Flatbush Senior Housing Mutual Aid: Winter Fundraiser

Since April, a small group of community members have been delivering groceries, PPE, and safety information to tenants in Flatbush. As the weather gets colder and COVID-19 cases surge we need YOUR help to sustain deliveries while adjusting our operations to keep everyone safe.

Since COVID-19 hit NYC in March we have been providing groceries and PPE to residents every week. We are now supporting 100+ elder households with food, distributing groceries to 26 residents a week on a rotating schedule.

We hope to keep delivering high quality, healthful groceries and PPE to this at risk population until the end of the pandemic. Help us stop preventable deaths!

To keep everyone safe we want to maximize our distribution capabilities:

Rather than continuing our 26-residents-a-week cycle we will deliver to all 103 once a month. 

We will continue to source our PPE from Fou Gallery, which uses their proceeds to purchase PPE for the local community, and our groceries from Brooklyn Packers, a worker-owned, Black led food-distribution cooperative based in Brownsville. 

Additionally, Brooklyn Packers will start delivering directly and will provide us with distribution support so we can drop boxes off door-to-door as efficiently as possible. 

In total: groceries, PPE, and deliveries, will cost roughly $3300 a month. 

The residents are elderly and low-income, people of color, and immigrants, increasing the likelihood of their dying from COVID.

Although the PPE and food we provide can only begin to address the hardship our elders face, it undoubtedly continues to be a necessary project, especially in the face of a tidal wave of COVID-19 infections this winter.