My name is David Garza, and I am working
an extraordinary amount of hours every day.
I often say that it feels like it's blurs
day because one day just blurs right into the next.
It's been a pretty incessant run since mid March.
A crisis like this, to me, brought up kind of existential moments and questions, and
particularly as the leader of an organization like Henry Street.
And so with 127 years of history, we have
a lot of points of reference, some that I've been around for, I've been around for
20 years, some that are in the blueprint that our founder left for us.
But we're probably one of the few organizations that could say as COVID was
bearing down that this is not our first pandemic.
We were active during the Spanish flu of
1918. But I've been at the Settlement through 9/11, through Hurricane Sandy,
through a blackout, and understand that how quickly you can move matters.
I stay close to the work.
I stay close to the team that does the work.
When you work at an organization like Henry Street that has a profound
responsibility of helping people and taking care of people and supporting
people, and when a crisis like this bears down, your thoughts go to the most
vulnerable, like who's the most vulnerable and what do we need to do to help them?
We started to really make definitive and decisive moves.
There were some moments of deliberation, but at the moment, it becomes visceral,
and, you know, you decide, and if that's against the grain, so be it.
It felt like a game of speed chess, like
just situation, decision, situation, decision.
The need was so basic, vital and primitive, if you will, like, get people
food, get people diapers, get people medicine.
We redirected food from school based programs.
We redirected immediately to the shelter.
We quadrupled the amount that we were getting.
We redeployed nurses that normally work at our primary health clinic.
But because that stopped, we put them at our shelter.
We began to redeploy staff.
The fear of getting sick ourselves was, to me, the most challenging uncertainty.
I can remember just being at the end of
the week and just like, losing it, kind of like right now.
Did I sanitize my hands? Did I wash my hands?
Did I keep my mask on? Did I touch my face?
I often have a tendency to think that I'm
overthinking things and my own kind of defense, and that is I'm not
overthinking and I'm being thoughtful, and I think that what you do is important.
How you do it is equally important.
And so a lot of the decisions
at the Settlement, we're very thoughtful about, we think, are we including people
in the decision that are going to be impacted?
Are we giving people agency?
The Lower East Side is such a resilient
community, you name it, the Lower East Side has lived through it.
It's hopelessness that would really devastate a neighborhood.
And the Lower East Side is never without hope.
And so there's a certain determination and
focus and urgency and also kind of crisis maturity.
Like it's not our first rodeo, in some ways.
It's exposed raw so much of the
structural problems and the disparity whether it's around class, whether it's
around race, whether it's around public health access.
I don't know how it got quantified, but we came out with serve the community, support
the team, keep the doors open. And worry about the financial implications last and
that strategic prioritization has carried us through to today.