Local chef launches drive to help Home of the Innocents kids during coronavirus crisis

Home of the Innocents is currently on a semi-lockdown, closing some facilities and heavily restricting outside visits during the coronavirus crisis. A local chef wants to help the children housed there, many of whom are the victims of abuse, get the things they need.

Founded in 1880, the non-profit is, along with other services, home to a shelter for children who have been removed from their homes because of violence or neglect, while also offering transitional housing for teenage mothers and their children and housing for severely emotionally disturbed teenagers.

In an emotional video plea on Facebook, Madeleine Dee, the Louisville chef who launched the Fond Originals product line and has published several cookbooks, asked for donations of essential items to the home directly through Amazon. She provided access to multiple links to items needed so that possible donors can easily purchase the items and have them shipped directly to Home of the Innocents. There, the items will be sanitized by staff and then distributed to the children as needed.

While so many of us are staying inside, relegated to watching Netflix or hanging out with family, these children are largely cut off from their families and friends. Dee said, in her search for a way to have some measure of control of even something minor, she came up with the idea to help the kids in Home of the Innocents who are in a different kind of lockdown.

“We aren’t thinking about the fact that having a safe, healthy home in which to quarantine is a luxury, but unfortunately for many children in Kentucky, it is,” Dee says in the video.

The goal of the 10-day initiative, which ends at midnight on April 18, is to get 10 each of the 59 items on the list, ranging from body wash to diapers to batteries for the toys the children play with. She said the total cost of the 590 items would be roughly $8,000, with some items obviously being more expensive than others.

“I know that these aren’t your children, but in a way I truly feel like they are,” Dee says, “because they are part of our community.”