Our 2021 Charitable Organization of the Year Award recipient, Fork Over Love, began as an emergency response on January 8, 2021, to bridge the gap between two groups of people severely affected by the pandemic: small, local restaurants and the working poor. Both of these groups are experiencing different levels and types of food insecurity. Restaurants are struggling to keep staff employed, stoves on, and doors open, while the working poor are struggling to put food on the table. Fork Over Love's mission is to establish a new system of community care that creates food security while elevating all who are struggling. To this end, Fork Over Love solicits the help of the community to strengthen our independent restaurants by paying them to provide hot, nutritious takeout meals that are then distributed to the entire community for free. In this way our food insecure neighbors can access healthy meals with absolute dignity and no stigma or shame.

Fork Over Love believes that food is the foundation of a healthy life and that restaurants are the foundation of a healthy, culturally diverse community. By investing in our restaurants to feed our people, they know that we are creating a socially innovative and responsible solution to nourish our entire community with dignity, grace, and power—physically, mentally, emotionally, socially, culturally, and economically. To date, FOL has held 42 free community dinners throughout Luzerne County, reinvested over $140,000 in the restaurant community, and served over 14,000 meals. They did this by engaging 60 restaurants, 30 host sites, over 130 volunteers and the complete and utter generosity of our community donors which includes private donors, corporate sponsors, foundations, and non-profit partners. They are looking forward to continued growth as they establish Fork Over Love franchises in some of our hardest hit neighborhoods in the county. They know that by training and empowering our community to "fork over love" for each other we are creating the pathway for a new, sustainable, nourishing system of care.

Make sure to join us for our Chamber Annual Dinner on November 18th to celebrate Fork Over Love and the rest of our honorees that night! Click here to register today!