Two Years On:
How the Pandemic Changed Everything We Do for New Jersey Kids
By Catherine Buck
On the final day of our after-school Academy program in March 2020, our Camden middle-schoolers planted peas.
Everyone has a story about the abruptness of that time - those first weeks of the pandemic - and this is ours. Our twelve-person group of preteens took a mini field trip down the street to begin a weeks-long unit about nature writing and the power of observation. Nahiem diligently took down notes, Angel jumped to help set up a trellis, and Koi and Bryanna teased each other as they set down a row of careful seeds. As they worked, Jon Compton from the Center for Environmental Transformation (CfET) talked to us about growing food, healthy eating, food deserts and related justice issues in our neighborhood.
The kids were far more worried about getting dirt on their clothes than they were about some far-off virus in California. When we got back to our center, they all washed their hands for the length of two alphabet songs as required by our brand-new CDC poster. They wrote a few sentences about what they'd see as they'd watch the peas grow in the coming weeks, and then we were never together in the same room again.
There have been over 125,000 cases of COVID-19 in Camden County in the two years since, exacerbating the challenges of a city with historically high rates of poverty. From March to April 2020, Camden's unemployment rate leapt by 12%, and many families that had otherwise been stable were suddenly faced by compounding tragedy.
At Mighty Writers, the uncertainty loomed large. We were an after-school program at a time when schools were shuttered indefinitely, and our entire program revolved around carefully tended in-person relationships. We immediately moved classes online, and then did the only other thing we could: we started to hand out food.
First, this was just for the families of our students. It was a way we could stay in touch, hear how they were doing, and encourage them to keep writing about what they saw and how they felt. They were living through history, we told them, and people would want to hear what it was like. We started with 60 bags of food, twice weekly, provided by the Food Bank of South Jersey. This covered our kids and their friends, new students we were eager to meet. The first day, it was just three of us: me, our development director Naomi and Derrick Gallashaw, the father of a second grader in our after-school program. We stuck a folding table in a doorway, piled it with food, books and a few packs of diapers, and blasted music to a mostly empty street.
Today is as far from that as possible: we serve more than 500 families a week, and everyone on the block knows our names. All told, Mighty Writers Camden has given out over 130,000 meals, 500,000 diapers and 2,000 books through our food and resource distribution program, as well as winter coats, period products, and other essentials as needed.
After just a month, the lines started wrapping around the block, as word spread and our food supply increased. We expanded our partnership with the Philadelphia Diaper Bank, and volunteers stepped up in a big way to sort, package and share everything with a masked-up smile. Books and activity pages were a constant, and we handed Tootsie Roll Pops to every kid who showed up. A little less than a year later, we got a major partnership with Philabundance that has ensured we never run out of food: There is plenty here every day.
So many moments in the past two years have been disheartening and isolating, but distribution has been a constant source of connective joy. We shared water ice in the summer, chocolate on Halloween, stockings on Christmas and turkey and trimmings for Thanksgiving. There is a very intentional sense, consistently reinforced, that distribution is a place of community. We don't ask for ID or proof of income. We speak to guests in English and Spanish, let people pick what they want to eat, and find just the right book for every reader.
Snapshots that stand out when I think of what we've built: our incredible summer teen volunteers, our elderly neighbor Mr. Stan holding it down with his MW T-shirt, Ms. Ameera's first in-person class building a spaceship in the courtyard and painting our BookArk, the rain blowing away our tents, mountains of cardboard for recycling, meal kits with Michelle Obama's Pass the Love program, Philip and Khalaya reading poetry at A New View, and a vaccine event with Virtua Health.
Crowds have shown up mostly through word of mouth, and every new visitor is treated as a celebration. We have the resources to share, and want them to get to as many people as possible. Still, maintaining triple digits of daily guests has been a stark reminder that the need for food and diapers is unabating, and there are real stories behind the statistics of struggle.
As COVID cases drop and restrictions lift, the program we started to fill an emergency need has become a permanent one. Our community helpers aren't going anywhere, and MW Camden distribution isn't either. This September, students returned to on-site programming, many of them from families who found us first through distribution. We are planning to launch Spanish-language programming, as more than half our distribution visitors are primarily Spanish-speaking, a community we'd never reached before.
I'm now moving into a different role to develop new Mighty Writers sites across New Jersey and New York, using Camden as a model for growth. The new program director of MW Camden is Derrick Gallashaw, the first parent who stepped up to help. He's led our summer teen program, fills every diaper order, and manages the growing crowd of guests with consistency and respect. He is the perfect person to bring us into the next chapter.
This summer, we've been given our own plot in the CfET garden down the street. Among other activities, workshop students will check in on and then journal about their plants' growth each week. There will likely be twists and turns - weeds to pull, days with too much rain or not enough - but I think at the end of it, they'll have a harvest of which they'll be proud. They might even get to grow some peas.
Catherine Buck is the NJ and NY Director of Programming for Mighty Writers.
Mighty Writers is a class 501(c)(3) non-profit organization established in 2009. One hundred percent of the programs we offer are free. We serve communities in and around Philadelphia, PA, as well as in Camden, Newark and Atlantic City, NJ. We also run writing workshops in Washington Heights, NYC.
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