Keefe Center volunteer Jacob Galarza shlepping boxes in the cold Thursday morning.
The word on Dixwell Avenue Thursday was: Brrrrrrr.
That’s where 21-year-old Jacob Galarza tried his best to keep warm in his hoodie while making sure needy people had food to eat.
As temperatures inched into double digits, Galarza was working at the Keefe Center, carrying two boxes at a time into community center’s food pantry area to be unpacked then organized into grocery bags for residents to pick up later in the day.
Galarza spoke with WNHH FM’s“LoveBabz LoveTalk” program’s“Word on the Street” team in between shlepping the goods.
Galarza, who lives in Newington, travels to Hamden three time a week to help prepare and distribute groceries from the Keefe food pantry. He also take a 40-minute drive back on Saturdays and Sundays to help run the warming center from 7 p.m to midnight. (Read more about the center here.)
On top of volunteering at Keefe almost daily since last March, Galarza works at All Access Sports in Plainville.
He noted that another word on the street is: gas money. He spends a lot of it getting to and from the center and his second job.
Galarza attends Springfield College remotely, majoring in human services.
“I just like helping people,” he said.
Working at the center has helped Galarza to confirm that he wants to pursue a career in human services, he said.
Helping at Keefe — which operates as a warming center, food pantry, and food distribution site for Hamden — Galarza has built relationships with visitors who talk to him about their day’s agenda and upcoming job interviews, and ask for him to pray for them.
Watch the full radio interview below.
What a stand-up guy!
The flip side of stories like this is that it's painfully clear to me that Jacob is doing good, hard, much-needed WORK at the food pantry & warming center. Which is more than I can say for a lot of people in a lot of professions! And yet not only is our society -- the richest country in the world -- expecting him to do all of this for free; that society is also just continually creating more work for him in the form of an endless supply of people who need his help.
I'm reminded of what Studs Terkel wrote in the foreword to his 1974 collection of interviews with working people of all sorts:
"In a world of cybernetics, of an almost runaway technology, things are increasingly making things. It is for our species, it would seem, to go on to other matters. Human matters.
... 'Learning is work. Caring for children is work. Community action is work. Once we accept the concept of work as something meaningful - not just as the source of a buck - you don't have to worry about finding enough jobs. There's no excuse for mules any more. Society does not need them. There's no question about our ability to feed and clothe and house everybody. The problem is going to come in finding enough ways for man to keep occupied, so he's in touch with reality.' Our imaginations have obviously not yet been challenged."
(The interior quote is from Ralph Helstein, a labor leader active in the 40s-60s.)
It turns out that our technological advances continued to primarily benefit the rich, so what was true in 1974 is still true today.