Silver Dining Playbook: Keeping Family Meals Alive During the Pandemic

In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, groups of women around the world have started mutual aid initiatives such as coordinating volunteers to help immuno-compromised residents get groceries and other essential goods and raising money for emergency aid. Women have a long history organizing mutual aid ventures in response to social problems and crises. Though operating to scale can be difficult because it requires a lot of volunteers and coordination, women-initiated groups in the United States and United Kingdom provide aid and services to meet needs not being met by governments and elected officials.

Mutual aid programs run by Black women have filled critical gaps in public assistance during the pandemic by feeding hundreds or thousands of people in multiple Southern cities. From Durham's Mustard Seed Project to St. Louis' Potbangerz to others, these community-based care programs center their aid on prepared meals, but they often add other donated goods for people in need: personal protective equipment, groceries, and household and baby items. In some cases, the nonprofits' organizers have formed intercity friendships and alliances that help spread their tactics.

Pascua Yaqui and Tohono O’odham tribal leaders took quick action to support members during the Covid-19 pandemic. They instituted a curfew, required face masks, and ensured that tribal members had sufficient food and supplies. The Pascua Yaqui’s information technology team created an app for residents to easily provide household information and request food, household goods and cleaning supplies. Federal rescue money allocated to the tribes has not arrived, so the tribes created their own systems of caring for their tribal members by securing essential goods and distributing them to those in need.

New and existing community response and mutual aid networks, such as the Maine Coronavirus Community Assistance Facebook page, serve as stopgap measures so people struggling with the economic costs of the Covid-19 pandemic can get more immediate aid than from state bureaucracies. The crowd-sourced format also allows for more targeted aid, like when one of Maine’s 20,000 members received firewood, food, and even over-the-counter medication. The Maryland page has marked over 200 posts as having received assistance. To run smoothly, the pages need volunteer moderators to fact-check and maintain civility.

Two women living on the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming helped to provide mutual aid when they saw many families in the area facing difficulties during the onset of the pandemic. The pair set up a fundraising page and a Google form to raise funds and track peoples' needs and started distributing goods like groceries, diapers, and hand sanitizers to over 300 families on the reservation.

A group of volunteers came together to feed young people, mostly immigrants, living on the streets. Around 40 residents of Egia began cooking hot meals to serve to people in a local community square. Two volunteers are responsible for cooking each day and many more help distribute the food. Local businesses, like a bakery, donate food and help raise funds to sustain the program, which is largely paid for by the residents themselves. The program started small, with just a few residents bringing hot meals to the square to feed a few people, and has since scaled up.

A no-cost meal program allows high-poverty schools to offer all enrolled students free lunch, which consequently addresses child nutrition problems and meal debt. The program, however, has pivoted and expanded during the coronavirus pandemic to ensure that schools can still act as a food distribution hub.

For several years, the Urban Growers Collective in Illinois has been helping to bring and distribute healthy food to underresourced communities throughout Chicago by operating eight urban farms, but efforts have increased during the COVID-19 pandemic. In just over six months, the organization has "delivered nearly one million pounds of produce to more than 25 partner organizations across the city."

During the COVID-19 pandemic, organizations and government agencies are connecting farmers with people in need by making fruits and vegetables more affordable or even free. For example, Bueno Para Todos, a small farm in New Mexico, has planted new fruit trees alongside a vegetable garden, and allows people to pick what they want and pay how they can, either with money or by helping on the farm. Scaling these efforts can be difficult if communities want to encourage growing more local food.

Despite the lockdown and loss of tourism income due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the village of Kohonoma in India has been able to maintain a high level of food security for its people. Because of previous legal changes and grant money, villagers were able to change their lifestyle to support the community’s tourism industry and preserve its sustainable agriculture practices. Village leaders are hopeful that their conservation and sustainable development efforts will continue post-pandemic and will encourage other communities to do the same.