Kerrville Chef Who Fed Flood Crews for Weeks Ambushed With $2,000 Surprise

Shonna Foster thought she was showing up to sell her food trailer. Instead, the Kerrville caterer who spent weeks feeding first responders and displaced families during two catastrophic Texas Hill Country floods was handed a $2,000 surprise from a man she had never met before that moment.

The meeting was actually a setup arranged by Joe Gest, who had spent more than a year trying to get Foster recognized for her disaster relief cooking, according to KABB. Gest posed as a potential buyer for Foster's 40-foot food trailer to get her to the meeting spot, then presented her with a Cash for Kindness award from Fox SA and DJC Law worth $1,000 — and matched it himself with another $1,000 out of his own pocket, bringing her total surprise to $2,000, KABB reported.

Gest first watched Foster's relief efforts online after catastrophic flooding struck the Texas Hill Country on July 4, 2025, a disaster that killed 139 people across the region, including 119 deaths in the Guadalupe River basin, after rainfall exceeding 5 inches per hour sent the river surging nearly 30 feet in under an hour, according to the National Weather Service. As search teams, volunteers, and first responders poured into the disaster zone, Foster and her volunteers began cooking breakfast, lunch, and dinner for anyone who needed it.

Waking at 3:30 a.m. to Feed a Disaster Zone

Foster described the chaos of the flood's early hours to KABB, recalling how she and her team scrambled to respond once they understood the scale of what had happened. “We woke up that morning. Of course, you don't really know what's going on, and once we figured it out, we went to Home Depot, and we fed the first responders there,” Foster said, per the outlet.

That first meal at a Home Depot parking lot turned into a weeks-long operation. Foster woke up at 3:30 a.m. daily to prepare meals, teaming up with World Central Kitchen and local volunteers to serve hundreds of plates a day — including more than 100 breakfast sandwiches and 300 cheeseburgers in a single shift, according to KENS 5. She and her volunteers ultimately produced thousands of meals for first responders, search teams, volunteers, and displaced families before the effort wound down.

Gest tried to get Foster recognized after the 2025 flooding, but it took a second disaster to finally push the nomination through. In July 2026, the Hill Country was struck by another major flash flood, with the Guadalupe River at Comfort rising more than 30 feet in under three hours, killing at least two people and triggering more than 230 water rescues across the region, per The Watchers. Foster resumed feeding people once the flooding hit again, and Gest renominated her afterward.

A Business Built From an RV Park Kitchen

Foster founded Shim's Be Blessed Catering with her husband, Tim, after the couple moved to Kerrville in 2021. The business grew out of cooking meals from an RV site at Johnson Creek RV Resort and Park in Ingram for fellow residents before the Fosters purchased a food trailer to use as a commercial kitchen, according to background reporting from Shelby Ligon. Foster has since built a local reputation beyond flood relief, earning finalist honors at Kerrville's Pot O' Hot Festival in February 2025 for her Nilgai Shroom Soup and returning this year with a “King of the Hunt” Green Chile Stew, per the Kerr County Lead.

The trailer that brought Gest and Foster together at their staged meeting is now genuinely for sale. Shim's Be Blessed Catering listed the 40-foot Freedom trailer, complete with a wood-fired pizza oven and smoker, for $53,500 this month, while confirming the business will keep operating full-time as a private chef and catering service in Kerrville, the Kerrville Life reported. Foster is unlinked here per the single-source exception governing KABB's reporting, but the listing detail helps explain why she had no reason to suspect anything unusual about the meeting Gest arranged.

Recovery Efforts Strain Under a Second Flood

Foster's grassroots feeding operation is one piece of a much larger recovery effort that has repeatedly been set back. Team Rubicon, a disaster relief group that deploys military veteran volunteers, logged nearly 11,900 hours of service and assisted 928 residents after the 2025 flood before returning to Kerrville in July 2026 to perform home muck-outs and debris clearance, according to the organization's own accounting.

Even ecological recovery work has taken repeated hits. Fresh floodwaters in July 2026 washed away native vegetation and bank stabilization plantings that local groups had installed along the Guadalupe River over the preceding winter, per KSAT. That damage came after the Community Foundation of the Texas Hill Country rolled out $14 million in recovery grants in April 2026 to repair park infrastructure and restore habitat along the river, a fund Hoodline previously reported prioritized Kerrville's downtown river corridor. Separately, the Kerrville Area Chamber of Commerce launched the Kerrville Area Rebuilding and Recovery Fund after the 2026 flooding to provide gap funding and utility payment support for damaged local businesses.

Against that backdrop of institutional grants and organized relief groups, Gest said what struck him most about Foster was that she never asked for anything in return. Foster and Gest had never met before he arranged the surprise recognition, and by his account, she simply kept giving. For her part, Foster used the moment to encourage others to be kind, according to KABB's reporting.