The Austin Food Blogger Alliance Weighs Ethics Against Charity
Texas is ablaze today, wildfires ravaging Bastrop and threatening small towns outside of Austin. Fifty-seven fires are burning across 100,000 acres of Central Texas, and more than 1,000 homes have been destroyed since this latest rash of fires broke out on Monday. And in Austin, local bloggers are trying to do something about it.
It's a typical response from the blogger community in Austin, which is tightly knit and has always stepped up to offer support when it's needed, whether to area residents devastated by wildfires or to complete strangers like New York food blogger Jennifer Perillo.
Perillo recently lost her husband and was left with two small children to care for alone; food bloggers around the country rallied to help Perillo, including many Austin-based food bloggers like Penny De Los Santos (who is, coincidentally, in the process of moving to NYC). De Los Santos, a photographer for Saveur, is auctioning off an opportunity to go on assignment with her for a day, while other bloggers organized national bake sales and auctioned off their own high-dollar items for Perillo's benefit.
"That's how we, as bloggers, should be spending our time," said Natanya Anderson, president of the Austin Food Blogger Alliance. "To me, these are the kinds of things that show what organized bloggers can do." The AFBA was created earlier this year after local food bloggers had been spending increasing amounts of time assembling potluck dinners and charity functions along the same lines as the response to Jennifer Perillo's situation.
"We realized our collective power as a group to do good in the community could be harnessed," Anderson said over the phone last week. "There were a handful of people who had one-on-one conversations, but there's enough of us that we all talk to each other. If we did something a little bit more formal we could have a bigger impact on the community as a whole."
By this past Spring, the AFBA was born: a formal non-profit that seeks to support "each other and our community through classes, social events, and philanthropy." It's the first of its kind in the country.
























