Sleep Well, Do Good – How #HeywoodHelps

In April, the Heywood Hotel began a commitment to serve our community through 250+ volunteer hours. While our hotel operations are paused, our entire staff will be paid their normal wages to volunteer with local nonprofits who are making a difference in the Austin community. We call this our Sleep Well, Do Good project, a.k.a. #HeywoodHelps.

On this page, we highlight the organizations we are supporting and the work we’re doing together. We expect to expand our volunteer operations over the coming weeks and will keep this page and everyone updated as we go.

May 11 update: We’ve added Meals on Wheels Central Texas and Family Eldercare to our #HeywoodHelps network. More details below!

July 15 update: We’re proud to announce we completed 1,000 handwritten letters delivered to Meals on Wheels clients across Central Texas. We’ve delivered 125 fans to our East Austin neighbors through Family Eldercare’s Summer Fan Drive, with more on the way!

ATX Hospital Meals

Local entrepreneur Matt Silk and his wife, Tonya, saw the impact COVID-19 was having on the local restaurant industry and wanted to do something about it. A brief “what if” conversation grew into an entire ecosystem of good.

Each week, ATX Hospital Meals delivers more than 1,050 meals to local healthcare workers across the St. David’s network and to Austin-Travis County EMS. Donations are raised to purchase meals from local restaurants and delivered by Capital City Limousine of Austin who donates drivers, cars and dispatch services.

The Heywood Hotel team assists with publishing daily menus and providing delivery information to the drivers, so in our small way, we support each meal! 

Learn more about ATX Hospital Meals and consider making a donation. Your donation of $50 can feed 5 hospital workers and put a little cash in the pockets of local restaurant workers: https://www.atxhospitalmeals.com

Impact Update:

As of May 29, ATX Hospital Meals has delivered 7,056 meals to local healthcare workers and raised more than $81,000 to support the 43 restaurants that have provided meals to the program. The Heywood team has supported 100% of the meals delivered since the start of our services in April, impacting the delivery of 4,470 meals to 4,470 healthcare workers in three clinic locations in our community.

Keep Austin Eatin’/Baylor Scott & White Food4Caregivers

A food writer for good, Lesa Rossick normally spends her days promoting the best eats in Austin via her Keep Austin Eatin’ blog. When the coronavirus pandemic hit, she saw an opportunity to leverage her knowledge and contacts in the Austin restaurant world to help keep Austin healthcare workers fed.

Keep Austin Eatin’ serves as a coordination and donation arm for three fund-raising and “meal-raising” efforts orchestrated by Baylor Scott & White, Dell Children’s Hospital and St. David’s.

Through Keep Austin Eatin’, the Heywood crew supports the Baylor Scott & White initiative “Food4Caregivers.” Our goal is to feed all 1,483 Baylor Scott & White healthcare workers each day across 17 locations of hospitals and clinics. Our team’s work involves delivery coordination and scheduling, restaurant outreach and social media support.

Learn more about the organizations supported by Keep Austin Eatin’ here. If you’d like to make a donation to Baylor Scott & White’s Food4Caregivers program, please visit: https://ctxfoundation.bswhealth.com/Food4Caregivers

Impact Update:

In the month of our involvement, we helped the effort develop relationships with 34 new restaurants, securing an additional 153 meals from the eight restaurants we brought into the program. In addition, we supported 65 participating restaurants through social media promotion, reaching an audience of more 10,500 individuals and achieving nearly 150,000 impressions per week! Our involvement culminated in a celebration on May 12th, when the Food4Caregivers program provided, in a single day, more than 2800 meals to all 50 Baylor Scott & White locations across Central Texas, in honor of International Nurse’s Day, National Hospital Week, and the 200th anniversary of the birth of Florence Nightingale, the “Mother of Nursing!”

Austin Travis County EMS Association

The Austin-Travis County EMS Association provides 9-1-1 emergency medical response to the city of Austin and across Travis County, a population totaling 2.2 million. These first responders are on the front lines every day, but the importance of their services has never felt more apparent. 

The Heywood is helping to support better interdepartmental communication across their 574 employees by helping streamline their database of medics and specialists. We’re also assisting with outreach to donors and sponsors to help medics who have been exposed to the virus, may be experiencing symptoms, or are otherwise unable to work because of the pandemic, as well as outreach to collect supply donations for those emergency workers still providing their services in the EMS stations.

To support EMS medics impacted by COVID-19, please consider making a donation to Austin-Travis County EMS Association’s campaign here: https://donorbox.org/austinemsrf

Impact Update:

The Heywood team donated 25 hours to update more than 550 employee contacts within the organization’s database, to ensure that crucial COVID-19 information gets to the correct first responders, and as quickly and efficiently as possible. We also created a number of handwritten thank-you notes to donors who contributed to the EMS Relief Fund, an effort that has raised $65,000 to date.

Rebekah Baines Johnson Center

When we paused our operations in March, we recognized that we would have a surplus of a precious commodity: toilet paper! We teamed up with Hotel Eleven to donate much needed paper products and food items to the Rebekah Baines Johnson Center, a senior facility here in East Austin. The RBJ Center serves some of the most economically-disadvantaged seniors in Austin and we were so glad to help our neighbors.

Please consider supporting the RBJ Center’s GoFundMe fundraiser. Your contributions will support the purchase of food and supplies distributed directly to residents (which, for safety reasons, is preferred at this time over in-person donations from the general public): https://www.gofundme.com/f/keep-seniors-fed-and-safe-at-rbj

Meals on Wheels Central Texas

Each guest of the Heywood is welcomed with a handwritten notecard from our small team. When we paused operations, we found that we missed writing these friendly greetings. We wanted to find a way to put this skill to good use and to keep our writing muscles strong!

Meals on Wheels Central Texas seeks to enrich the lives of homebound people in need through programs that promote dignity and independent living. Through their many outreach efforts, Meals on Wheels is able to provide not only meals, but also in-home care, pet care and home repair services to homebound seniors and people living with disabilities in our community. Their meal delivery program alone distributes 3,000 meals each weekday — 15,000 meals per week! — with 93% of those meals being delivered by volunteers.

The entire Heywood crew and our families have teamed up to send encouraging messages and words of kindness for Meals on Wheels clients through our letter writing campaign that we’re calling “Howdys From the Heywood.”

We would like 100% of Meals on Wheels clients to receive a friendly howdy from a neighbor. Our goal is to start by writing 1,000 letters and notecards by July, covering a third of daily deliveries in our community! As our team is bi-lingual, we will be sending our happy messages in both English and Spanish.

Our Central Texas neighbors in need require access to independence and life-sustaining services now more than ever. Please consider making a charitable donation to Meals on Wheels Central Texas here: https://donate.mealsonwheelscentraltexas.org/give

Impact Update:

On July 1, the Heywood team was thrilled to deliver our first 1,000 “Howdys from the Heywood” to Meals on Wheels of Central Texas! The effort was indeed a full family affair, with all employees and their children involved. We look forward to continuing this effort with the goal of sending the full 3,000 in coming weeks!

Family Eldercare

Summer temps are rising and many homes across Central Texas are without air conditioning. For 30 years, Family Eldercare has run a summer fan drive distributing box fans to neighbors in need across our community.

But this year of course is different. (You can say that again.) Normal distribution channels and delivery outlets have been disrupted by COVID-19 restrictions.

When we asked how we could help, Family Eldercare told the Heywood team the biggest help would be in delivering fans. We signed up to volunteer not only our time, but to build an extended Heywood Crew to manage deliveries in our East Austin neighborhood. We will also be fundraising for purchasing additional fans.

TIf you would like to be part of our #HeywoodHelps delivery team or for more information on how you can be part of our effort, please email us: hey@heywoodhotel.com

To learn more about how Family Eldercare supports more than 6,000 seniors and adults with disabilities each year and how you can get involved, please visit: https://www.familyeldercare.org

Impact Update:

As of mid July, the Heywood crew had delivered 125 fans to our East Austin neighbors. Temperatures in Austin have remained near or over 100 degrees, making this volunteer work some of our most timely and important. We will continue this effort throughout the summer and are proud to be Family Edercare’s East Austin delivery team!

More Coming Soon

“Small but mighty” is how we often describe our hotel. We have a small team of eight amazing women, but we’re able to make a big impact.

We look forward to sharing more information with you soon on the support we’re coordinating for these additional nonprofit organizations:

Dress for Success Austin
Mobile Loaves and Fishes