Solar panels for our refugee food bank

Here’s a quick review of what Katalyst has been up to the last few months.

Our biggest operation, the food bank, is still going strong, delivering over 50,000 pounds of food to thousands of refugees and host families around Moldova EVERY WEEK…since last March.

The impact we have on the humanitarian sector is because 96% of what we buy is Made in Moldova, 75% of what’s included in our food bags are fruits and vegetables, and that we use biodegradable packaging.

It’s a lot of work, but we have a lot of help…

Before winter set it, we hired Ukrainians to insulate hundreds of old Soviet apartments because heating costs are about 3x more this year.

We also bought hundreds and hundreds of boots, winter socks and backpacks for refugees, from Moldova’s largest shoe factory (took almost half their inventory).

Since December we’ve been organizing cooking classes for teenagers, single parents and the elderly. Starting later this month, we’ll run a vocational course for young adults, to develop basic food service skills, so they can get their foot in the door.

During the fall and early winter, we delivered over 5,000 family-sized water filters to parts of the country with the worst water quality.

And right after new year, we bought an old city bus and have started the process of converting it to be a mobile classroom/lab, which we’ll use once it warms up, running around the country, visiting forgotten corners of Moldova. We were hoping to fundraise enough to put solar panels on our food bank, but so far we’ve received less than $2k, which is actually enough to give the bus “green power”, so we’ll do that for now, which is probably more exciting anyway…

Thank you again to GlobalGiving and to all our donors, without your help we’d probably still be 3 volunteers bouncing around in an old van, trying to make a difference.