In the spring of 2020, everything changed.
Everything changed first over COVID-19. People worked from home, others lost their jobs. Overnight, our plans changed. Our needs changed. And the organizations we counted on to meet those needs – they had to change as well.
And something else was happening too. The same week North Carolina closed its schools, a woman named Breonna Taylor was shot and killed by police in Louisville. Two months later, George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis. And as people flooded the streets in protest, once again, we realized things had to change.
It’s now been three years since that spring. What have we learned from our experience? What lessons have we taken away? What changes have we made? And which of those changes will last?
“Three Years” is a series by 97.9 The Hill’s Aaron Keck – looking back on our memories and lessons learned from our collective experience, drawn from conversations with numerous government officials, nonprofit heads, scholars and thought leaders in the Chapel Hill-Carrboro community.
Click here for the entire 15-part series.
Listen to Chapter 4:
Chapter 4: The Generosity
Melissa Driver Beard’s story about the mysterious overnight food donation may have been the best story I’ve heard about people quietly stepping up to help in the midst of COVID-19. But there were many, many, many stories, just like it – and people took notice.
“I say over and over again: I’m so proud of this community,” says UNC Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz. “We were very dedicated to helping each other weather this as best as we could,” adds Hillsborough Mayor Jenn Weaver.
Chapel Hill Mayor Pam Hemminger got to see our community’s generosity firsthand on numerous occasions. “The food distributions, and the money – to help people stay where they were, or to help restaurants, or workers from restaurants, and just trying to reach out and make sure that we were taking care of folks,” she says. “We even moved the shelter folks into a hotel to make sure that they were protected and safe.”
Almost overnight, new organizations popped up. There were tons of examples. Local residents organized “Carrboro United,” a drive-through food service that kept numerous restaurants open in the toughest times. In Chapel Hill, business owner Nick Stroud single-handedly raised tens of thousands of dollars to support local service workers who’d been laid off. Others made their giving go two ways at once: buying take-out food from local restaurants to support them, then bringing the food to frontline workers at UNC Hospital.
“My sense was that people felt like, ‘okay, I’m going to choose my favorite handful of local restaurants, local businesses, and I’m going to do my best to keep sending money their way,’” says Jenn Weaver. “And somehow it worked better than I thought it was going to. I was so worried about what was going to happen to our local economy. And I know it’s been incredibly tough, but we weathered it better than I anticipated.”
In Mebane, North Carolina poet laureate Jaki Shelton Green found residents helping each other too – sometimes in the most unexpected ways.
“I witnessed many things,” she says. “There was this different type of generosity. People were more patient. There was resistance to the mask, which was frightening – but I did witness just these wonderful exchanges between people. Watching people with Confederate t-shirts on, carrying groceries out to an elderly black woman’s car who is in one of those little motorized wheelchairs. Listening to them asking her over and over again, ‘are you sure? Do you live alone? Do we need to follow you home to help you get your groceries in? Are you gonna be okay? Do you need any money?’ And I just stood there and I thought, ‘that’s different. And that’s wonderful.’
“I think on so many different levels, some people were thinking about, ‘what does it mean to be human, and what does it mean to appreciate and value and prioritize, not just their own humanity, but the safety and humanity of other people?’”
Maybe the ones who got to see that human spirit most closely were the ones who went to work for nonprofits every day, as our neighbors’ needs suddenly multiplied.
“The number of meals we were delivering increased in a very short period of time, and our regular source of funding and fundraising could have never kept up with that,” says Rachel Bearman of Orange County Meals on Wheels. “(But) while we couldn’t have volunteers come in, we had literally hundreds of volunteers, who hadn’t been connected with us, who did all these little things for us along the way. They made masks for us. Dropped off bags. Created special cards for our recipients. They became phone callers. Things that just weren’t a part of our service model before. That was pretty amazing. And it was that community outpouring which really enabled us to keep going.”
“Do you have a specific strong memory?” I ask.
“I have two,” she says. “In the very beginning, there were two groups of women who were sewing masks – and they just showed up at our door and dropped off bags of masks. Not only for our volunteers, but for our recipients and the staff. Like, without asking, they delivered them to us…
“And the second – which seemed so little – was that we couldn’t get bags to deliver our items in. The supermarkets usually donate them to us, and they were out. We just could not get access to bags. And we had someone who called us and said, ‘I know you put it out there’ – I’m sure it was on Facebook – ‘that you needed bags.’ She’s like, ‘I’ve got them for you. I’ve got hundreds of them for you.’ She went door to door in her neighborhood and collected paper bags! And when we showed up at Meals on Wheels, there were hundreds of bags there.”
Down at the CORA Food Pantry, Melissa Driver Beard and Rebecca Hankins saw needs rapidly increasing too.
“The number of people who had needs changed dramatically,” says Beard. “In the first year, we saw over 800 new folks. And normally, you know, in a given month it might be maybe 10 people.”
“(We saw) multi-generational families moving in together,” adds Hankins. “A grandmother saying, ‘I used to have one other mouth to feed, now I have four other mouths to feed’…When (our) mobile market started up, the line would be probably a mile long.”
“The need exploded because there had been layoffs,” says Beard, “and people were staying home out of choice, because they were afraid of going into work. And some of the (other) folks that we serve really didn’t have that choice. It was either go to work or don’t work at all.”
But Beard and Hankins both say what stands out most is the generosity of the community.
“In the first few weeks,” says Beard,
as word got out (that) the supply chain was so disrupted and people were in need – I mean, we would have cars with people that I’d never seen or heard of before, that would drive by and say, ‘Hey, what do you need today?’ And if it was protein, I would yell out into the parking lot, ‘Protein!’ And you know, any kind of canned meat, peanut butter, they would come back having gone to three or four grocery stores with as much as they could possibly get. The next day it might be money. ‘Hey, some local grocery store has allowed us to buy them out of whatever.’ And one day a lady came and wrote us a check for $10,000.
Very often, and very frequently, and I mean, just in ways that we’ve never seen before, people were coming up with checks of $10, $20, $100, and I mean, just in any way that they could help out. I’ve said it a million times, it’s been a little bit like being in a Dickens novel, ‘the best of times, the worst of times,’ because everybody came together in ways that I just never would have anticipated. We really can’t forget, because we got to see it over and over every day. And it was heartwarming and wonderful – and it enabled us to serve the thousands of people that we served over the past two years.
“You think, oh, a food pantry, it must be a sad place,” says Hankins. “There is way more laughter than tears. And just remembering summer 2020: really hot days, and people sitting in their cars in the heat, and Melissa’s going like, ‘let’s go deliver bottled water to the cars.’ And just having normal conversations with individuals. Just to have the laughter made some of those hard days a lot easier…
“Even now, I sit in my office and one of our staff members, Meredith, has the best laugh, and I can hear it reverberate down the hallway – and I just go, ‘who knew?’ Who knew that you could work in an organization that some people would think would be so sad – and it’s just so wonderful.”
Click here for the entire 15-part series.
Featured image: the team at Carrboro United. (Photo via the Splinter Group.)
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