We want to THANK Congressman McGovern for his tireless work around access to meals for children. The announcement from the USDA extending Free Meals for Kids Through December 31, 2020 is life-saving. Truly.

This waiver allows us to serve 3 meals a day; instead of 2.

This waiver allows us to serve meals to children without their parents needing to BRING them to a meal site (and provide student IDs).

This waiver allows us to provide meals on Fridays to cover the weekend meals.

And most importantly, this waiver allows for us to continue to deliver meals door to door to families that cannot get to a meal site. Since early May the YMCA has been collecting names and addresses of families (over 1000) and delivering meals 7 days a weeks to their homes. In 17 weeks we’ve delivered  more than 149,000 meals!

Because of you, and the work you do for your community, we will be able to continue this program and deliver meals during the Fall while children are 100% virtual learning. Thank you, from the heart of the Commonwealth, we couldn’t do this work without you.

Our Food Program work is highlighted here:

By Scott O’Connell
Telegram & Gazette

WORCESTER – Given the green light by the state last week, local organizations are preparing to offer school-day child care to working parents in the city as the school system embarks on a fully remote model this fall.

Last week, Gov. Charlie Baker announced his administration would allow licensed child care programs to begin taking care of school-age students during school hours. Local parent-organized groups will also be able to offer school-day child care.

The moves are aimed at addressing the lingering question of how working families can care for their children at home with schools closed through the fall.

“A lot of our kids have nowhere else to go,” said Liz Hamilton, executive director of the Boys & Girls Club in Worcester, one of several organizations planning to provide school-hours child care this fall. “I’m worried about kids being home alone, because their parents have no choice but to go to work. I feel we have to be there for our kids.”

The logistical and financial obstacles of mobilizing large-scale child care services will be not be easy for some of those centers, especially on relatively short notice. The Worcester public schools, for example, first floated the idea of starting the school year remotely in early August.

Just finding space is proving to be a challenge for the YWCA of Central Massachusetts, which had to shut down its after-school programs at Worcester’s Roosevelt School and Wawecus Road School this March when the district closed all schools because of the pandemic.

“We’re looking for a location right now,” said the organization’s director of children’s services, Darlene Belliveau. She acknowledged that the long list of safety requirements for such an operation, as well as the need to hire more staff, will make it difficult for the YWCA to have a site up and running by the start of Worcester’s school year on Sept. 15. “I feel like we’re in this big jigsaw puzzle, and we’re just trying to make the pieces fit.”

Belliveau pointed out that the YWCA’s efforts didn’t just begin with the governor’s announcement last week, either. The organization began its search right after the city schools decided last month to begin the school year remotely.

While local school officials don’t know exactly how many families could require child care this fall, “it appears there’s a big need” based on anecdotal evidence, said Worcester Superintendent Maureen Binienda.

“We only know (they need it) if they’ve contacted the schools directly,” she said, adding that the district is referring families to the organizations that are setting up school-day child care.

Some already have waiting lists, Binienda said. That’s the case at the YMCA of Central Massachusetts, which plans to offer school-hours care to around 500 children at multiple locations in the region this fall, according to Pam Suprenant, the Y’s youth development director.

The plan, she said, is to offer a safe, quiet space for students to do their remote work during the school day, as well as after-school activities in the afternoon. The YMCA sites will also provide free meals to students.

But Suprenant has concerns about how the program will handle those responsibilities, considering the potential technical problems posed by the virtual schoolwork, as well as the individualized support students will likely need with their classes.

Providers are beginning discussions with the Worcester schools to at least solve some of those issues.

“There is great two-way communication – especially at the local school level, connecting with principals and teachers,” Suprenant said, adding that the school district has offered training for YMCA staff on the remote learning Worcester will be doing.

Another big question facing centers is how they’ll be able to afford an unprecedented ramp-up in services while also meeting the financial needs of Worcester families. The YMCA’s program, for instance, is charging $225 a week for 50 hours of care, but aims to provide assistance to families who can’t afford that (care for other children may be eligible to be subsidized by the state).

The Boys & Girls Club, meanwhile, plans to offer free care to 8- through 14-year-olds in its 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. school-day program, recognizing that “most of our kids are at or below the poverty level,” Hamilton said.

It’s also unknown just how long those organizations will need to be available for school-hours care, since the Worcester schools are not guaranteed to begin in-person classes after the first quarter. Even if they do, most students will still need care for most days of the week.

“We’ll do everything it takes” to continue offering the service, Hamilton said. “Our plan is to continue to make sure we have the resources to be there for our kids.”

“This is uncharted territory,” Suprenant said. “We’re figuring this out as we go, and we’ll continue to innovate and problem-solve.”

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Helping Hands Come Together for Community Support

How helping hands came together in Worcester during pandemic

By Elaine Thompson
Telegram & Gazette Staff

WORCESTER – At the beginning of March, when people were clearing store shelves of food, cleaning supplies and toilet paper, Barbara Fields and Tim Garvin were already working on a way to address the great humanitarian crisis that was quickly brewing throughout Worcester County and beyond.

Fields, president and CEO of the Greater Worcester Community Foundation, and Garvin, president and CEO of United Way of Central Massachusetts, people on their executive boards, and partner nonprofits were closely following the unfolding ominous news accounts about what would soon become the greatest health and economic threat in the country in more than a century.

Between the announcement of the state’s first presumptive positive case of COVID-19 on March 2, and Gov. Charlie Baker’s decision to close nonessential businesses on March 23 to suppress the spread of the deadly virus, leaders of the two venerable service organizations were well on their way to reaching out to hundreds of nonprofit partners and dependable veteran donors about raising money to provide assistance to the thousands of vulnerable people in the county who would be greatly impacted.

“We were talking to our partners. We were reading the stories and we could see the shutdown was going to have a widespread impact. This was not some small contained thing,” Fields recounted last week. “We knew we needed to stand up and lead in the effort to help our community. We were all in the same storm, but not all in the same boat. There was a disparate impact in our community.”

Zoom, a videoconference platform that neither Garvin nor Fields had used before, quickly became a way to safely hold meetings.

“On Sunday, March 15, we took a historic vote to take 1% from our endowment to launch the Worcester Together: Central Mass COVID-19 Fund,” Fields said, about the campaign, commonly referred to as the Worcester Together Fund. The fund is not affiliated with the communitywide effort called Worcester Together that helped Puerto Ricans who moved to Worcester in 2017 after the island was devastated by Hurricane Maria.

With nearly $500,000 as the base, the 45-year-old GWCF was able to begin raising money quickly from donors.

Meanwhile, Garvin notified his board on March 11 that they would have to postpone the opening night of the long-planned exhibit celebrating the organization’s 100th anniversary that was to be held at the Worcester Historical Museum on March 17 until the risk of the novel coronavirus had passed.

He discussed the crisis with Edward H. White Jr., the UWCM board chair-elect for July 1, 2022, and executive director of the National Grid Foundation. The next day AiVi Nguyen, United Way’s president at the time and a partner at law firm Bowditch & Dewey, sent Garvin an email saying with the closing of the Worcester Senior Center and the Worcester public schools because of the unprecedented crisis, she was worried that students and seniors who relied on those places for meals would go without food.

Early the next morning, Garvin emailed board members that he was setting up a fund to respond to the pandemic. He named it “We Care Fund,” similar to “Suppose Nobody Cared?”, the first fund-raising campaign conducted by the local United Way, after it was established in 1920. Garvin then went on the “Talk of the Commonwealth” radio program to inform the public.

Two days later the fund was approaching $100,000. Donations accelerated after a $1 million contribution from the George I. Alden Trust, to be split between the two charitable organizations.

Garvin and Fields said it quickly became apparent that more money could be raised and the community would benefit exponentially if the two organizations worked together. Before the end of March, an agreement was signed and the Worcester Together Fund took off, raising more than $10 million in five months.

“I don’t know any community foundation nor local United Way that has worked together in a way we have in the last five months,” Garvin said. “Worcester Together is the epitome of collaboration and compassion put into action.”

About two weeks into the partnership, it became apparent that something extraordinary was happening, Garvin noted.

“Because there were so many people all linked and working together like a beautiful tapestry, we said we have to record what’s happening for posterity and value,” he said. The Worcester Together leaders connected with two students at the College of the Holy Cross who recorded all the response team’s phone calls, and interviews that the students conducted. Joseph Ertle, a senior majoring in English and philosophy, and William Fitzpatrick, a 2020 graduate who majored in economics, are writing a narrative on how a community can coordinate in a communitywide pandemic. Garvin said the case study will be a guide for any future emergencies. It will also be given to the Worcester Historical Museum.

Fields, Garvin and City Manager Edward M. Augustus, Jr. talked every morning at 8, seven days a week initially, then down to five days a week.

To address the different needs at different points during the emergency, an 11-member governance committee – consisting mostly of board members from the two organizations – designed three distinct phases for distributing the funds: Rapid Response, Recovery and Reimagine. The two organizations were already familiar with the vast majority of the applicants, their financial ability and capacity to respond during a crisis.

The first phase, Response, offered quick financial support to nonprofits to help the most vulnerable with emergency needs including food, health, housing and emergency child care for first responders. Worcester Together raised $2,398,208 plus $3.9 million from the Massachusetts COVID-19 Relief Fund established by Lauren Baker, the governor’s wife.

Augustus, who was on vacation last week, provided decision makers with real-time information on areas of need throughout the city.

Peter Dunn, the city’s chief development officer, said while funds were being raised, others were discussing what they were seeing happening in the community.

“I think most importantly a lot of the nonprofit organizations provided programs and resources for gaps that existed,” Dunn said.

The second phase, Recovery, provided $2,348,000 in grants ranging from $10,000 to $100,000 to help sustain nonprofits for two to four months.

About 200 nonprofits received grants in the first two phases. The fund’s balance of $1.5 million will be used for the third phase, Reimagine, which will not be launched until the fall, to allow organizations a chance to think creatively about how they will operate as they go into 2021.

The initial $8.8 million went to support homeless shelters, prevention of evictions, food pantries and feeding programs, emergency child care for frontline workers, education supports, immigrants and refugee special services, community education, expanded client services during the crisis, and the purchase of personal protection equipment and cleaning supplies.

An example of how the fund has helped the community was the partnering with the Worcester Community Action Council to purchase 4,000 meals from Main South restaurants that were delivered to families with someone who was COVID-19 positive.

In another partnership, Worcester Together helped in the $500,000 purchase of 5,000 WiFi hotspots so thousands of children without internet access at home could do online learning after the schools shut down. While the grants went to service organizations, some restaurant owners and other businesses also benefited.

“I think we really spanned the needs of the community from access to online learning to food, to health, to opportunities to remain in their homes,” Fields said of the successful collaboration.

Two of the largest grant recipients were the YMCA of Central Massachusetts ($477,463) and the Boys and Girls Club of Worcester ($401,000), which serve thousands of children, a critical focus of the relief fund.

After the governor’s state of emergency shut down many of their regular services, the two organizations, like other community service providers, pivoted to address the needs of families and youths impacted by the coronavirus. The YMCA and the Boys and Girls Club used much of their grants for much-needed free emergency child care for first responders. They also helped get free food to children and their families, and provided educational and youth development and healthy living programs virtually, among other services.

David Connell, president and CEO of the YMCA, said without the Worcester Together funding, the 156-year-old organization would have been able to serve some vulnerable populations in the community, but not as many and not to the magnitude that it did.

The organization lost a significant amount of revenue from membership and programs fees when it closed during the state of emergency. Those fees usually represent about $16 million, or 43% of the $24 million annual operating budget. There was a projected $2.1 million revenue loss at at the reopening on July 6. Some members generously donated their fees.

When schools shut down, the YMCA served as a hub for families of schoolchildren to pick up free meals. The organization now is using its vans to deliver food to recipients’ homes.

“We are thankful for what the Greater Worcester Foundation and the United Way did. It was very instrumental in helping us in a difficult time,” Connell said. “We look forward to the next steps because the need is still there.”

The Boys and Girls Club used grant money to provide free food, laptops and tablets and other school and art supplies, homework help through Google Classroom, online literacy games for youths, as well as videos and therapeutic Zoom meetings to support mental and emotional health.

“If it weren’t for the … grants, we might have had to furlough staff, which would have meant curtailing our services to the community, or even close our doors altogether for the duration of the emergency,” said Liz Hamilton, executive director of the Boys & Girls Club.

Fields said if donors had not stepped up, the community would be in tough shape today. “Many more people would be out of their homes, without food and without access to health care,” she said.

Warner S. Fletcher, a director and lawyer at Fletcher Tilton law firm and chair of the Alden Trust which contributed $1 million, said the trustees gave the funds to the Greater Worcester Community Foundation and the United Way because they trusted them to determine who the recipients should be. The trustees also hoped the sizeable donation would inspire others to donate, particularly other trusts and foundations created by people who had prospered in Worcester. Several did, including the Fletcher Family Trust.

“All the trustees and people who contributed said we trust the Worcester Together fund people to spend the funds we might donate wisely,” Fletcher said. “As a longtime Worcester resident, I have never been prouder of the way the community has responded to a community-wide crisis such as the COVID pandemic. The awful thing is it’s going to be with us longer than anyone initially thought.”

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