Maya McFadden Photo
The Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen food pantry.
Crosswalks can wait. People have lost jobs during the Covid-19 pandemic and are hungry now.
That logic drove the Downtown-Wooster Square Community Management Team on Monday to reverse a previous vote and give all $20,000 of their Neighborhood Public Improvement Project (NPIP) dollars to the Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen (DESK).
“To think about what neighborhood improvement means, the first thing you can do is keep people alive,” said neighbor Ian Dunn.
Several neighborhoods have switched how they intended to use the dollars set aside for them by the city’s anti-blight Livable City Initiative in light of the Covid-19 pandemic. Fair Haven has devoted around $10,000 to personal protective equipment for the community. Hill North has paired $3,000 of their NPIP dollars with Yale donations to purchase masks.
DWSCMT Chair Caroline Smith shared stats about how job loss and hunger has disproportionately affected African-American and Latino communities in Connecticut. She said that Fair Haven inspired the executive board to propose the different use of funding.
David de la Mano, Town Green Photos
Previously, over 75 neighbors had voted to give $5,000 to Site Projects for a mural on Crown Street (example pictured above with other project renderings), $8,000 for colorful crosswalks on Chapel Street and $10,000 for lighting the bridge between Wooster Square and Downtown.
Town Green District was in charge of the latter two projects. Executive Director Win Davis said that the organization has spent money on contracts already as they have tried to get the crosswalks and lighting done.
Camila Güiza-Chavez described the way the nonprofit she works with, Havenly Treats, has switched to food relief during the pandemic.
“We have seen just an astronomical amount of need. We produce about 600 meals a week and it’s not at all enough,” Güiza-Chavez said.
Like others on the call, she pointed out that the management team is not as diverse as the neighborhoods represented.
“My guess is that the people who are most affected are not represented here,” Güiza-Chavez said. “While trying to find a different source of funding is logistically difficult, it is a different kind of consequence than not being able to pay rent.”
Zoom
Neighbor Camila Güiza-Chavez: The need for food now is astronomical.
The neighborhood held two votes. The first was whether to rescind their previous vote on NPIP. When this passed, the second was on whether to give $10,000 or $20,000 to DESK.
Executive board member Anstress Farwell pitched the $10,000 version as a way to both contribute to the previous projects and help with neighborhood hunger.
“[It is important] in the middle of a pandemic to see joy and beauty and improvement,” Farwell said.
In the end, Smith put the two options to a Zoom poll and the $20,000 option won out. Smith promised to work with DESK to provide a budget to the management team and to still help the other projects reach completion.
“Thank you, everyone, for really stepping up on this. This will be a tremendous help to those in the greatest of need,” said DESK Executive Director Steve Werlin.
Thank you to everybody who put people's desperate need for food ahead of beautifying their neighborhood. These are unprecedented times both economically and socially. The Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen will be a wonderful beneficiary of their donation.