LIFELINE IN A GRIM TIME
Church pantries help keep fams going through pandemic
Trevor Simonn doesn’t come to the soup kitchen just for the soup.
For years, volunteers at Manhattan’s Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen have been able to steer him in the right direction when he needed odd jobs or temporary work.
Fill in for a restaurant worker? The soup kitchen hooked him up. Load some boxes on a delivery truck? The soup kitchen always put in a good word. do the best you can with the families.
But that was before all the best you have.” But soup kitchens like Holy work dried up, before coAt least there’s still the Apostles have hit hard times, ronavirus came along and soup, or too.otherassortedmeals, took away his lifeline. which on this day includes Nanny Marcia Tisson
“It’s been difficult with the roasted steelhead trout, San started getting her meals from pandemic,” Simonn said.” BeMarzano tomatoes with fresh the food pantry at First Presfore, you could come here and herbs, butternut squash, a byterian Church of Brooklyn say, OK, I need some work, side salad and a can of Canada in Brooklyn Heights after the and they would have Dry.some pandemic forced a family she work for you for two months Holy Apostles Soup worked for to leave the city — or three months. They always Kitchen, at Ninth Ave. and and leave her without a job. have something to help you W. 28th St., serves up to 1,000 But for three months, First make some money for a pemeals a day from its landmark Presbyterian, which had been riod of time. Church of the Holy Apostles. running the pantry since
“Now there’s nothing,” he In addition to hot meals, the 2008, was forced to close its said, noting that the odd jobs church also provides a food doors because the virus was he used to take have nearly pantry service to distribute to putting its volunteers at risk. vanished. “Now you have to the homeless and local “As you can see most of our volunteers are seniors,” said the Rev. Adriene Thorne, the church’s pastor. “We have some volunteers in their 80s. We were very concerned about not getting anyone ill. As a church, we feel called to clothe the naked, feed the hungry and visit the imprisoned, so we had to weigh that against if one of the volunteers gets sick and dies.”
The church pantry’s resurrection came just in time, said Tisson, whose job loss hurt her family.
“It was very hard for me because I didn’t have food to eat,” said Tisson, who has two
children and two grandchildren to look after. “I don’t really have the money to buy anything. When the pantry opens, I try to get bits and pieces for my family.”
Joan Cooms, a former mental health counselor, said she would not have made it through the pandemic without help from the church, which feeds up to 100 people on some of its busiest days.
She has arthritis in both knees and pain from a spine surgery, so she tries to avoid standing in a long line.
“I try to come out as early as possible,” Cooms said. “The price of the supermarket, you go in there with x amount and you can’t even buy what you want.”
COVID-19 robbed 73-yearold Elsie Alvarez of her husband in March. Along with the loss of her partner of 56 years was the extra income from his Social Security check. Thankfully, she’s not alone. Her son has moved in with her, but he is out of a job thanks to the deadly virus.
“My son worked in an airport,” Alvarez explained. “He can only work one, two days a week. He has to do little things to make it work.”
They have turned to Greenpoint Reformed Church’s Hunger Program for help. Joan Benefiel, the manager of the Hunger Program, said she’s seen an influx of fresh faces at the food pantry since the pandemic started. So many, in fact, that “fairly quickly we hardly recognized our [food pantry] line.”
“Especially these young professionals who lost their job, they didn’t lose their job because they did anything wrong. … For us, being on this side of things, it was kind of nice because people weren’t feeling badly for coming to ask for help,” Benefiel told the Daily News.
Attendance has nearly doubled from 600 to over 1,000 people a month, Benefiel said.
“It used to be that when someone would sign up [for the pantry] they would try to explain why they were there and be feeling uncomfortable asking for help,” Benefiel recalled, as volunteers gave out food behind her.
“What’s interesting now is that it is not so much a prevalent feeling because there’s a sense of everyone is in this together.”