How to help during the pandemic
Dear Friends,
How do we demonstrate our concern and care for others while we are responsibly staying physically apart? It’s a question we’re grappling with at the Leichtag Foundation, and we’ve heard many of you are, too. Events at Leichtag Commons and most partner organizations have been canceled. We are socially distancing and working remotely.
As we follow the recommendations of our public health and safety officials, we seek to express our Foundation’s, and our community’s, values in these extraordinary times. Learn, adapt, and take action with us:
1. Community Needs: following a message of support to our nonprofit partners, we are collecting information about their needs, challenges and opportunities. We will keep our community closely updated on what we find out and opportunities to help.
- Click here for our updates and resources.
- Here are six ways to support nonprofits.
2. Come Together: join our pilot virtual gathering this Friday, March 20th at 11am. Our Director of Jewish Engagement, Chaya Gilboa, will facilitate a session on navigating uncertainty while maintaining community. Participants of all backgrounds are welcome.
Save the date for a virtual Passover Seder with Chaya on April 2.
Want to hear about more virtual programs? Tell us here!
3. Reach Out: the many unfamiliar consequences of the pandemic require new kinds of service.
- Can you call a local isolated senior or Holocaust survivor, or want to hear about other opportunities? Sign up to volunteer here.
- The City of Encinitas is delivering hot meals to seniors. To volunteer with the City, email Travis Karlen or call 760-943-2256.
- The Community Resource Center is relying on volunteers to “shop” for clients in their Food and Nutrition Center. Learn more here.
4. Feed the Vulnerable: existing critical food needs will become more urgent and substantial.
- Sign on to this letter to advocate for more federal support.
- Share/utilize this list of Community Food Resources across the County.
Please notify us of other volunteer opportunities and practical ways to help.
Can a missed handshake become a call that we place? A skipped gathering a verbal expression of warmth and concern? Let’s join together to stay connected despite social distance.
Wishing us all good health!
Stacie and Jeff Cook understand commitment. They live it.
Black, Jewish and Queer. These three identities weave the fabric of who I am, but it took a long time to believe that they could exist together.
Lee and Toni Leichtag established the Leichtag Foundation in 1991 following the sale of their business. Lee and Toni were lifelong entrepreneurs with a passion for innovation and for supporting talent. They believed that only with big risk comes big reward. Both born to families in poverty, Toni to a single mother, they strongly believed in helping those most in need and most vulnerable in our community. While they supported many causes, their strongest support was for young children and the elderly, two demographics who particularly lack voice in our society.
Lifelong Baltimoreans, Rabbi George and Alison Wielechowski and their sons, 11-year-old Lennon and 9-year-old Gideon, are more than pursuing the good life in Southern California. Having moved to San Diego more than three years ago, they are fulfilling a lifelong dream.
You would think that as the executive director of San Diego LGBT Pride, Fernando Zweifach López Jr., who uses the pronoun they, has done all the coming out they possibly can. A queer, non-binary individual who has worked for many years on civil rights issues, López also speaks openly and often about their father’s family, Mexican-American migrant workers who tilled the fields of rural California.