Group’s pandemic mission nears end
Oakland at Risk has kept vulnerable out of harm’s way from coronavirus
Jason Alderman remembers the exact day when he found out the couple for whom he’d been picking up groceries for almost a year was, in his words, laying him off.
“I think I yelled out loud in excitement when I read the email to myself in my little home office, with the dog looking at me like what was wrong?” he recalled. That email marked the end of a routine that went on much longer than anyone expected. It was just one of the hundreds of relationships begun through mutual aid groups that sprung up across the Bay Area in the early days of the pandemic to connect volunteers with vulnerable residents seeking to avoid potentially risky outings to the grocery store or pharmacy. But those connec
tions are changing as more residents are vaccinated and the region opens.
For almost a year, Alderman got a detailed grocery list every Thursday from Carolyn Horgan, 73, and her husband, Jonathan Crowl, 78, a couple worried about the risk of contracting COVID-19 while grocery shopping. Friday mornings before work, Alderman would drop off groceries from a Safeway near their Piedmont home, masked and waving from a distance. Every few weeks, Horgan would leave him some brownies or banana bread to take home. By the end, the spot on the doorframe where they’d thumbtack a check for the groceries started to look as if it’d been attacked by a woodpecker.
In late February, the couple emailed Alderman, telling him they were fully vaccinated and ready to do their own shopping.
“It was very psychologically reassuring to have that routine connection with the ‘outside world’ in the person of the ever-cheerful Jason,” Crowl said in an email. “It was pretty liberating to be vaccinated and able to fully do grocery shopping again.”
Oakland at Risk, the mutual aid group that connected Alderman with Horgan and Crowl, was supposed to last three, maybe four weeks co-founder Paige Wheeler Fleury said. But it kept going, providing aid far beyond what was originally envisioned and building life-changing connections across generations and ZIP codes, she said.
“I never would’ve met these people, and they’ve enriched my life,” Wheeler Fleury said. “I have other volunteers, some of which are now good friends of mine, who say they see their person every week. They’ll see them forever.”
The stories come one after the other, a positive inverse to the steady drumbeat of heart-wrenching COVID-19 headlines over the past year.
Through Oakland at Risk, Wheeler Fleury helped someone find housing, someone else a tax advisor. She helped a homeless woman move into a new home, then helped her get furniture and gift cards for groceries. She’s even giving one person a personal loan while they wait for their backlogged unemployment benefits. Over the holidays, she began fielding requests from immigrant families in East Oakland who had lost work or contracted COVID-19 and had nowhere else to turn.
One man reached out when he and three generations of his family who had been quarantining together all tested positive, leaving them unable to work. Wheeler Fleury said they were able to get him groceries, then she raised money from friends and relatives so the family could buy Christmas gifts for the younger kids.
“That just made my holidays,” she said.
Oakland at Risk will shut down this monh, Wheeler Feury said — existing volunteer matchups will continue, but the organization won’t make new connections. Over roughly 13 months, about 1,700 volunteers were matched with about 500 mostly elderly households, she said. They also helped about 100 monolingual Spanish-speaking households who had tested positive or been exposed to COVID-19. They referred about 200 households to the Mercy Brown Bag program from Elder Care Alliance and to CalFresh and compiled resources for another roughly 100 low-income households.
But there’s no way to measure the strength of the individual connections that were made. For Wheeler Fleury, there is Rosie, the older woman living near Highland Hospital she met last April. She’ll probably be helping Rosie for the rest of her life.
“She just sent me a text today that said, ‘How are you dear, I love you so much,’” Wheeler Fleury said, her voice breaking. “As hard as it is, it also fills my heart because she has so much love to give and had nowhere to send that love.”
Alderman said Oakland at Risk helped him gain a sense of control during a time when “It really felt like the virus was controlling all aspects of my life and I really resented that.”
He signed up to volunteer the day he read about the group in the East Bay Times.
“It’s been a year of feeling disconnected, and it made me feel more connected to two lovely people I’d never met before,” he said. “It’s brought out something good in me.”
On a more practical level, he said, a year of seeing Horgan and Crowl’s “pure and wholesome” grocery list has inspired him to try and buy more fruit and vegetables for his own family.
As for Crowl, being fully vaccinated did have one major positive: He could go back to the Berkeley Bowl.
“My wife was happy to be able to finally hug our 1-year-old grandson; I think I was just as happy to have such variety of fruits and vegetables again,” he wrote. “Sometimes I think my priorities need examining.”