Feed Lake Worth

The Cause

Feed Lake Worth is the first annual meal-packing event organized by the Rotary Club of Lake Worth Beach, with Palm Beach County and Palm Beach County Parks & Recreation. On Saturday, March 20, 2027, volunteers will gather in Lake Worth Beach to pack 75,000 nutritious meals for local food banks, feeding neighbors in their own community.

The event had a date, a goal, and a lot of goodwill behind it. It didn’t have a name, a logo, or a website. The site’s whole job was to turn people who care about hunger into volunteers and donors, and to do it cheaply, since every dollar the event doesn’t spend on infrastructure becomes meals.

A Brand Built From Scratch

We designed the complete logo and brand kit before writing a line of code. The mark is a place setting: a fork and a knife on either side of a plate, with a palm tree at its center. It says “meals” and “Lake Worth” at once, with no words needed. Beside it, a heavy serif FEED sits over a spaced LAKE WORTH, in a navy, gold, and cream palette that works on event shirts, banners, and social posts as well as on screen.

The brand kit carries through to a full design system of tokens, type, buttons, form controls, cards, and icons. The website was built from it component by component, so the site and the printed materials look like one event.

Donations Priced in Meals

The donate page lets supporters give without leaving the site. PayPal, Venmo, and card buttons sit directly on the page, all running through the Rotary’s own PayPal account.

The important decision was pricing the gift in meals, not dollars. Every $0.40 packs one meal, so the preset amounts were chosen to make the meal counts round: $20 packs 50 meals, $40 packs 100, $100 packs 250. The $40 tile comes pre-selected, because “100 meals” is the number people remember. Donors who pick a custom amount see their meal count update as they type (“Your gift of $25 packs 62 meals”), and the count always rounds down, so the site never promises half a meal nobody paid for.

Under the hood, the order is created and captured by a small Cloudflare Worker, not the browser. The server checks the amount again, so no one can edit the page to change what gets charged. Local development always uses PayPal’s sandbox and the live site always uses real PayPal, so there’s no setting anyone could forget to switch before a deploy. If PayPal ever fails to load, the page says why and offers the mail-a-check address instead of a dead button.

A Volunteer Form That Fills Its Own Spreadsheet

Event organizers live in spreadsheets, so that’s where signups go. When someone submits the volunteer form, the Worker validates it, filters out spam bots with a honeypot, and passes it to a Google Apps Script that adds a row to the volunteer roster sheet and emails the Rotary’s inbox. Nobody retypes anything, and there’s no form-builder subscription.

The roster and the notification emails belong to the Rotary’s Google account, not to us. The whole pipeline runs on free tiers, so it costs $0 a month. The form also never reports a signup that wasn’t saved. If the sheet can’t be reached, it tells the volunteer to email the organizers directly instead of showing a false success message.

AI Imagery Wearing the Real Logo

A brand-new event has no event photos. Stock photos of generic volunteers wouldn’t show Feed Lake Worth, and a wrong or garbled logo on a shirt would undercut the brand we’d just built. So we generated custom AI imagery and passed the actual logo in as a reference image, so the mark on the volunteers’ shirts is the real one, in the correct cream-and-gold-on-navy colors.

Every photo slot on the site has its own image. We generated a separate shot for each spot instead of reusing one photo at different crops.

The Result

Feed Lake Worth launched on Astro, deployed to the Cloudflare edge, in September 2026: a four-page site with a complete brand behind it, donations that show the impact of every gift, and a volunteer pipeline that fills the organizers’ spreadsheet on its own. The home and about pages ship no JavaScript at all, and running the site costs close to nothing, so more of the money raised goes to meals.