WINTER IN MENDOCINO COUNTY is not for the faint of heart. For children without warm clothing, winter is long and cold.
This year two professional chefs and former restaurateurs have joined forces to help kids. Shannon Hughes, former owner of the Pangaea and Lorca restaurants in Point Arena, and Margaret Fox, former owner of Café Beaujolais in Mendocino, are collecting warm clothing and other items to distribute to children in need at schools on the Mendocino Coast.
Hughes began this effort — a project she calls “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” — 15 years ago, single-handedly collecting “thousands of pounds of warm clothing, bedding, home goods, toiletries and camp gear” and delivering the bounty to shelters from Fort Bragg to Willits from November to February.
It was “me and my Prius and bags of stuff,” Hughes says. “People are really generous.”
The “super grassroots” project continued to grow, to the point where Hughes was making multiple trips around the county to deliver donations to schools and shelters. And she needed a bigger car.
This year, for the first time, she will have a partner in fellow chef Fox.
Fox is the President of the Board of the Mendocino Coast Children’s Fund, which has been helping local children in need for 30 years. She was looking for a way to make up for the end of federal funding that made it possible to provide homeless children with warm clothes. A mutual friend told Fox about Hughes’ years of work. The two chefs had known each other in their professional lives for decades, so working together this year to help others seemed a natural solution.
Hughes was “giving people the means by which they can help” in a “very concrete way,” Fox says.
The two women, both longtime residents of Mendocino County, share more than their professional backgrounds. Each is acutely aware of the contradiction between what outsiders may see as an affluent area and the reality of life on the coast. There are so many “people in our community who don’t have what they need,” Hughes says.
Fox agrees. “Sure, it’s beautiful here,” but “lots of kids are really hurting bad.” Kids may be food-insecure or homeless themselves, even as they attend local schools with other kids who are in much better situations.
“Sure, it’s beautiful here, but lots of kids are really hurting bad.”
Margaret Fox, Mendocino Coast Children’s Fund
Hughes and Fox are collecting jackets, coats, warm clothing of all sizes, bedding, sheets, blankets, towels and toiletries to be distributed to schools in Mendocino and Fort Bragg school districts. Clean and “in good shape” donations can be dropped off at the Greenwood Community Center in Elk (look for totes under the awning at the Annex building at the rear of the building), Tangents in Mendocino, and Ananse Village in Fort Bragg. For those who can’t make a drop-off themselves, pick-up can be arranged by messaging the Baby It’s Cold Outside Facebook page.
Visit the the Mendocino Coast Children’s Fund for more information or to make a donation.
This story originally appeared in The Mendocino Voice.
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