An Interview The Two Georgias
Initiative Participants: Zoe Myers
and Jennifer Lovett
Cook County Family Connection
Jennifer and Zoe, how are you both doing in the
midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, and how is your
team doing?
ZM: We are doing well - we're all very tired at this
point, because the food distribution projects that we
have taken on have been an awful lot of hard work.
But we've had a remarkable team of partners and
volunteers that have hung in there with us throughout
this process, and it takes a strong team to make it
through a crisis.
What do you think has been the biggest operational
change at Cook County Family Connection over the
past few months?
ZM; We closed our offices like most folks did back
toward the end of March, and paused our
collaborative meetings where we have between 40
and 45 people at every meeting - we have a really
strong, diverse partnership. But now instead of
working with our partners in large group meetings, we
are working with partners individually and in small
groups through a variety of processes. We've been
using a lot of social media, email blasts, personal
phone calls, conference calls and Zoom meetings, just
the same as everyone else is doing. Some of our work
is even done through sidewalk and driveway
discussions where we drive to a partner’s home and
meet outside for that face-to-face interaction from a
safe distance. We’ve been trying to find new ways of
keeping the partnership pulled together and folks
included in what we're doing. We've been really
impressed with the success of our Facebook page. We
had used that for quite a while, as a means to share
what we are doing and to share resources and
connections. Typically we had been having a
readership of about 3,500 people per month on our
Facebook page, but during the pandemic that number
has jumped to around 9,000 readers a month. We
have been excited by that because it's evolved into a
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great way to share out links to other services and to
keep people engaged in what we're doing.
Your team has been doing a lot of food distribution
work during the pandemic - can you tell us more about
that?
ZM: The SOGA Charitable Fund contacted us within
the first week of the shutdown and wanted to know if
they gave us a very generous donation, if we would be
willing to coordinate emergency food work. And we
said, absolutely, we’d be honored to take it on. So
they gave us an amazing donation to get that started
and we began with free food tables-- five different
locations where we put a table outside the door of
different businesses in different parts of the
community and kept those tables stocked so that the
general public could walk up and take whatever they
needed off of the tables.
Then we started doing our Manna Monday food drops
and have done one of those every Monday morning
since the first week of April, and we have at least 150
households that drive through every Monday
morning. So our team members go out and pick up
fresh produce, and we purchase canned foods
through Second Harvest, and we buy from bakeries in
this area. We also have a large hog farm that's located
in a neighboring county that started making donations
of pork products to us. We distributed over 100,000
pounds of food to several hundred families thanks to
generous donations from SOGA Charitable Fund and
the Community Foundation of South Georgia.
We’re also still providing food for about 80 senior
citizens who right now are shut-in and home bound.
We have buses through a partnership with South
Georgia Area Aging Council who provide the buses
and the drivers. We load all of the produce and
canned goods on the buses, then they deliver out to
those 80 senior citizens. We were recently contacted