These 42 restaurants are participating in MIFA’s 10-day fundraiser for Meals on Wheels

What’s happening: The Metropolitan Inter-Faith Association, or MIFA, has launched a new fundraising campaign for its Meals on Wheels program in their ongoing efforts to deliver more nutritious meals to more senior Memphians in need. And the campaign, Spring for a Meal, has garnered the support of 42 local restaurants to help them do just that.

What it is: Spring for a Meal takes place at participating restaurants from Friday, April 5, through Sunday, April 14. Promotional table tents are placed atop the tables of 42 restaurants throughout the Memphis area, with QR codes enabling diners to visit the MIFA website and make a donation to further fund the Meals on Wheels program. Restaurants with the highest amount of donation referrals will receive prizes for their staff.

Why it is: MIFA is the provider of Meals on Wheels in Memphis and Shelby County, which serves and delivers more than 737,000 hot and nutritious meals to more than 4,400 seniors in need each year. It’s their goal to bring those numbers up to one million meals served to 5,000 seniors annually, and it’s hoped that the Spring for a Meal fundraiser will help them reach their goal.

Senior food insecurity is a pressing problem nationwide but especially here in Memphis, where the metropolitan region ranks third in senior food insecurity rates in the country.

[Related: Read “Addressing senior food insecurity is a critical need nationwide, but especially in Memphis” on High Ground.]

Where to go: There are 42 restaurants participating in the Spring for a Meal fundraiser in the campaign’s inaugural year. They include The Bar-B-Q Shop; Beauty Shop Restaurant; Bogie’s Deli; Central BBQ (downtown and Summer locations); Chicken Salad Chick (Arlington, Germantown, Poplar Perkins, and Wolfchase); Gus’s World Famous Fried Chicken (Bartlett, Downtown, Germantown, and Southaven); Hog Wild BBQ; Huey’s Restaurants (Collierville, Cordova, Downtown, Germantown, Midtown, Millington, Poplar, and Southwind); Kooky Canuck; The Mad Grocer & Deli; Memphis Made Brewing Company; Memphis Pizza Cafe (Madison and Park); Patrick’s Neighborhood Bar & Patio; Sunrise Memphis (Memphis and East Memphis); Tops Bar-B-Q & Burgers (Bartlett, Cordova, Hacks Cross, Macon, Poplar, Summer, Union, Thomas St., and Winchester); and Villa Castrioti (Cordova and Lakeland).

Room to grow: “This is our pilot year,” says Anna Kathryn Word, Chief Development Officer at MIFA. “We started small; we have 42 restaurant locations, which is almost exactly what we said we wanted when we started planning. We're hoping to grow it to 100, 200 locations in the next few years. But we really wanted to get it right this first year. And so having 42 locations and working with some really committed people who have been amazing partners to MIFA, and in many ways over the years — they're helping us. They're helping us with this experiment and we're doing it together.”

Visit MIFA online to learn more about Spring for a Meal, Meals on Wheels, and more.