The love for our community doesn’t stop in the restaurant

To our Boulder community,

In January 2020, we gathered as a management team to discuss our new years’ resolutions for Japango in the year ahead. While our small individual goals differed, the overwhelming consensus was that each person wanted to make this year one of giving back. Little did we know what was in store for us two months later— that we would be the ones relying on help and leaning on each other to reinvent something we believed to be a well oiled machine. With our security blanket gone we learned that when you have no idea what to do, you just do something and that help should be an unbroken chain passing to whoever needs it most. When feed the frontlines started, we all had the epiphany that food is our means to connect: a salve that keeps us all fighting and gives us purpose. This lesson would prove recurring over the next two years as our community was tested, frontline workers and first responders became our saviors and our neighbors would be called upon to show up for one another time and time again. With the benefit of hindsight, we have been able to see that the shutdown that started this all was a twisted opportunity to fully reset and realign ourselves with the values we’ve always held to be true, but had been dulled by time and the grinding force of routine— that we need a cataclysmic shift to prepare ourselves for everything that lay ahead and realize how strong this community really is.

From the very beginning, we grew acutely aware of how it is easy to assume help will always be there when we need it, but also easy to overlook the sacrifice our frontline workers and first responders make as they put their own health, time and family aside to help people they usually don’t even know. 

In March of 2021, we faced a hard reality that no town, no neighborhood, no community—no matter how loving and tight-knit—is insusceptible to senseless and heartbreaking violence. We're still trying to cope with the loss of so many lives—some we had the pleasure of knowing, and so many that we'll never have the honor of meeting.

Then as we planned to charge into 2022 with optimism and a drive to tackle whatever lay ahead, we all watched as Erin’s hometown helplessly burn out of control and it became hard to believe that pluck or a good attitude could stand up to the devastating force of nature and happenstance. Too many people we love woke up that morning assuming the worst and finding the reality even harder to process—the homes and memories that formed the fabric of our beings gone, just like that. We were in awe watching the efforts of all first responders fighting against an unfair foe and when it came time for our community to show up in the aftermath, the response was nothing short of beautifully overwhelming.

We are still far from having answers for any of it, but our pride and gratitude for the community we are in, continues to exponentially grow. We created this page to compile links to all the amazing fundraisers and resources we have seen rise from each tragedy. As always, we hope our restaurant will always be your home away from home: if you need to talk, to NOT talk, to cry, or to just quietly exist for a little while, we are here, and we love you