Community Well-Being: Feeding Queens

[music]

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Now we continue our series 10 Heroes of Community Well-being in The Year 2020. We're bringing on 10 individuals or leaders of community groups who may not get covered in the news very much but who have helped make life livable in this year of so much grief and so much need and so much thirsting for justice and equality.

These are not the 10 heroes of community well-being this year, we should say. There are tens of thousands just in our listening area to be sure. These are 10 who've been brought to our attention by colleagues and sources and friends and you on the phones and so we are telling 10 community well-being stories for the end of 2020 as representative of how all kinds of people have stepped up this year under these extreme conditions.

We will also have a live Zoom event on Wednesday night next week, December 9th to honor three champions of community well-being that the station is generously naming the Lehrer Prize for Community Well-being. You can make a free reservation if you want to attend this event on Zoom at wnyc.org/lehrerprize. Right now we'll meet one of the three finalists for the Lehrer Prize for Community Well-being for this year, the director of La Jornada New York. La Jornada runs the largest food pantry in Flushing and serve surrounding neighborhoods too so hard hit by the coronavirus and with so many undocumented New Yorkers unable to access direct government assistance.

I'm joined now by Pedro Rodriguez, director of La Jornada. Pedro, thanks so much for coming on today, and thank you for your work. Welcome to WNYC.

Pedro Rodriguez: Good morning and thank you very much for having me. It's an honor to be here and also be considered for what we do. We are a voluntary organization we're just the volunteers of La Jornada who are the heroes of the pandemic.

Brian: The phrase La Jornada, that's the journey, right?

Pedro: Yes. It generally means they walk-- That's what we have, we have a journey. That's what people are doing. A journey is to one day be able to close La Jornada because there is no need because there will be no more hunger in New York City

Brian: That's the ultimate goal of anybody working in service work, to put yourself out of business because your need isn't needed anymore. I understand that part of your journey was serving 1,000 families a week last year, then in March when you opened new facilities and the pandemic began, you had to start serving 4,000 families a week. How did you expand?

Pedro: We expand by the help of our suppliers, by the help of our volunteers. We all grow up very quickly. We learn new things every day and our volunteers learn things every day. Our suppliers came back and they started to supply those incredible quantities of food that we weren't expecting before. We're very prepared because this is what we have to do, it's not easy. It comes to the point where you start doing a job and then increases, it continues and you continue to grow with that job.

That's what happened to every volunteer here in La Jornada. For example, in March all the way through now, they have grown up and they step up to the job that they have to do. I'm very proud of every one of them. Go ahead.

Brian: I saw an interview you did where you described what was happening with food insecurity in the Queens neighborhoods you serve as a tsunami, just overwhelming need. Where are you getting all the food?

Pedro: We're getting the food right now from Food Bank of New York City which is one of the heroes of the pandemic. City Harvest, another hero. United Way, another hero. This is our three main suppliers and they have to step up too, they have to grow up from serving a community of 1,000 to right now, last week we serve 10,750 families.

Brian: Wow. I see you're located in-

Pedro: We're located in Flushing but we are like a hub. We serve communities from Woodside all the way to the Little Neck. That is the way we concentrate our work and that's the community that we are providing for food every day for that community. All the way from Woodside to Little Neck which is the Northern part of Queens.

Brian: Almost the entire length of Northern Queens. Is it slowing down at all, the tsunami, or is it getting worse?

Pedro: No, it's like today, you see, today it's pouring rain and we have a line outside our facility. Today this line is for seniors, people who are 50 years old. I think we probably have about right now like between 500 and 700 seniors standing in the rain to get some food. This is the third day of [unintelligible 00:05:46] These people have worked all their lives. [crosstalk]

These people have worked all their lives and now they're standing in line waiting for food. These are seniors, these people are like 50 years old and it's sad but that is the tsunami, the tsunami has not yet stopped. We are still under the water and I don't think we're going to be out of the water very soon because people come to me and say, "Pedro, I'm working only two days a week. They only call me to work seven hours." People are coming back to work but they are not coming back to work, they're coming back to the part-time jobs, people that use to have full-time jobs.

Then most of the people that are in the communities are peoples that would work in restaurants and places like that. Most of them are closed or has room whereby one-quarter of the people that used to work in those places. We are talking about a community of millions right now in Queens that are unemployed or underemployed or underpaid. It's really [unintelligible 00:07:10] continue to be really, really difficult.

We're going to be under water probably for more than a few months. We're planning till next year we'll be in this condition also. I really did not like the numbers that I was hearing about, people that are going to need food in the richest city in the world, in the richest country in the world, people that are hungry is [unintelligible 00:07:41]. We will step up and we'll continue to fight and we will not stop until every person that we know that is hungry will have food [unintelligible 00:07:50]

Brian: My guest is Pedro Rodriguez, director of La Jornada, the largest food pantry in Flushing, Queens, but as he was just describing, serving Northern Queens communities from Woodside all the way to Little Neck which is at the Nassau County Line. Pedro, do you have the volunteers that you need or do you want people to contact you to volunteer?

Pedro: No. People should contact us for volunteers but right now we serve all this community with a pool of 400 volunteers which I'm very proud of. A lot of them are very young people, the millennials that last year we were talking about that they will not able to do anything, that they will not be of service in life, that they will not be able to accomplish anything because they don't care, they have their own lives. This is the millennials that fed New York because you remember at the beginning of the year, every senior citizen was asked to stay home and hide under the bed, that's what happened to my volunteers.

Most of volunteers in food pantries were seniors citizens.  I lost them all in March when the mayor closed the city and said all people over 50 years should stay home and be careful. All my volunteers they stay home, and who come here and step up to the fight was the millennials, all these young people during the 20s and 30s, mothers and children they were just coming.

Around that time there was so much fear which is still is both from the pandemic and that we were all protecting ourselves and fighting together and as of right now nobody in our food pantry got sick from the virus which means that the masks and washing hands and everything that we're doing is correct. We've been protecting ourselves correctly. We were so amazed by that.

Brian: All those volunteers and all those clients and no coronavirus cases. That's so great. It sounds like it must give you hope for the future that when you lost so many senior citizen volunteers who are so often the volunteer core in a lot of agencies that so many millennials stepped up, yes?

Pedro: It's two things that we saw. Is that the young people that we thought there was no way they were going to do this-- Remember, I don't know how they go survive in this world the way they are? These people, they step up loading and unloading trucks. These young ladies were running phone banks, answering phones because the phones were won't stop ringing.

Just incredible, just doing it, they're still doing it. A lot of them still coming on Saturday and [inaudible 00:10:55] Even though they guys gone back to work, a lot of them are still being show up here after hours, and they help us. They give incredible help. Gives me hope for the future.

Brian: I have read, Pedro, that even in the midst of this tsunami of increased need, that you lost some federal funding, is that right?

Pedro: Yes, the federal government needs to have a person with a heart. I need people running the departments that would have a heart because right now they don't. Right now they're playing games with a program called, From The Farm To The Home, which is an incredible, well-designed program, which had a rich [unintelligible 00:11:44] design program that is seeing thousands of people and they play games.

They making it sure that every two months, they have to apply again to be able to do their jobs. Right now, we're running with half the funding, half the food that we have normally because they are not delivering food. They're giving the funding to companies--

Brian: Let me end this way. I want to jump in because-

Pedro: I'm sorry, go ahead.

Brian: -we only have a minute left and I want you to have an opportunity to say how people can get in touch if they want to make a donation to La Jornada, or if they want to volunteer, or if they need food.

Pedro: If they need food, they just have to come in and call us at this number. The number is-- Let me be 100%.

Brian: Is it 917?

Pedro: No, 300-7068

Brian: I'm sorry, say it again. It broke up a little bit. Say the number again.

Pedro: I'm sorry. The number is 929-300-7068, that's the number in case you need food in Queens. Now, if they want to volunteer and they would like to help us financially, they can go to our website, which is lajorndany.org or our Facebook page--

Brian: Yes, La Jornada on Facebook or lajornadany.org on the web. Again, if you need food, the number that he just gave was 929-300-7068, if you're in that stretch of Northern Queens from Woodside to Little Neck. Pedro, thanks, I'll talk to you again at the event next Wednesday. Thank you so much for coming on.

Pedro: Thank you, sir. Thank you so much for the opportunity and thank you to New Yorkers for being so helpful.

Brian: Thank you one more time.

 

Copyright © 2020 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.