Loaves & Fishes gets huge water donation from Sacramento businesses to fight summer heat
Two longstanding Sacramento businesses, Bonney Plumbing and Markstein Beverage Co., teamed up to fill a critical need for Loaves & Fishes in their effort to provide water to homeless people during the summer months in a region known for its triple-digit heat waves.
Following a June 18 call for donations of clean drinking water on social media from Loaves & Fishes, a homeless survival service organization that Michelle McCauley, a Bonney spokeswoman, follows. McCauley reached out to Markstein and was connected with Cynthia Hardin, the community outreach manager, who she was told “does a lot of community endeavors as well.”
“Knowing the temperatures in Sacramento can be a hundred-plus, and knowing it was coming very fast, I thought we need to do something,” McCauley said.
Markstein has been working to provide water to first responders during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, so it has experience when it comes to gathering resources for a good cause, according to Hardin.
“We like to work with local businesses to help support the community,” Hardin said. “Michelle reached out to me with the opportunity, she saw that there was the need, and luckily we were able to act fairly quickly and put everything together.”
Through Markstein’s connection to beverage vendors and along with donations by companies like Essentia and Icelandic water, Bonney and Markstein were able to purchase two truckloads, roughly 98,000 bottles, of water that were delivered to Loaves & Fishes Thursday morning.
“Water is essential year-round for our guests,” said Erika Prasad, development director for Loaves & Fishes. “When we look at it in the context of right now, being in a global pandemic, complicating that with triple-digit weather, with the lack of support system that has been put in place for people experiencing homelessness, it’s a whole other critical level of need.”
Prasad said that Loaves and Fishes is “a kind of oasis” for guests during a time when many businesses like restaurants or gas stations they might rely on for food, water and sanitation remain closed or are not serving at full capacity. Because of this, it is not uncommon for those without shelter to walk a mile or more to access clean water, according to Prasad.
“They don’t have access to drinking water, they don’t have access to hand washing stations or any way for them to access sanitation and clean water,” Prasad said. “If you consider that, not only are we providing drinkable water on our campus, that doesn’t even go into the fact that folks are doing laundry, they can wash their hands. Once they leave, we are providing water bottles that they can take to their encampments. Sometimes this is the only place our guests can get water bottles to take with them while they shelter in their encampment.”
Because Loaves and Fishes is one of the largest survival services in Sacramento, the need for water “can never really be filled,” according to Prasad. She said they will continue to face that challenge going through the summer and into the winter.
Prasad said at Friendship Park, Loaves & Fishes’ private park adjacent to their facility on C Street, they serve roughly 1,000 adults and children per day and over 13,000 “unduplicated guests” annually. She said it is hard to say if the amount of water donated by the two businesses will actually last until the end of August, given the need and summer heat, but because Loaves & Fishes doesn’t rely on county services, large donations like that from Bonney and Markstein are crucial to their efforts to help those in need.
“The beautiful part about it is that local business have supported us,” Prasad said. “That’s been a tremendous amount of help, and we’re grateful for them.”
This story was originally published June 25, 2020 at 3:33 PM.