It takes so much effort to keep a community safe, healthy, smart and strong. But the effort is well worth it. This short essay will give you a glimpse into the “behind the scenes” world of our Community Covid Response.

It’s a Friday in August. The temperature is already 80 degrees, and this year’s August has had an almost record number of 90-degree days. What I’m going to describe for you, however, has been going on since March, when it was still snowing, through April when it rained 26 of 30 days, into the black flies of May, and mosquitoes of June and July. Not to be deterred, the army of Community COVID Response Volunteers is a hearty bunch, driven by the singular mission to help our community!

For me, the day starts out at 7:30 am at the office. Upon arrival I embark on the task of moving the 153 weekend food bags from End 68 Hours of Hunger out of the office to the front of the building, piled in neat little piles for each of their school and bus route destinations for the day. These bags each weigh about 10 pounds, and since we started distributing them as part of the school lunch program, we’ve handed out almost 2000 of them. And that’s a fraction of the total number produced and distributed by E68. Each bag contains enough food for a typical youngster to eat from Friday afternoon until Monday morning… the 68 hours in which schools don’t feed kids. The bags at United Way were packed up by E68 the weekend before and hand delivered by two of our volunteers to the office the previous Monday.

At 9 am the first volunteer shows up at United Way. This is typically Trish Klee and her husband (some of you might know Trish for her service as a State Rep and Ward 3 Alderwoman. I know her simply as the amazing volunteer who she is. They pick up 20 of the bags and transport them in their little pickup up to Nashua North High School where a little bit later that morning the will be included with the food which will be distributed on two bus routes in the city.

Also at 9 am other things are beginning to happen… several volunteers from the Boys and Girls Club of Greater Nashua and the UW Covid Response Team are driving in BGCGN vans over to the Nashua Soup Kitchen and Shelter to pick up frozen meals and fresh produce. The folks over at the Soup Kitchen have prepared the frozen meals as part of the Meals for Kids program, and the fresh produce was picked up earlier in the week by NSKS at the New Hampshire Food Bank. The frozen meals are kind of like TV Dinners, for those of you who – like me – are old enough to remember these. The fresh produce is whatever is available and in season from the Food Bank. It includes everything from melons and bananas to cucumbers and potatoes. All of these are hard-to-come-by staples for people who have difficulty accessing transportation or are low income. After loading up at the Soup Kitchen, the BGCGN/UW crew heads out to multiple locations around the city where things are starting to get hopping. By 11 am, they need to have dropped of at all 10 school locations, which includes the city’s 6 Title 1 schools as well as Sunset, Broad Street, New Searles and Pennichuck Middle Schools. They also drop off at Nashua North for this food to be included in the 2 bus routes.

It’s now 10:30 and volunteers start to arrive at United Way to get their marching orders. These volunteers pick up their allocation of E68 bags, sorted for each school, with Ledge Street getting the largest quantity at 85 bags, and others receiving as few as 3-5 bags. Each week the quantities are adjusted to reflect demand from the week before. The volunteers also pick up face masks for distribution at their sites. Since United Way began handing out face masks, as part of this program, as well as to other local nonprofits, at the malls, at downtown locations, at the farmers market, and at our food drives, we have distributed OVER 80,000 face masks. Some are the disposable surgical kind, and some are the woven reusable kind. This effort – we are convinced – is saving lives as it has made the face mask in Greater Nashua easily accessible to all and ubiquitous. We believe in the science that says that wearing a face mask is likely the single most effective tool we have to protect others from the possibility that we are carrying the Coronavirus. By 10:45 all of the volunteers have come and gone from United Way and are out to their sites waiting to begin food distribution, which begins at 11 am.

The BGCGN vans, in addition to picking up their produce and frozen meals, have also gone up to Nashua North to pick up numerous 55 gallon marine coolers full of ready to eat, grab and go breakfasts and lunches as well as milk and juice. This food has been prepared, 3 days per week, by the incredible cafeteria staff from the Nashua School District. Under their fearless leader, and one of my chief partners in crime, they have produced – as of this week – just shy of 90,000 breakfasts and lunches for the kids in our community. We distribute those meals without regard for income and without any type of verification. The design of this program is very simple: minimal barriers equals no stigma equals maximal nutrition. The cafeteria crew started this program on Monday the week of the shutdown, having only learned about the shutdown the prior Thursday, and haven’t missed a beat since. Have we had challenges? Absolutely! At one point we went for a couple of weeks suffering from a shortage of bags for the lunches and were rescued through the generosity of Dunkins and Chick-fil-A, who gave us thousands of bags. As the spring turned to summer, we needed cooling and I now find myself the proud owner of over a dozen 55-gallon marine coolers. The district needed to come up with a protocol for measuring temperature to keep food safe. And our volunteers had to learn to always wear a mask, use hand sanitizer, sometimes gloves, and physically distance. Through all of it we persevered and, in my estimation, fed every kid who needed it!

Sometime in March I got a call from somebody who said “my child goes to Elm Street, but we live miles from there and aren’t near an elementary school which has school lunch. What can I do? We thought about that a little bit and realized that there was, indeed, a need to get out into other parts of the community. At that point, the amazing Nashua Transportation System, under the leadership of Sarah Marchant and Camille Pattison, two more of my secret partners-in-crime, stepped up to the plate and said “Look, we’ve got busses available and drivers who want to help. Why don’t we deliver the food out to the community on city busses?” Well, that was an incredible idea and so I pulled out a map of the city of Nashua, looked at the 10 schools where we were currently giving out food, drew circles around those, looked at what we were missing, and we made up bus routes for all of the missing places. Since that time, around the beginning of April, city busses have been traversing Nashua with UW COVID Volunteers on board, along with food from the school district, face masks from United Way, and food from the Soup Kitchen, brought to them by volunteers from the Boys and Girls Club.

Finally, we also realized that some families haven’t got access to transportation and were literally quarantined due to COVID. This includes homeless families in several different locations. We started taking referrals from teachers and guidance counselors from these families and before we need it, we were hand delivering food to over 30 students. The volunteers who do that all show up at Pennichuck around 11 am, get their food and their marching orders, and take the food out to the kids who need it. One thing I didn’t mention about the food program, in general, is that we do all of this 3 days a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. We know that kids need to eat on the other days, too, so Monday’s and Wednesday’s we hand out 2 breakfasts and lunches, and on Friday’s we hand out 3. And on the few holidays we’ve had, such as Memorial Day, we actually handed out 4 days’ worth of food at once to make sure that kids are fed, and nobody goes without. Again, regardless of income, just because “feeding Nashua’s kids” is what we do.

So, it’s 11 am… food’s at all the sites and busses are running. People are coming and getting fed. Things get quiet for a few hours, which is about when I would like to begin to take a nap. And I would, except for the millions of other things going on with us at United Way. Somewhere around 12 or 12:30 somebody runs out of food and a volunteer or two who are on call will retrieve food from one location and quick trip it over to the other location. At the same time, invariably, one of our food pantries in the community will give us a call and ask if we can pick up some food there and deliver it to one of their clients. This has happened almost 50 times so far and has been a great way to make sure that people who should be staying in their homes due to COVID, don’t go out and risk their health and the health of others.

Around 1 pm, things begin to get busy again. That’s because our school sites bring their coolers and leftovers back to United Way. All of the leftovers from the schools gets quickly shuffled around and reorganized for the next destination which is our “pop up food pantries.” These are locations which were established back in May where, 5 days per week, fresh produce and on Friday’s frozen meals, are distributed to the public at large. This food comes from the same sources, i.e. the primarily the Soup Kitchen along with the school lunch leftovers, but this time we have logistical support from the YMCA. Early on, their CEO, Mike LaChance said “what can we do?” They answered the calling and, like the Boys and Girls Club, under Norm Bouthilette and the Soup Kitchen, under Michael Reinke, the YMCA put their volunteers to work picking up food and bringing it out the the community, where they meet up with United Way volunteers who hand it out. These pop-up pantries, since they started, have served OVER 4,000 families, again giving people access to fresh produce, frozen meals, and – of course – face masks. Each day of the week, two different pop up locations hand out this food, from 2-3 pm.

At 3 pm, the day is finally beginning to wind down. The leftovers from the pop-up pantries are brought back to United Way and by 3:30 pm the busses are finishing their routes and come to United Way as their last stop. Once here, all remaining leftovers are removed from the coolers, which are then sent back to Nashua North for the next cycle. And at 3:30 pm the final volunteer shows up at our office and picks up the remaining sandwiches and produce, which is brought first to the Nashua Children’s Home, and then what they don’t need is brought to Mary’s House, and finally what they don’t need is brought to the Salvation Army. And by the evening every last morsel has been handed out to the community.

This is a remarkable story, and I thought worthy of documentation. It involves broad based collaboration of many agencies. It involves the choreographed dance of dozens of volunteers, who have logged over 7,500 hours in service since March 1. And it requires the extraordinary skill of two unsung heroes. I need to give credit to my colleagues Liz and Sara. Sara is the master puppeteer, the Oz behind the curtain, who is making all of this happen from recruiting to deploying volunteers. Liz, my other colleague at United Way, has done literally everything in her power to make sure that the rest of our small operation functions seamlessly, thus allowing Sara to focus on what she is doing. Without either one of them, the operation would crumble. Without all of our partners, the operation would fail. And without our amazing volunteers, the effort would never have accomplished anything near what it has. As for me, I am extraordinary grateful for all of these people and agencies, who have pulled together and demonstrated, in the most visible possible fashion, that GREAT THINGS CAN HAPPEN WHEN WE LIVE UNITED.