A family struggle as pandemic worsens From her mother she learned values that have helped sustain her in difficult times, such as grit and generosity. She took comfort in prayer and gospel music.
NEW YORK >> At the peak of the coronavirus pandemic this spring, Sharawn Vinson often woke up crying. A recurring thought was making the unemployed single mother desperate: That her kids could go hungry.
There was also fear of contracting the virus, which has disproportionately hit low-income Black families like hers. Meanwhile some of the largest protests against racial injustice in decades were transpiring right outside their window, after the family had experienced its own terrifying encounter with police earlier in the year. There were unpaid bills, and feelings of shame from having to go to a soup kitchen in search of a meal.
So Vinson made the painful decision to send 11-year-old twins Mason and Maddison to live with their father, six states to the south, knowing that way they’d at least be fed.
“I needed them to breathe,” Vinson said, wiping away tears in her living room of peeling gray walls in a Brooklyn housing development.
Vinson was not alone in struggling to put food on the table in this historically tumultuous year. In New York City alone, an
estimated 2 million residents are facing food insecurity, a number that the city’s mayor estimates nearly doubled in the pandemic amid the biggest surge in unemployment since the Great Depression. The scope of the problem outstrips previous crises such as the Great Recession, according to those who are working to
combat it, and it’s not going away anytime soon.
“It’s never been this tragic for such a sustained period of time. Since COVID hit, the numbers of people in line at food pantries and soup kitchens skyrocketed, and it’s not going down,” said Rosanna Robbins, director of food access and capacity at City Harvest, the city’s biggest
food rescue organization. “And so I think for us it’s just adjusting to the fact that we expect there to be a real need for free food for a very long time to come.”
When New York schools closed in March, Vinson’s children lost overnight the free breakfasts and lunches they relied on in normal times. Grocery store shelves were poorly
stocked, and her pantry was almost bare. She began skipping meals to make sure they ate, and having them wake up later to try to trick hunger by giving them two meals a day instead of three.
“You never realize how important schools are until you don’t have them,” Vinson said.
“I’d open the refrigerator and I’d see struggle,” she added, “and also sacrifice.”
Oldest daughter Jasmin, 25, and 5-year-old grandson Hunter were living at a homeless shelter but came to visit her at the Lafayette Gardens public housing complex, where the family would share whatever they could scrape together for lunch.
“It got to the point where the kids would unconsciously save a chicken wing for Hunter,” Vinson said.
The family was cooped up for weeks during lockdown, living on just $1,800 a month in worker’s compensation from an on-thejob injury Vinson suffered last year when she fell and tore her meniscus.
From the dusty kitchen window of their 16th-floor apartment, they could see the deserted basketball