Hundreds of Seattle bakers are keeping local food banks stocked with bread

Through Community Loaves, home bakers in Seattle are able to keep the shelves of local food banks filled with nutritious and delicious homemade bread.

Katherine Kehrli runs Community Loaves, a network of volunteer bakers. Twice a month, participants whip up batches of the group's signature honey oat bread, with the loaves then given to Hopelink, a nonprofit agency that runs food banks in the Seattle area. Community Loaves started small, with just a few bakers delivering 19 loaves to Hopelink. Today, there are nearly 500 bakers, with the group recently donating 1,300 loaves in one day.

Over the holidays, the bakers branched out, donating thousands of dinner rolls and nearly 4,000 pecan finger cookies. The project has "restored my faith in the collective good that we can actually do," Kehrli told Today. "And it restores my faith that we can be more self-determined even in the face of the pandemic."

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Baker Sarah Gannholm found a way to connect with her father while volunteering with Community Loaves. She told Today she bought her dad a stand mixer and bread pans, and instructed him via video conferencing on how to bake the honey oat bread. "It just seemed like a natural thing for us to get on Zoom and do this together, and all of a sudden he's giving back to a community in a way that he's never done in his life," Gannholm said.