Feeding the needy during the crisis
My heart sank when I read the email on Thursday: CHiPS, the Brooklyn soup kitchen where I serve food once a month, would be closing. Not enough volunteers have been showing up since coronavirus forced everybody into isolation.
More than 150 people, homeless or just struggling, count on the Park Slope soup kitchen for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Now, I wondered, how would they eat?
Many of the nonprofits that bolster our government’s woefully inadequate safety net rely heavily on volunteers and donors. The Food Bank for New York City, one of the city’s largest food relief organizations, said, as of Friday, 97 food pantries and 21 soup kitchens in its network had closed due to coronavirus-related reasons.
Just a few weeks ago, CHiPS’s executive director, Denise Scaravella, was defiantly vowing to stay open, telling News 12 that the dining room has been full “like Christmas morning.” But the volunteers stopped coming in. Of her three full-time staffers, one cares for her 88-year-old mother, one lost her lymph nodes from breast cancer, and one is an elderly man with a sick wife.
Aside from five part-time staff, the balance of CHiPS’s labor are volunteers: 20 to 25 people, six days a week, mostly from churches, schools and the Park Slope Food Coop, which sends members like me to work their required monthly shift cooking, washing dishes and serving food.
Soup kitchens are “essential operations” under Gov. Cuomo’s PAUSE order, but it’s hard to fault anyone for not volunteering when we’re told staying inside could save lives.
I usually look forward to my shift. I’ve always loved waitressing, and the clientele, mostly men, tend to be more gracious than many of the paying customers I’ve served. But I was feeling anxious about getting sick, too, even though CHiPS had switched to only serving carryout.
Ultimately, I went on Thursday. I felt an obligation.
As I approached, the line stretched around the corner. Inside, cafeteria tables that normally seat 50 were stacked high with tubs of condiments, juice boxes and granola bars. Back in the kitchen, a handful of volunteers scooped brisket, fried rice and mixed vegetables into plastic containers that were distributed from the front door. I was assigned to wash dishes.
I asked people outside what they would do after CHiPS closed. Most seemed panicked.
Honey Fernandez, 68, said she walks here from her apartment up the street; it’s the one place she can count on. “I can come and help. I can cook. I can cook,” she insisted.
Jillian Eversley said she doesn’t get food stamps, “I just depend right on this.”
At the end of my conversation with Scaravella, I asked if she had anything to add. We looked at each other in silence. I took in the sadness in her eyes, the chatter from the people lined up outside, and the weight of the situation, knowing that some of the regulars might not be here when the doors reopened.
Then she said: “This is heartbreaking. I wish somebody else made the decision and it wasn’t my decision. But at the end of the day, no one made the decision. And I had to.”
Not to be defeated, on Monday, as rain poured down, Scaravella and another volunteer were back at CHiPS running their own “pop-up” soup kitchen from a side door. I brought one of my favorite comfort foods, biscuits with butter and jam.
Rethink, based in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, may temporarily “take over” the soup kitchen as part of a coordinated, citywide effort among food relief groups to rapidly reconfigure operations. But for now, people like Scarravella are plugging the holes coronavirus has ripped through the safety net where they can. “I’ll be out here every day, handing out whatever individually-packaged meals that people want to bring,” she said.
Ryley is an investigative journalist. As a reporter at the Daily News, her series on the NYPD’s abuse of eviction laws, done in partnership with ProPublica, was awarded the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.