Food for thought: Helping each other is contagious
A Norfolk hot dog shop started feeding those in need for free. A flood of nationwide support followed.
The calls and messages came from New Jersey. They came from the state of Washington. They came from Miami and Nashville and Chicago and Fort Worth, Texas. And of course, they came from all over Hampton Roads.
Each was from a person who’d been moved to offer a little bit of help, and a few kind words.
“You are such a blessing,” began one card from the Peninsula.
“It made me smile wider than in quite a while,” read an email from Chicago.
At the end of February, Tarah Morris began a program called Franks for Friends at her Norfolk hot dog and burger shop, Perfectly Frank, offering one free meal per day to anyone who needs one. “If you’re broke and hungry, we got you!” read the sign they put out in front of the restaurant, at 4408 Monarch Way on the Old Dominion University campus. “One free meal per person per day. No questions asked.”
The idea came after a customer gifted her shop $2,000 to help employees and anyone else in need. From there, she started a fund, allowing customers to pay forward a meal if they’d like to do so. Enough did so that the program became self-sustaining: She’s given out 125 meals so far.
But after a story about her program appeared in this newspaper on March 11, USA Today came calling. Podcasts contacted Morris, asking her to appear. Then came CNN.
The response, Morris said, has been a nationwide outpouring of goodwill that sometimes brings her to tears as she reads the messages of support — often alongside a
check given as a donation.
“It’s been crazy,” Morris said. “People are calling from so many different places. People are friending me on Facebook — I don’t know what they’re looking for, there. I’m blown away . ... I’m trying to stay on top of it. I know I can’t send a thank you card to everybody, but the people who mail in a card with a check and say all these nice things, I’m mailing thank you cards. I’m writing emails to people who email. I hope I don’t miss anybody.”
More than $6,000 in donations have poured in to help her offer free meals to her neighborhood, Morris said. Donations have ranged from a single dollar to hundreds. “I just got $500 from someone named Judy,” Morris said. “That’s all it says — Judy.”
One man, she said, tried to donate a meal even when he had no money of his own.
“He said, ‘I live in Miami. I’m broke, I don’t have money, but this hit really hard and I want to donate,’” she said.
The shop ran his card, but it came back with insufficient funds.
“He was embarrassed that he didn’t have $10,” Morris said. And so a staffer donated $20 in his name, and thanked him for the support.
When she started the pay-it-forward program at Perfectly Frank, Morris had wondered how long she’d be able to keep it going. But people who’ve donated from all over the country have changed that.
“I am really struggling with people saying I’m an angel,” she said. “No — it’s the people donating.”
To keep up with the overwhelming support, she’s now broadening her net by consulting local nonprofits — and is considering setting up a table outside her hot dog shop on Sunday afternoons, when she’s normally closed.
She was also able to deliver one of the program’s meals to one of her regular customers, Beau Cowan, an avid Old Dominion University sports fan who gets to the shop whenever he can; he uses a wheelchair to get around, so he generally has to catch a ride. He was stuck in the hospital this week, she said, so she told him she would bring a donated meal. Morris doesn’t get to see most of the people the Franks for Friends program helps, she said. The program is anonymous by design. But this meal was different, she said.
“He always smiles and laughs and tells terrible jokes, and is a good human being, and I got to go deliver him food today,” she said. “It filled my heart.”
“I am really struggling with people saying I’m an angel. No — it’s the people donating.”
— Tarah Morris, Perfectly Frank