Esplanade residents provide free lunch for Lakewood Ranch Medical Center workers

As time wound down in November on this year’s Esplanade Gives Back campaign, Lifestyle Director Rob Commissar fired off an email to Esplanade Golf and Country Club residents that had one last plea to help with donations to feed the staff at Lakewood Ranch Medical Center.

Commissar’s gesture worked better than even he expected. Esplanade residents raised more than $15,000 — enough to provide 1,033 box lunches for hospital workers Nov. 30.

Esplanade resident Yvonne Martin said the Esplanade Gives Back program was created as a way for people to understand the caring and giving of Esplanade's residents. The program raised funds during the 2020 Christmas season for 981 lunches for hospital workers.

“During the pandemic, we clearly understood what the frontline workers were doing, and we had a big heart for that,” Martin said.  So we reached out to the hospital and started partnering with them. Our lunch (donation) definitely did kick off the relationship.”

The partnership with Lakewood Ranch Medical Center has continued to grow. The hospital donates time for a monthly speaker series called Healthcare Hour that helps residents learn various ways to take care of skin conditions and injuries, and has provided other assistance in the community.

“They have physicians and staff come out,” Martin said. “It's very much tailored to what is relevant to our community, something about how your golf swing could impact your posture and your shoulders and everything like that. So it's been beneficial.”

Commissar said Esplanade residents had raised enough to cover approximately 965 lunches before his final outreach to the community. 

“We hoped COVID would have gone away this year, but it came back and made it tough on these medical workers,” Commissar said. “They all work and a lot of them probably didn’t go home for Thanksgiving or didn’t have time to cook. We just wanted to help them out as much as we could.”

The lunches were made in the restaurant kitchen at Esplanade and loaded onto pallets in a moving truck to be delivered to the Lakewood Ranch Medical Center staff. Due to COVID restrictions, the staff came just outside the main entrance, where stacks upon stacks of meals awaited.

“We appreciate everything every community does for our hospitals,” said Sandra Aguirre, who works in the hospital’s laboratory. “We are going to enjoy this.”

“This is just awesome,” hospital worker Megan Hartenstein said as co-workers and Esplanade residents joined forces to load the lunches onto carts. “This is a beautiful community. The people are awesome and they really appreciate this hospital.”

Lakewood Ranch Chief Operating Officer Diego Perilla said it was cool to actually see the community come out and support the hospital — especially after two years of non-stop work during the pandemic.

“I enjoy seeing the community come out, and I enjoy saying 'thank you' to them when they realize that all the work that they do is seen and appreciated by others,” Perilla said. “It is a good experience for them to see the faces of all the people that are helping.”

Esplanade Homeowners Association Board chair Alan Chalfin said the last-minute push was just extra motivation and it paid off judging from the reaction of the hospital staff. 

“We've all been locked up and suffered the consequences of COVID, and this was some way we felt we could give back to the community as a whole,” Chalfin said. “These guys have been working day and night due to COVID regardless of their own conditions. So we just thought it was a good way of showing our gratitude and posture. “We'll do even better next year.”