All posts by Ro Fiori, Intern, NECC Community Resources, Salem State University MSW graduate student

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NECC veggies, SNAP outreach, cake, gratitude and 223,568 pounds later

 

The Community Resources area at Northern Essex Community College has partnered with Community Action Lawrence and Community Action Haverhill to have a SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) authorized outreach worker attend our next mobile food mart on Tuesday, April 25.

Pick up your veggies and receive information on qualification for SNAP. Get assistance if a current application is stuck or pending. Ask about other farm and food bank partners. Get your questions answered before or after you shop for food.

Also, Community Resources warmly invites you to eat cake and celebrate 6 years of mobile food mart presence on the Northern Essex Community College campuses!

The NECC Community Resources Department has partnered with the Greater Boston Food Bank for 6 years.

This collaboration coordinates campus Mobile Food Markets. We connect food-insecure students to food and resources through many mechanisms. Whatever the channel, we deliver food into the hearts and homes of NECC students. This mission is boots on the ground and brings the most resources to where there is the greatest need. Like all other colleges, we stand shoulder to shoulder in acknowledging the work of these departments at every college across Massachusetts.

The following quote is from a Massachusetts community college. Here the President pondered on the recent receipt of a grant: “Our top priority at Berkshire Community College is offering a quality education that is accessible to all.

But access goes beyond the classroom-we must do everything we can to ensure the basic needs of our students are met. Food insecurity disproportionately impacts students of color and low-income students.

This generous grant allows us to address the serious issue of hunger head-on by identifying need, taking active steps to alleviate the problem and allowing our students to thrive without the added pressures of food insecurity.” Ellen Kennedy, BCC President.

This writer pauses to examine what that social justice transformation looked like, in deeds rather than words or platitudes. Let us dispel the myth that we are all self-made students on individual journeys of non-connection.

Let us recognize that change was in the mobilization of committing to Community Resources Department across Massachusetts; across the United States.

Community resources with just the Mobile Food Mart alone, assisted over seven thousand households at NECC. The total number of unduplicated recipients is 26,233 not including our last (March 2023) or next (April 2023) food mart.

If you are more of a weights and measurements kind of person, Community Resources arranged and distributed 223,568 pounds of food having a value of just under $300,000.

The calculations previously listed do not include our own walk-in and bag-up food pantry. The NECC pantry offers many nonperishable nutrient-dense foods like beans and tuna. Our NECC food pantry also includes perishable items such as meat, hummus, and eggs. Nor do the calculations previously mentioned include our frozen Smart Meals, a Heats n’ Eats program with community partner Food for Free. Also, in our resources manifest is our Menstrual Care program stocking first floor restroom and our pantry itself with essential hygiene products.

Finally, $300,000 does not include something not so easily monetized: triage and resources for emergency referral. It does not include the compassion and justice work of being present with students in real time. But it is a starting point of gratitude.

A sweet thank you to our own Community Resource area at NECC.
And remember, bring your SNAP questions to the SNAP outreach worker.
Save this date: Tuesday April 25, 2023, and join us at the following mobile food mart locations for fruits,
vegetables, SNAP advice, cake, gratitude, and justice:
• Haverhill: Behrakis Student Center 12-1PM
• Lawrence: Dimitry Building 1-2PM

Opinion

Re-purposing President’s Day: Your leadership is your legacy

 

Happy mid-February! It is time to think about those childhood memories of the usual first day off for February school vacation (the third Monday in February). Remember?

A whole week to delay homework. February is all about Black History Month, more daylight, a concurring holiday all about l-o-v-e, and of course world Nutella day.

But it is also Presidents Day.

It is an inharmonious day to feel celebratory especially with its juxtaposition the same month as Black History Month. It is difficult to recall the injustices under leadership of our fledging country as economies of growth were driven by the exploitations of both slavery and minority labor.

It is difficult to remember the elimination or resettlement of our indigenous forebears under assertive presidential leadership; most recently we watched the Standing Rock Sioux fight for a stay in the Dakotas. We watched as an administration implemented the order for separation of caregivers or parent(s) from their children at the border. In this vein, presidential felicitation means different things for different citizens.

I think of Presidents Day as a set-aside holiday based on creating a mythology out of past elected fractious leaders.

Would we embrace, rather, a national reckoning day of reflection, civility, and citizenship?

I propose a repurposed holiday to citizen leadership day. Let us recall how many devoted folks have shown up to be the change, volunteer steering committees, ad hoc unpaid councils, volunteer school activism, non-profit volunteers, community organizers, those alone on the dais, and those surrounded, who have devoted generations of their time labor and love to making inch by inch progress.

A majority devoted to their citizen leadership might notice that those giving of their spirit are there to ameliorate oppressions in socio economic status, racism, homophobia, xenophobia, ageism, ableism, and sexism.

It is time to celebrate citizens who devote their lives to the cultivation of the art of citizen leadership. Where are our leaders that are not elected and do not lead from the White House, the Supreme Court, or the Congress?

What are their voices like? How do they contribute?

Close your eyes for one moment and think of a time in your life when you were inspired to act. What was the catalyst? Who was the changemaker inspiring you?

Celebrate that person on February 20, 2023. And have some Nutella.