In Crisis Year, New Haveners Helped

During a year of unprecedented hardship, New Haveners stepped up to help their neighbors survive — with packets of masks, with boxes of food, with backpacks and cash and emergency healthcare.

Thanks to their efforts, 2020 will be remembered not just as a time of great suffering, but as a time of generosity and support as well.

The Covid-19 pandemic made landfall in New Haven in mid-March.

The past nine months have seen at least 6,721 positive cases and 142 Covid-related deaths in the city, with the latest surge quickly filling up hospital beds and imperiling more small businesses.

Even as a multiple vaccines are already here or on the way—thanks in part to the selflessness of New Haven volunteers who signed up to participate in one such experimental trial—the city is still staring down months more of social distancing, mask-wearing, economic distress, and broadscale disruption to life as we once knew it.

New Haveners also likely have a much more positive sight to look forward to amidst such dread: the continued generosity of their neighbors and co-workers.

Since the very start of the pandemic, people from all across the city — sometimes as individuals, sometimes at work, sometimes as part of religious groups or sororities and fraternities or neighborhood associations—have dedicated countless time and money to helping their fellow New Haveners get through.

That community-based care has come in the form of neighborhood mask giveaways spearheaded by Newhallville construction contractor Rodney Williams, boxes upon boxes of fresh produce distributed by the likes of West Rock Alder Honda Smith, direct cash support targeted at the city’s most vulnerable by mutual aid groups like the Semilla Collective and CT-Core Organize Now!, lifelines for local undocumented immigrants by Unidad Latina en Accion and for the incarcerated by CT Bail Fund, on-call mental health care by Clifford Beers Clinic, and a ramping up of Covid-19 testing by neighborhood health clinics like Cornell Scott Hill Health Center and Fair Haven Community Health Care (occasionally with the help of mariachi bands).

And that’s not to mention back-to-school backpack giveaways led by groups like the Dixwell Community Management Team and the Newhallville Community Action Network and the Dwight-based Church of God and Saints of Christ and Black Lives Matter New Haven.

Or food drives, pantries, and soup kitchens led by groups like the Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen and the Hill-based New Haven Inner City Enrichment Center and the Kingdom International Economic Development Corporation.

Or the quick pivots that teachers and police officers and firefighters and 911 call takers and librarians and trash collectors and building inspectors and public health students and officials and pollworkers and bus drivers have had to make in order to continue their daily work for the city under previously unimaginable conditions.

And, of course, the life-saving work of Yale New Haven Hospital intensive care unit nurses and other healthcare providers who have staffed shift after shift to treat local Covid patients.

“I grew up here,” Williams said at one October mask giveaway he hosted at the corner of Hazel Street and Shelton Avenue. ​“And I see so many people around without masks. The virus isn’t going away, so do we want to save lives or let people die?”

“Right now, we have this crisis that lays bare injustices and wealth gaps,” said Food Garage co-founder and Semilla Collective member Luis Luna in April about a food service targeted at helping undocumented immigrants. ​“We can really come to a solution.”

“While we were shopping and setting up for delivery, we’ve had other people come up to us and ask us how they can help,” Phi Beta Sigma Chapter President Derek Tompkins said during a fraternity-led grocery delivery in September. ​“It’s not only what we’re doing but how it affects the community positively as a whole.”

In late March, Immanuel Missionary Baptist Church soup kitchen head Bethany Watkins described her motivation for continuing to serve food to the needy even as the pandemic hit as a continuation of that soup kitchen’s pre-pandemic mission. ​“This is not community service. This is ministry.”

And in an April op-ed, YNHH Emergency Department physician Karen Jubanyik described one of her department’s new nurses sitting beside a patient who had been brought to the ED ​“in a condition beyond salvation; she was holding his hand and speaking softly to him.

“Although he had not graduated high school, he was now her professor. I knew that as much as she was giving, she was also getting the privilege of being present with him as he inched along on his final journey.”

And in late May, Joseph Starita (pictured), a lifelong New Havener who has been homeless for the past four years, managed to put into words the need — and the impact — of such pandemic-era local care, as he picked up some masks, shampoo, and food downtown at a giveaway led by DESK, Chapel on the Green, Congregation Beth El-Keser Israel, and the Mask Creator Volunteers.

“People don’t think about the basics,” he said. ​“But when you have nothing, the basics are needed.”