The My name is Lisa Souder and I'm the executive director for Beans Cafe and the Children's

Lunch Box and boy we are really busy trying to serve our community during the COVID-19, you know, pandemic.

It's had incredible impact on our programs, which of course is Beast Cafe,

which is Emergency Shelter, usually cold weather, overnight shelter

and meals for people year round, and children's lunchbox, which feeds hungry children

right here in Anchorage.

So Bean's Cafe is currently providing safe temporary shelter for a maximum of

480 people 24 hours a day and is utilizing the Sullivan Arena and Ben Bokey Ice Arena.

All that started on March 21st.

How did you approach that situation?

You know it was a really big lift for a small agency.

We were approached by the municipality of Anchorage

to ask if we could help them to establish an emergency shelter.

It was necessary because of the CDC guidelines, which were

recommending that people in shelter be separated six feet apart when sleeping.

And this really wasn't very compatible with most of our current

emergency shelters. So it was going to cause a huge decrease in the number of people that

would be able to access their traditional shelters.

So initially it was identified by the Muni to find a space and the first site was Ben Bokey.

And it was quickly realized as we started getting numbers back from the shelters

as to what this six-foot rule was going to do to the number of people they could accommodate,

that Ben Bokey Arena simply wasn't going to provide enough capacity and at that point

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