Photo courtesy of Second Harvest Heartland
Second Harvest staffers working
Second Harvest staffers are working to meet our community’s needs (don’t worry, they wear masks now).
The arc of the pandemic has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Yet the question remains: Where are we on that arc? Millions of people are sick, unemployed, missing loved ones, and hanging on to hope. But we need more than hope—we need action. At times like these, individuals and organizations roll up their sleeves and get down to the business—and struggle—at hand and try to make our communities whole again.
Among those helpers are the nonprofits that serve our state. Over the last few months, many of the 900 nonprofits in Minnesota have implemented creative, innovative strategies to help individuals and communities stay afloat and find some (new) sense of normalcy.
Second Harvest Heartland, a Twin Cities food bank, started seeing “an immediate and exponential need for food” in mid-March as layoffs and furloughs began impacting workers, says Allison O’Toole, the organization’s CEO. Referrals for SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps) roughly quadrupled. Food bank volunteers and staff couldn’t work shifts in close quarters anymore, and food rescue (donated food from grocery stores that is often nearing the sell-by date) took a hit as stores sold out their shelves.
All of these factors impacted Second Harvest Heartland’s decision to hit the reset button. Its core team started repacking food into a kind of free mobile farmers’ market, with 34 delivery drivers dropping off food at sites across the metro daily. People could also drive up to Second Harvest’s main site for contactless food pickups. “It happened so fast,” O’Toole says of the increased need for food—and of the complete overhaul of Second Harvest’s systems. “But this is our sweet spot.”
St. Paul–based Springboard for the Arts has been supporting artists in myriad ways since 1991, but the pandemic caused the organization to quickly hone its focus. In the first month of COVID-19 event cancellations, applications for Springboard’s emergency relief fund skyrocketed from a few per month to more than 1,000. “Our value system was built for this, but our accounting system was not,” says executive director Laura Zabel.
To help meet that need, Springboard rallied and raised more than $500,000, through individual donations and funding from community foundations, to offer grants of up to $500 for creative workers. At press time, it had aided more than 1,000 artists and performers across the state and hopes to reach $1 million in funding to help in the months ahead.
The list goes on. After the YMCA of Minnesota closed its fitness centers in March, it redirected its efforts. Now, the staff provides childcare to essential workers and performs wellness calls to senior citizens to ensure they have supplies and services during the stay-at-home order. Manidoo Ogitigaan, based in Bemidji, connects with Native Americans living on reservations to ensure residents, especially elders, have access to food and support. Organizations like Interfaith Action, which serves homeless and impoverished communities, are working to provide shelter while maintaining social distancing and donate food to those who need it. “Failure was never an option,” says Interfaith Action executive director Randi Ilyse Roth. “Abandoning our community was never an option.”
This is all just the tip of the iceberg. We still don’t know what long-term recovery looks like—but at least we know we have the right people and organizations in our corners. These groups will fight for the well-being of our Cities, our state, our home.
