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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