Episode 3: Ellen Kuwana
This episode features a person I connected with after donating to the cause she singlehandedly created. My guest, Ellen Kuwana, started We Got This Seattle.org herself on March 13th. It was a bit accidental as her initial intent was just to gather some funds so she could donate a meal to the lab technicians and scientists at the UW Virology lab. Ellen’s background is in labs - she’ll tell you about it - but she wanted to do something simple to show gratitude to the people who were on the frontlines of the pandemic working around the clock to process the first Covid-19 tests. And as most genuine things do, her effort snowballed. Fast forward 6 months, Ellen has single-handedly raised over $75,000 and fed over 18,000 frontline healthcare workers mainly with the help of her daughter’s friends who are home from college.
I’d donated to Ellen’s first couple of efforts after seeing them on Twitter, but had no idea that it was one person behind this huge effort to feed lab staff at the UW. I invited Ellen to come on and tell her story and it took a second to get the interview actually on the books. When we first talked, Ellen’s energy was bubbly and high - she was excited and ready for the next phase of her mission. But then, 6 weeks later when we actually sat down, the energy from both of us was markedly different. This was her first time in 6 months Ellen had been in a house that wasn’t her own, and we sat together, masked with the doors and windows open about 10 feet apart, and talked about how sad and tired we are. How Covid fatigue had set in with both of us, and the grief was coming through more clearly than the energy we felt weeks ago.
Our conversation took a different turn than I’d anticipated, but grief is funny that way. What follows is the story of how one single woman cared enough to feed some lab workers who needed a morale boost - and how that genuine concern and care turned into an effort that has touched 18,000 frontline workers in the Pacific Northwest.
Donate to We Got This Seattle here: https://opencollective.com/wegotthisseattle