Overview:
This month marks 5 years since COVID-19 changed everything, and the community is still dealing with the aftermath.
Five years ago this week, the first cases of COVID-19 were reported in Colorado. The shock and awe of those early days are behind us, but the aftershocks still ripple through our community. Nobody was prepared for the deadly consequences, the isolation or the economy’s shutdown.
According to the CDC, over 16,000 Coloradoans died because of the pandemic. Lockdowns and long COVID entered our lexicon, students struggled with online learning, mom and pops closed and thousands of dogs found homes as neighbors struggled to find companionship during isolation.
To get a sense of how the world has changed since the early days of the pandemic, Bucket List went back to some of the businesses and nonprofits we profiled in those days to see how they’re doing today and how they got through with resilience and grit.
One such individual is Jesse Albertini, who was on the precipice of opening her first restaurant when the COVID-19 pandemic shuttered the doors before it could even open.
Processing the crushing reality of a dream deferred and the anxiety of an uncertain future, all with a three-month-old baby at home, Albertini found herself at a crossroads. The Kingston, NY native channeled her restaurant experience, Italian heritage, and the early foundations of her business plan into something new: Sfoglina, whose name is an homage to the women of Bologna who handroll pasta.
“It ended up being the best thing that could have happened to me,” Albertini reflected—not the pandemic itself, but the unexpected opportunity it created to take a step back, refine her vision and carefully consider the products and experiences she wanted to offer.
“If I had opened the business then, we probably would have had to close,” Albertini said. While Sfoglina didn’t have a chance to open its physical doors in 2020, many restaurants had their doors closed, like Biju’s Little Curry Shop, Acorn, Annie’s Cafe and El Chapultepec, to name a few.
In March of 2021, the Denver Department of Excise and Licenses (DDEL) reported that at least 25% of local eateries went out of business during the first year of the pandemic. This finding suggests that the Denver restaurant scene fared worse than the national restaurant scene, which saw an estimated 10.2% of restaurants close permanently in the first year of the pandemic. And we haven’t recovered—earlier this year, the DDEL reported that there are 22% fewer restaurants in Denver since 2021.
Albertini is an exception to the larger industry trends. The entrepreneurial chef hustled her way across the Front Range, delivering pasta she made by hand at home directly to Denverites’ doors and tabled at farmer’s markets on the weekends, where her booth became a customer favorite.
In 2022, Sfoglina made a big pivot. Albertini moved the business out of her house and into a commercial kitchen, where she hired a production assistant to help launch her wholesale service, selling fresh pasta to restaurants in Denver and Boulder. “I might not be able to commit to a brick-and-mortar right this moment, but maybe someday,” Albertini told Bucket List in 2022.
Three years later, “someday” is now just months away. This spring, Sfoglina will open its first brick-and-mortar storefront in Northwest Denver, sharing space with Moon Raccoon Baking Company—another women-owned, made-from-scratch business that shares Albertini’s commitment to ethically sourced, thoughtfully crafted food. With more space for cooking classes, pop-ups and chef’s tasting tables, Albertini can now fulfill her mission of feeding her community from the Sfoglina she originally envisioned.
Just about a mile east from the soon-to-be Sfoglina storefront stands Bienvenidos Food Bank, an almost 50-year-old grassroots nonprofit food pantry providing Denverites with food assistance in a welcoming, safe and dignified space. Though Bienvenidos had to close the pantry doors at 3810 North Pecos, the organization never once ceased operations during the pandemic.
“We pivoted to what I call a ‘farmers market,’” CEO Greg Pratt said. By shifting operations to a farmers market format, Bienvenidos was able to bring its choice shopping model outside, a philosophy that is core to Bienvenidos’ mission and meets an increasing need.
According to Jane Barnes, executive director of Benefits In Action, a partner of Lakewood’s Coalition to End Hunger, Denver-area food banks and pantries experienced an estimated 200–300% increase in the number of people served. “We could still give [them] choice, respect, and dignity by being able to pick out their own food,” Pratt said.
While the pivot was quick, it wasn’t always seamless. The food pantry lost its longstanding volunteer base at the start of the pandemic. Many were older women who found themselves at risk of engaging in the community work they had done for decades. Feeling called to help their community, young North Denver residents stepped up to volunteer at Bienvenidos’ outdoor markets, assisting in the daily tasks of setting up and breaking down.
With crisis after crisis that has unfolded over the last five years, Bienvenidos has adapted to meet the needs of North Denverites facing food insecurity. Now, they’re faced with a potentially larger crisis: the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement policies and funding cuts to social services.
“We’re definitely very concerned,” Pratt said regarding the potential deportation of its clients. “We’re leaning into what the best response is for our organization, clients, volunteers, and staff. We want to make sure that our clients know what their rights are, be respectful about how we take information—or, in this case, not take information if we don’t need it—so people feel comfortable coming here to get food. We can’t protect them beyond our own capacity as a small organization, but we’re trying to do everything we can to let people know that we care.”
As far as potential social service funding cuts go, “We’re concerned about cuts to free and reduced lunches at schools, cuts to the WIC program through SNAP benefits (what used to be food stamps),” Pratt said. “All of these could take little bites that are going to constrict people’s budgets, so I wouldn’t be surprised if we see a gradual increase of people in need.”
Having served as the executive director of Bienvenidos for 12 years and a volunteer and board member before that, Pratt says he’s probably nearing the end of his time in his role, interested in moving on to address gaps in the city’s food system at large. He intends to stay on until at least next year when Bienvenidos will celebrate its 50th anniversary and help weather the storm that cuts to social services may bring.
“Whatever shoe will drop next, I want Bienvenidos to be a strong organization in our community (for as long as it’s needed), with or without me,” Pratt said.
On the other side of town from Bienvenidos Food, Dan Clarke was teaching film at Montbello High School when the pandemic hit. He created an organization called Mamabird Interviews as a direct response to COVID.
“When we started teaching remotely, I became even more aware of the disconnect between my life and my students’ lives,” Clarke said. While Clarke taught from the comfort of his home, spending more time with his children and safe from the virus, many of his students had parents working frontline jobs, putting them at risk of exposure and under greater stress.
Montbello High School’s student population is predominantly Latinx, with 86.9% of students qualifying for free and reduced lunch, according to the Colorado Department of Education. Many needed food, and tech for online school.
“They were exposed to the world in ways that I wasn’t,” Clarke said. Noting this stark contrast between his lived experience in Central Park with those of his students, Clarke wanted to make a difference.
With money from his own salary and the COVID stimulus checks he received, Clarke invested it all back into his former students. He first employed a former student to tutor his children in Spanish over Zoom, but he wanted to do something bigger, more scalable, with greater impact. “I saw Zoom as this amazing tool for having intimate conversations,” Clarke said.
Clarke employed seven former students, all women of color, to network with women in career fields they were interested in pursuing and form mentorship connections more broadly. Since its founding, Mamabird has conducted 100 paid interviews, including seven people who have since passed away, which is a precious gift for families. For Clarke, though, it’s still not enough: “I want that number to be in the millions.”
Whether starting a business, operating a food pantry, or launching a nonprofit to empower young women, all of these organizations, featured in Bucket List in the earlier years following the pandemic, took away valuable lessons from an unspeakably difficult time.
“These past five years, it’s been pivot, pivot, pivot, change, change, change. And it’s been exhausting, and it’s kind of set us back in some ways, of kind of moving forward with where we want the organization to go. But on the other hand, we stepped up in every way possible,” Pratt of Bienvenidos said.
Financial support from North Denver residents and community solidarity sustained and propelled organizations forward. “Having a network of other small business owners is everything,” Albertini said. “There’s so many administrative things I didn’t know, even just down to properly filing taxes, that I wouldn’t have known without my network.”
For Clarke, Mamabird Interviews has still not realized its full potential but his main reflection from the last five years of COVID has been: “Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.”
Vicky Collins contributed additional reporting to this story.
