This Q&A is part of a series highlighting the work of the 2020 Funds to Feed Grantees, community organizations who provided critical food during the COVID-19 pandemic. Answers have been edited for clarity and length.
Jawhar Karim from Karim's Cobbler Shop & Bakery and Fatima Muhuammad Roque from MODABA sat down with LISC to talk about the impact of their Funds to Feed project.
What were your organizations doing before the pandemic? What new opportunities opened up with your Funds to Feed project?
Jawhar Karim: We primarily do charter schools and catering. That’s really our niche. After the pandemic hit, catering dropped significantly. We had to focus on just doing the charter schools, and we had to get more creative and do a grab-and-go platform. We also reached out to other people in the community who needed food. We pivoted, like most businesses. It was kind of rough at first.
Fatima Muhuammad Roque: We always focus on maternal/child health and families of color. We were doing doula support and home-birthing for free. There is a focus on breast-feeding, but more so the information/education component of it. We look at nutrition and feeding from another perspective, feeding the newborn. Funds to Feed allowed us to have more of a focus on breast feeding. In addition to offering fruits and vegetables and some meals to families during the pandemic so that they were eating and eating well, we really encouraged the latching process. We wrapped up breast pumps and some other things into the grant to be able to support moms and babies and not just focus on the birthing parent. We focused on newborns and their nutrition, especially antibodies and the transfer of milk and how that can help to boost your babies during a pandemic.
How did you use the Funds to Feed Grant? What new partnerships formed because of the project? Where did you source your food?
J: Most of our food was through major retail. We also used a couple of farmers markets to try to use of the local. We used major retail in order to get prices where we could sustain the program.
F: We also utilized Mendoza Family Farms on the Salt River reservation. We did utilize Sprouts. We tried to tap into local food sources around here. The challenge with was locating a lot of the local food sources and then having quantity to serve masses. We did our best. Some of the funds were for packaging, PPEs, mileage, storage. Everything surrounding food and distribution.
Did the Funds to Feed Grant and your project support new community leaders? Can you share a specific example of how new leaders came to the forefront?
F: We are considered new leaders in this type of work, even though we’ve been doing our respective work for a while. Being smaller organizations, we usually don’t have that exposure. There are a lot of other organizations who are well-deserving, but they didn’t have the same opportunity. I think we have gained some wisdom about the process to be able to help. We see new leadership in terms of the younger generation, being able to groom them to offer support and to look at food and mutual aid from a greater framework.
Why is this work important to your community? In other words, how will this impact future generations?
J: I didn’t really know the impact until we started doing the work. You see that people really need it and you start to see the impact. The people really appreciate it. That’s something that made me feel good, feel better. It kind of kept me going.
F: In addition to that, I feel like that we have all these traditions around food, whether it’s formal or informal, just coming together for barbecues, or holidays, or birthdays or whatever the case may be. It offered an opportunity for us to come to our community in a time of need. I feel like sometimes we have need, but we’re so used to having need that we don’t frame it in terms of we need food right now. We kind of just go into a survival mode. It’s not easy to open up and say this is what we have, and this is what we don’t have.
The work impacted our community in a lot of different ways. It increased trust. It helped to create communication and more open communication without being suspect. I think it also helped to create a foundation for the future if there’s a need, there’s more of an openness to be able to express that. ‘Oh, Karim’s delivered food or MODABA delivered some food. Maybe we can reach out to them and say Ok you have any resources available or do you know where we can go?’
The Funds to Feed Grant was about seeding a future, not just responding to the urgencies of Covid-19. What do you feel the lasting impact of your project will be? In other words, what does the project look like in the future?
F: Looking in hindsight and also reviewing all the other projects, we were talking about creating a greater place base. The opportunities at Brooks Community School is an example. Because it was pmcea fully functioning school, it has a kitchen. They’re working on making it a commercial kitchen. There is land where we can do more community gardens. How can we use that space and that place base as a hub in the community, developing more of an impactful process around food? We can have greater partnerships because there are already partners on the ground there. And then design like a one-stop shop. That’s what our future is looking like. We’re starting to plant those seeds and plan around using current resources in the community, this process and create those expansions.
We also talked about summer youth work experience programs for teens. We talked about the possibility of being able to hire some of these teens to work around food and pay them to have those experiences.
What is one thing you learned from this past year?
J: Learning patience and taking real good value of your time. Communication -- building with your other team members in the community and seeing what people need. Empathy -- I grew a lot that way.
F: We learned what it’s like to be part of this process on the ground. There was a lot of planning ahead of time to bring this to fruition, to create the opportunity, to make sure our paperwork was put together, to really think about a program, to adjust the needs and write the grant. That was a huge learning curve. You don’t know how a pandemic impacts you personally, your colleagues, your loved ones, your community. We learned that it’s great to have partners to call on, and it’s great to be able to have the resources to help your community.