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SANTA CLARA, Calif. (KRON) – Taylor Swift may have left the Bay Area, but she is still making a huge difference. Second Harvest of Silicon Valley announced last Friday that the artist donated enough money to help hundreds of thousands of people in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties.
Second Harvest says they won’t disclose the amount that Taylor Swift donated. Since the donation, there’s definitely been a “Swiftie effect” of incoming donations.
“We got the call from her team. Our team was super excited to get this call from Taylor that she was going to support our work,” said Shobana Gubbi, the food bank’s chief philanthropy officer.
Gubbi is still excited about what happened on Friday — the first of Taylor Swift’s two-show run at Levi’s. And since then, she says the food bank has seen a 43 percent increase in one-time donations.
“Definitely we think some of it is because of the visibility,” she said. “This is not like a very busy donation time of year for us. So just seeing that uptick is very exciting for us. We get a lot of donations usually during the holiday time.”
The food bank shared on its social media that her generous gift will help them feed an average of 500,000 people every month. Gubbi adds that the pop star did not put any restrictions on how Second Harvest can use her donation.
“We can use it for what we need, and we are using the funds to get food to our community,” she said. “So 95 cents of every dollar goes to programs and we are able to provide enough food for two healthy meals with every dollar that’s donated.”
Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour also brought a huge economic boost to hotels and restaurants in the South Bay. The VTA also reported a record number of riders to and from the concert.
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