A group of Evanston Township High School students and alums is rallying around a family business near their school in the sort of gesture that lights the way for all of us.
Gyros Planet and Taqueria, down the block from ETHS, has been a gathering spot for students and neighborhood families since wife-and-husband team Erika Castro and Pablo Sanchez bought the storefront from its previous owners and reopened it in March 2019.
In April, shortly after the restaurant’s one-year anniversary, Castro and Sanchez started handing out a few dozen free meals each day, hoping to fill the hunger gap caused by the coronavirus pandemic. At first, they took turns packing and delivering free food to their customers — customers they’d known and loved for months — who would call and tell them about their needs. (Sick family members. Furloughs. Layoffs. No health insurance.)
Soon they couldn’t keep up with the deliveries, so they set up a table every day from 11 a.m. to noon and filled it with meals for people to come by and pick up. Their goal was to give away 100 free lunches a day — no small task for a restaurant with a dwindling bottom line and no employees besides Castro and Sanchez to help with the cooking and assembly.
“We will be hopeful that everything will get better,” Castro told me in April. “We need to trust God and feel that we will be fine. My husband said, ‘Even if we lose the restaurant, we did something good.'”
As of last week, Castro said they’ve given away 23,840 meals. Still, she said, the scope of the need in her community is daunting. More Americans are going hungry now than at any point during the pandemic, according to a Washington Post analysis of new federal data.
“I know their stories and I know their struggles,” Castro told me Monday. “I wake up every day thinking about them.”
Evanston has lost about 70 businesses since March.
“I know all the sacrifices you put in,” Castro said. “You put your dreams, you put your money, you put your time. I’m thinking about the owners and the employees that just lost their jobs. It’s really heartbreaking.”
She wonders if her own business can survive.
Amy Landolt is an Evanston resident who’s been looking for ways to help her neighbors survive the pandemic. She read an article recently about Illinois’ Business Interruption Grant program and emailed Castro, who she had never met, urging her to apply.
“I just try to reach out to people who I know are doing good things in the community,” Landolt said.
Castro was touched by Landolt’s note and replied that her restaurant is struggling to both survive and meet the needs of the community. A grant might help for a month or two, but she and her husband also have to think long term. Sometimes they end a day having made $40 or $60. The couple set up a GoFundMe account to help cover their costs.
“I felt like I needed to do something,” Landolt said.
She organized an auction with a goal of raising $5,000 for Gyros Planet. She knew it would be tough for local businesses, already struggling to survive, to donate items, so she turned to her 19-year-old twins, recent ETHS grads.
“At first they thought they didn’t have anything that would be of value that people would be interested in,” Landolt said. “But I knew that wasn’t true, and I wanted to help them understand what they have to contribute.”
Her son offered to auction his services as a math tutor. Her daughter offered to read bedtime stories via FaceTime or Zoom, in Spanish or English.
Eighteen current or recent ETHS students signed on to the auction. They’re offering dog walking and cookie baking and personal tech support and multiplication table practice sessions. Several local businesses have kicked in products or services as well. You can view the full list of items at 32auctions.com/GyrosPlanetTaqueria. The auction opened on Black Friday and will run through Sunday.
“It gives me hope for the future because young people are more actively involved in changing the world and helping others than I remember me and my friends being at that age,” Landolt said.
She’s also hosting text banking and postcard-writing events, wherein participants urge their friends and neighbors to purchase takeout from Gyros Planet.
“We’re just trying to alert more people that they’re in the neighborhood,” Landolt said. “They’ve spent all their time serving families and not building their business or clientele.”
Castro was moved to tears when I spoke to her about the auction.
“You feel the community is there for you,” she said. “You see students from high school and people from college helping and it makes me feel hopeful that things will be better. Even with this dark situation with the virus taking so many things from us. It makes you say, ‘Thank you, God. Thank you for just giving us even one more day.'”
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