By Levi Brandenburg and Ashli Craig
Guilt can be a strong driving force if you ask Lis Jones and Shannon Jacobs.
As the COVID-19 pandemic emerged and called on all health care workers to dedicate more of their time. There were times the nurses and doctors weren’t able to take normal lunch breaks or have one at all. Jones and Jacobs knew they wanted to do something. Yet, the guilt of being unable to physically help drove these women to help in the one thing that they knew hospitals and doctors needed: Food.
Lis Jones, a nurse at the Anna Mae Owen Residential Hospice House, started a group to feed her coworkers in the hospital. Shannon Jacobs, a nurse at Spring Creek Nursing Home, put together a group called Feed Murray’s Health Care Heroes.
Jones, who has worked at the hospital previously, knew the struggles her friends who were nurses faced. During a shift, nurses had to juggle responsibilities with multiple demands for their attention, which left them with little time to take a break to eat.
“And I thought they can’t eat, they don’t have time to go to the bathroom, they don’t have time to go eat anything,” Jones said. “And when you’re working day after day after day, and you’re bringing two meals for yourself a day, it’s just, you don’t care what you just saw, I thought, ‘Okay, I’m going to start bringing in meals for them.’ And that’s how I started.”
Since the pandemic began in spring 2020, both Jones and Jacobs have been working via donations and their own hard work and time in order to help to provide food to the beleaguered health care workers of Murray, including those you wouldn’t typically think of immediately.
“It was important for me too to touch on departments that aren’t normally seen,” Jacobs said. “Without housekeeping or food service or maintenance, they can’t really do what they need to do in order to take care of people. So I wanted to focus initially on all shifts too, not just the shift that we’re bringing the food for, but enough for the people on third shift, and anybody else who could make a plate later too.”
Jones said the most hard worked and underappreciated workers in this pandemic are the housekeeping workers who have fought hard for those around them.
“Not only was their job magnified four or five times by the type of cleaning that they then had to do, but we didn’t have enough rooms,” Jones said. “So housekeeping was now on a 24-hour timeframe, and we were filling the rooms as fast as they were backed up. As fast as we could get them clean, we’d have somebody in there. They are really underappreciated.”
These programs are a part of an almost entirely grassroots movement that sprouted up during the pandemic: people working to help feed and provide for the health care workers that are putting their lives on the line to protect the people in their communities. For instance, a Simpsonville woman set up a GoFundMe early in the pandemic to raise money to feed hospital workers around Louisville, according to a Courier-Journal article.
Jacobs and Jones worked to use as few large chain restaurants as possible.
“In the beginning I wanted to use small businesses that have been hurt by the shutdowns, the lockdowns and stuff, which we did,” Jacobs said. “And the only reason we did that was because of our giving community. We live in one of the best communities ever. I’ve lived in a few communities and I don’t know what you think about this community but this is an incredibly, incredibly generous community.”
The community’s involvement made the campaigns more special. Jones said people donated more knowing that their money was going to the local restaurants. Food came from places like Tom’s Grill, Mugsy’s or Sirloin Stockade.
Both programs began on Facebook at the beginning of the pandemic.
“I had the idea originally and then I saw this group similar to what I did,” Jacobs said. “My group is called Feed Murray’s Health Care Heroes. And there’s a group in Louisville that is Feed UK ER, and it’s the same thing. So basically, what we do is I talk to some people that are now in a department or at a place. And I’m like, ‘Okay, you want to get some tacos?’ And they’re like, ‘Yeah, that’d be great.’ So I decide what to get. And then I call the business to find out how much it’s going to cost to feed this many people. And then put up the campaign and say, ‘Hey, we need this much to feed these people. Can we do it?’”
Jones had a similar beginning but her group focuses much more on the hospital alone.
“I posted on Facebook, I can’t even think really how it started, I think Dr. (Brad) Robertson saw that I had posted about taking pizzas to the ICU,” Jones said. “And so he was the first big financial supporter, and I appreciate him so much. Then I made a Facebook post, I put out what my Venmo was, and I said, if you send me money, I’m going to leave it in there and not take it, not transfer it until I’m ready to use it. And then the next week I would post pictures of the food and people eating it. And then it was just a cycle.
“I started off just doing ICU for breakfast, for lunch and dinner. And then I thought okay, well I can do ER at the same time. And then after a while, we were just doing everyone. Jane Bright, who’s on the board at the hospital, She got the board to donate money and now we do all four floors.”
With decreasing COVID cases over the past few weeks, both women aren’t actively running their food campaigns. Jacobs recently fed the maintenance crew at the MurrayCalloway County Hospital. If anything comes up they are open to help.
“So I just kind of keep my eyes open to see what might come next or if something happens with healthcare again,” Jones said. “And we need to come together. I’m certainly open to that but right now we’re just kind of taking it slow..”
If you are interested in donating money to these causes, clicking the link below will send you to their individual projects.
Lis Jones donated this fruit basket to the CCU/PCU unit at Murray-Calloway County Hospital. Photo courtesy of Lis Jones. 
Shannon Jacobs spearheaded a drive to donate chocolate-covered strawberries to help feed health care workers. Photo courtesy of Shannon Jacobs.