bit brighter during these unprecedented times. The non-profit will continue to benefit from PandaDoc once the pandemic has subsided by providing healthy meals to mental health professionals and staff working at in-patient facilities.
