Oxford, Chick-fil-A Team Up to Provide Masks From Double Decker T-Shirts

Visit Oxford, along with the city of Oxford and Oxford’s Chick-Fil-A will distribute face coverings to help accommodate the City’s ordinance in response to the COVID-19 pandemic for requiring masks/face coverings to enter into businesses.

The distribution of free face covering will take place Friday at the Oxford High School with two pick-up times available to allow everyone the opportunity to receive a face covering. The first time is 8 to 10 a.m. and the second is 5 to 7 p.m. There is a maximum of four face coverings per vehicle.

For the first time in 25 years, the beloved Double Decker Arts Festival did not take place the last weekend in April. The iconic art poster T-shirts had already been ordered bearing the original dates of April 24-25 prior to the pandemic hitting the U.S. and Mississippi.

“We already had all these awesome shirts printed that we knew we probably couldn’t sell in August so we wanted to come up with a way to benefit the community and what better way than giving out free masks to wear into our local businesses,” said Lee Ann Stubbs, festival coordinator

A late-night lightbulb moment came to Visit Oxford Executive Director, Kinney Ferris.

“I had this crazy thought that we had all of these T-shirts and what could we do with them to help our community get open safely?” Ferris said.

A conversation with local Chick-Fil-A operator, Lance Reed, solidified the idea. Reed had money set aside to help the local community in a meaningful way and jumped at the chance to partner with Visit Oxford and the city of Oxford. Ferris and Reed discussed Visit Oxford donating the “fabric” while Reed’s money would cover the cost of manufacturing.

“We were looking for a way to give back and serve the community during this unprecedented time when Kinney called,” Reed said. “We are happy to partner with Visit Oxford and the city; we always want to support our community any way we can.”

Reed loaded 11 boxes of Double Decker T-shirts totaling more than 660 tees in various sizes and drove them to a vendor in Memphis who could laser cut the t-shirts into more than 7,000 face coverings within one week.

Oxford’s Emergency Management Director, Jimmy Allgood, coordinated the location and timing of the distribution similar to that of the hand sanitizer giveaway that took place earlier this month.

Staff report