The Upside: Café owner cooks up a plan to help his community
Ron Herman”™s Wooster Hollow Cafe saw its customers disappear and sales plummet 80% when the pandemic sent restaurants into lockdown last spring.
But it wasn”™t just his Ridgefield restaurant and employees he was worried about.
“My father always told me to never focus on myself; to always focus on those who have less. So I thought OK, a lot of people are losing their jobs. We”™re also close to Danbury, which has a lot of undocumented workers. They got nothing from the government.”
Quickly partnering with area churches with largely Hispanic populations, Wooster Hollow started giving away meals, packaged for distribution to parishioners who had lost their income. Word spread quickly as the need grew.
“We were giving away about a hundred meals a week, and it grew from there as things got worse. We started helping out Meals on Wheels, who had an increased need due to the elderly population who didn”™t want to go out,” he said. “We were providing 500 meals a week at the peak of the need.”
The effort also enabled Wooster Hollow”™s kitchen staff to stay on the payroll, which Herman financed initially through a holding company he had set up following his career in finance. Herman spent 15 years as president and CEO of GE Equity and six years in Abu Dhabi as CEO of GE Capital in the Middle East.
Using $10,000 from the holding company, Herman set up a nonprofit called Sunrise Meals to fund the cafe”™s new community programs. Wooster Hollow also received emergency funding through the Federal Paycheck Protection Program, which arrived just in time for Herman to keep paying his staff. Soon, as regular customers and locals heard about what was going on at the cafe, donations came in.
“The whole community rallied around us giving back,” Herman said. “We got $7,000 in donations.”
The Wooster Hollow staff was not only thrilled to be working, but also to be helping.
“I can”™t tell you how excited the chefs in the kitchen were that they were helping out, especially the Latino communities,” Herman said. “We had one chef figure out how to basically provide great food for people at a cost of $3 a meal. They were so clever.”
Thankfully things leveled off a bit for the cafe over the summer; the addition of a tented patio and several picnic tables helped bring customers back to almost usual levels, and all 11 regular employees are still on staff. All told, Sunrise Meals provided 4,046 meals to those impacted by the pandemic. There are still funds left in the 501c, and Herman said they will be used wisely.
“We are still providing meals to the Dorothy Day Hospitality House in Danbury, and will continue to do so,” he said of the shelter and soup kitchen. Herman”™s crew is also getting ready, eyeing another tough winter ahead. “Our philosophy will be that if anyone needs help, we”™re going to use every penny to give them help. Then we”™ll all be ready when life comes back to normal.”