When the governor closed the state’s schools last week, Cindy Bryant knew it meant more than no classes.

For lots of Spokane families, it also meant fewer meals. So Cindy and her husband, John, who own No-Li Brewhouse, turned their brewpub’s kitchen into a sack-lunch production line Tuesday, and volunteers at Logan Elementary handed out lunches to students and parents. No-Li has pledged to provide the lunches until the school district’s meal program is up and running, which is expected to be Thursday.

“We were lucky,” said Brent Perdue, Logan principal. “They reached out to us.”

Cindy Bryant volunteers in a program at Logan, the neighborhood elementary nearest to No-Li. At a time that is fraught with economic anxiety for those in the restaurant business, the Bryants chose to fill the gap for the Logan families while providing their workers some paid hours. They and the many others working to make sure children are fed during this season of quarantines and shutdowns represent the best of the response to the coronavirus crisis – people who are helping others even as they go through trials themselves.

“It is a hard time” for No-Li and its employees, John Bryant said, “but there are people out there who are really hurting.”

An enormous number of Spokane families rely on the schools to help keep their children fed. More than half of students – some 17,500 in Spokane Public Schools – receive free or reduced-price lunches based on their family incomes. At Logan, that percentage is above 90.

The district is ramping up a meal-distribution program, modeled on its summer meal program, that will make lunches and breakfasts available at 20 locations around the city.

“Anyone who needs a meal can come and get one,” said Ally Barrera, district spokeswoman.

The coronavirus crisis has forced public health measures that are taking a particularly hard toll on the service industry, with restaurants and bars shut down for sit-down business. That has left a lot of food-service workers in dire straits.

“It is stressful,” said Avont Grant, No-Li’s chef. “We’re talking about people’s livelihoods, their hours, their paychecks.”

That same stress affects lots of the parents in the Logan community, many of whom work in food service, Perdue said.

John Bryant said he and his team were aware of the links between food-service jobs and economic uncertainty growing from the coronavirus restrictions.

“This neighborhood – it’s economically challenged to say the least, and there are a lot of single parents, and a lot of the single parents work in hospitality,” he said.

Grant said the idea of making the brown-bag lunches arose at a staff meeting. Workers made the lunches Tuesday morning, and delivered them to Logan at 11:30. In the school parking lot, with music playing and the sun shining, kids and parents lined up to take brown bags home, while teachers and staffers – some carrying 6-foot sticks to represent the social-distancing guidelines – helped and greeted them. One teacher mimed an “air hug” with a student excited to see her.

Also there was Rep. Marcus Riccelli, D-Spokane, who represents the district that includes Logan and who has been working in Olympia this year to pass legislation that expands access to free and reduced-price meals in schools.

Riccelli said efforts such as the school district’s meal-distribution plans are vital, but that the overall community response to hunger crises should be woven into its overall emergency preparedness system so there is a faster, broader response for all people facing hunger when problems strike.

“I want us to look at food insecurity in our community holistically,” Riccelli said.

Cindy Bryant has been volunteering with a project at Logan that helps answer questions from kids who undergo various challenges or traumas. She and John committed to providing meals for as long as they’re needed, until the district meal distribution system is up and running.

Was it hard to do that? To give when the price of giving just skyrocketed?

John Bryant said they see their purpose as building community as much as brewing beer; No-Li barely survived the windstorm that shut down the city in November 2015, an experience that reinforced, for him, the ways in which people can come together and help each other in difficult times.

“So, no,” he said, “it wasn’t hard.”