Who Will Run the Soup Kitchens?

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Volunteers describe the Rainier Popup Kitchen not as a provider of homeless services, but as “neighbors feeding neighbors.” For the past three years, they’ve hosted a family-style Sunday lunch, open to all comers, in a parking lot just south of downtown Seattle. While they ate, guests could browse clothing donations, pick up pet food and clean needles, and spend time with friends, both housed and unhoused. They were encouraged to go through the buffet line as many times as they’d like.

But as Washington State emerged as the epicenter of America’s COVID-19 outbreak, with dozens of new cases confirmed every day, the members of this all-volunteer organization knew they’d have to make changes. Authorities were discouraging smaller and smaller gatherings by the day, and experts warned that older people and those in poor health—in other words, many of the kitchen’s guests—are especially susceptible to the disease.

Suddenly, the task of serving a home-cooked meal involved working in close quarters with people at especially high risk of infection. The group’s few dozen members also understood that if just one of them were to transmit the virus to someone in such a vulnerable community, the consequences could be devastating, even fatal.

So, last week, Rainier Popup Kitchen moved to a grab-and-go model, filling more than 100