My name is Jon Harper and I am the
director of operations and facilities for Abrons Arts Center.
In the before times, at least. Since about a month into COVID, I've also been the
acting director of emergency food response distribution. We shut everything down on
March 12, the same day Broadway shut down, the Met shutdown.
And then I got a call from David Garza, who is our CEO of Henry Street, saying a
food pantry close to us on the Lower East Side
has reached out and asked if we would help them with distribution.
They have food that they can get in, but they don't have enough space or enough
people to get it out to the people that need it.
It means running the pantry out of our main theater.
It's a 1915 proscenium theater that's
really beautiful and has a little bit over 300 seats which are all full of cardboard
boxes right now from the food that we brought in.
The stage is covered in pallets of food.
Stage right actually, now as of two weeks
ago, has a gigantic fridge that we built on it.
And then I brought in a bunch of other
theater technicians actually to be the crew with me.
So this is like a load in for a show.
Also make sure the show goes on because otherwise people will be hungry.
We had to actually develop the system and
we were all figuring out what we were doing and how to do it and how to work
6 feet apart in the space and getting used to wearing a mask all the time.
And one of our people actually was a
costume person beforehand, so she's made us all of these really lovely cloth masks.
It's incredible how deep the need is in the community.
We've had a couple of cases where our social workers were like, hey, there's
actually three families living in this apartment right now because they all lost
their jobs and they had to move out of wherever they were living.
Can you help them out with more food?
And we said, yes, of course we can figure that out.
Henry Street has for a long, long time
been an incredible resource for this community in a thousand different ways.
And I think this is one of those ways.
I remember delivering to one person in the
Vladeck Houses at some point and I was about to head up and the people that got
out of the elevator said, is that going to this apartment?
I said, yeah, how'd you know?
They're like, oh, that's us.
But we're going to the hospital because my mom, it seems like she's having COVID.
So this woman was rolling out on a stretcher.
So I said, how do you want to do it then?
Do you want to run up with me real quick?
Do you want to come by later?
I said, yeah, let's do that.
So I just held on to the bag of food for
them and they came by I think a couple of days later to pick it up.
And my job in that moment was to not add to what was obviously a very stressful
situation for them, but to figure out if there was a way that I could help.
90 something percent of my line will be people either from China or Vietnam.
I say those two because I think that's the
two languages that we need translation with the most.
And luckily, Henry Street has the depth of
staff that we're able to call people to help with that.
There's also been a lot of racism that has
come out and also a lot of things people had to say about homeless people.
They didn't deserve food and things like this.
And it's like, you know what?
These people are really hungry.
Keeping everything going is what drives me at the moment.
It's really amazing to be doing such meaningful work as an arts institution.
We're all in this together and we need to
be a meaningful arts institution and a supportive arts institution.
And an arts institution that's a part of
our community in the best way that we possibly can now.