Eastern Iowa Bakery Uses Thousands in Sales For Meals To Ukraine
Folks across America and Iowa are coming up with so many unique ways to send love and assistance to those feeling helpless from the devastating attacks in Ukraine.
From a local pizza shop creating a special drink and donating proceeds, to people renting AirBNBs to give people monetary assistance in the region, everyone is finding a way to do what they can.
Add an Eastern Iowa bakery to that list. Cheryl Maloney owns The Eat Shop in Solon, and over the weekend they held a bake sale. Not just any bake sale, mind you, but one that raised, in total, $7,629. The Cedar Rapids Gazette says donations from that will go straight to World Central Kitchen, the same group working with Fong's Pizza in Cedar Rapids right now.
The Eat Shop committed 10 percent of its sales from Saturday plus agreed to match all additional donations given at the register. They will provide meals to Ukrainians. As the result of their donation drive, they posted the following to Facebook on Tuesday:
This afternoon, The Eat Shop made a donation for $7,818.93 to World Central Kitchen to help feed families in Ukraine. 💙💛💙💛 We never imagined a small bakery like ours could raise such a significant amount of money for such a worthy cause. 🇺🇦 The generosity and support from people across Eastern Iowa was astounding. Thank you from the bottom of our hearts. ❤️
To one of Maloney's employees, it's personal. Tanya McPheron's brother and his family are stuck in Ukraine right now. Fortunately, she still hears from them most days, but it doesn't lessen the anxiety she feels like most of the rest of us every day.
As this donation event was going on, normal sales for a full Saturday were exceeded within 90 minutes and were tripled by the end of the day. The Eat Shop had to close Sunday to clean up, recover, and restock.
The Eat Shop's sale Saturday was one of the numerous ways people have helped locally, but there have been a number of inspiring acts of kindness nationwide as well, as a look at our list below clearly shows.