Since the beginning of the outbreak, Andrés has been doing some groundwork feeding communities. This week's operations were focused on helping the people living in a particularly hard-to-reach territory.

In order to extend assistance, he and his non-profit organization partnered with various stakeholders to repurpose buildings like Washington Nationals' stadium into a distribution center for free food.

 

Navajo Nation

Underserved communities in the Navajo Nation due to lack of information dissemination by local authorities led them to practice poor social distancing and other health protocols promoted by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. As such, they have seen a surge of coronavirus cases in their locality, and the government has virtually no clue.

Andrés announced on his social media last week that he and his team in the non-profit organization, World Central Kitchen, were prepared to do the people at Navajo Nation a public service. They were cooking dishes at the Bee Hóldzil Event Center at Window Rock High School that would be distributed to vulnerable families.

This week, he and his team launched Restaurants For The People, a campaign to support local and independent businesses with a commitment of $50 million. In addition, Andrés planned to keep working alongside restaurants to give healthy meals to communities.

According to their website, their initiative has allowed them to serve food to more than one million people in the U.S. alone. This does not include their reach in other countries like Spain, which is also leading the world in terms of coronavirus mortality rate.

Check these out:

José Andrés and his relief initiatives

Prior to serving meals to the Navajo Nation, Andrés was busy providing relief packages to over fifty cities in the United States. He took his world-renowned charity with him at each corner he could count in the country.

As far back as in 2010, Andrés and his wife Patricia started building the foundations for World Central Kitchen. He made enough money from his commercial success to support his growing business, and he thought that volunteering to help the less fortunate would leave him a better legacy than when he started.

The non-profit organization was an initiative to provide food to people in vulnerable conditions after being devastated by disasters. After Hurricane Maria, Andrés flew to Puerto Rico with his team at World Central Kitchen. They cooked and fed almost four million people in the country.

A lot of what he learned from volunteering at Puerto Rico, Andrés found himself to be relearning as he distributed food during the pandemic. Most of the people who account for this number are medical front-line workers.

At the same time, World Central Kitchen is coordinating with restaurants all across the country to keep their businesses running and to help boost the economy. This help is also inclusive to food delivery companies like Uber Eats, who help with distributing food.

"If somebody is hungry, you just get in the kitchen and start cooking," Andrés said.