Survival Center Builds Community

[The following appeared in the Amherst Bulletin on October 5, 2007]

I sat down to lunch one day at the Amherst Survival Center with a woman named Marie (not her real name) and we started to chat. She explained to me that she and her children had found an apartment after several months of sleeping on relatives' couches. She had been coming to the Survival Center to find the kinds of things that make a house feel more like a home, one of which was a coffeemaker.

We work with many women in similar circumstances, but Marie's story had an interesting twist. At first, she found no coffeemaker, but did manage to get a carafe. On her next visit, she located the base of a coffee maker, but it lacked a cone. A couple of visits later she found the cone, and with some ingenuity combined the individual pieces into a working coffee maker. With coffee from our pantry and paper towels as filters, Marie could begin her days like many of us, with a warm cup of java in her own apartment.

There are many things that one might take from this story (including bewilderment about why anyone would donate just a piece of an appliance to the Survival Center), but Marie took her makeshift coffee maker as a metaphor for her own life. A single working mother of three young children, she explained to me her strategy for survival. It involved putting together life's necessities from a wide variety of unconnected sources: a box of canned food from our place, clothing from the Salvation Army in Hadley, school supplies in the fall from a church in Springfield, and so on. This way of living is about as far from today's super-efficient Internet consumerism as you can get, yet Marie has the strength to be able to pull it all together.

Part of the reason I find the parable of Marie's coffee maker so striking is that, reflecting now on my first six months as director of the Amherst Survival Center, it occurs to me that the metaphor is as apt for the Center itself as it is for the way Marie provides for her family. Like Marie, the Survival Center each year provides food, clothing and community for about 3,000 households in more than ten towns - our extended family, as one volunteer describes it. The piecemeal connections that make this work are complex and astonishing.

Take our fresh food supplies, for example. Food for lunch and distribution is generously donated by sources as diverse as Trader Joe's, Whole Foods, Atkins Farms, Panera, Maple Farms, the Food Bank Farm, Henion Bakery, Antonio's Pizza, Simple Gifts Farm, Riverland Farm and many other local small farmers, merchants, and church groups supplemented by supplies from the Food Bank of Western Mass. Imagine yourself in our cook's shoes, finding out what ingredients will be available to prepare a hot lunch for 60 only when the food rolls down the ramp into the kitchen just a couple of hours before mealtime. Yet every day, she and her revolving crew of volunteers produce a lunch equal to any holiday feast, hot and on the table at noon without fail.

The diversity of our volunteers and consumers reflects another kind of piecing together that happens at the Center. During a typical day in our Free Store, the team of volunteers includes women from places as far-flung as Moldavia, Iran, Ghana, China, and Venezuela. A veterans group, some UMass lacrosse players, and several community service workers from the District Court team up to transport donated furniture to our storage trailers. In the emergency food pantry, a high school student lifts boxes laden with cans, a homeless man assists consumers in making their choices, a mother and her young daughter stock shelves, and a retired engineer breaks down cardboard cartons for recycling. In the kitchen, a local property owner, a farmer, a woman who recently lost her home and two college kids prepare lunch with the cook. At any lunchtime table, you find all of them breaking bread together, people who would otherwise never meet.

As improvised as Marie's coffee maker, this is true community, and it works.

[http://www.amherstbulletin.com/story/id/61334/]