Written by Emmy Anderson, Cooperative Business Developer
With great concern for our staff as the COVID pandemic intensified, CDI’s Executive Director, Noemi Giszpenc, took a strong stance early on by promoting a culture of safety in our organization and urging staff to shift training and visits online. A month after Maine became the 43rd state to have a positive COVID-19 case, it was evident that things were getting worse in the northeast. With health and safety as our utmost priority, our Cooperative Business Services team started exploring the possibility of donating Personal Protection Equipment to some of our clients in food processing, production, and retail.
What started as a small effort, sprouting out of concern for some of our immigrant and POC-led co-ops, morphed into a larger scale project allowing us to donate gloves, hand sanitizer, liquid hand soap, and both reusable and disposable masks to 16 client organizations located in Maine and Massachusetts. We have joined forces with co-ops and other organizations across the northeast to get these products where they are needed. Despite logistical barriers and supply shortages we have collaborated wildly with mostly local organizations such as Fare Share Co-op in Norway, Maine, American Roots in Westbrook, Maine, and River Valley Co-op in Northampton, Massachusetts.
The USDA supports us in this effort by approving the reallocation of funds, giving us the ability to continue to support our clients’ needs. As the demand for PPE products will persist for an uncertain amount of time, we will continue to work with our clients to fill their needs. This pandemic has been hard for many of us, but there is a spark of hope and resilience in the people we meet, a sense of opportunity for change. Our clients are hard-working, innovative people injecting strength into collaboration networks, displaying a heartwarming drive to move forward as inclusive and resilient organizations.
As we find strength and resilience in ourselves and others, we collectively work to elevate clients, partners and friends; enabling them to better serve and elevate the communities in which they live and work. Thank you clients, collaborators, and partners for creating this inclusive network of care, support, and opportunity.
If you can, please consider buying PPE equipment from Black-owned cooperatives or buy them in bulk to support manufacturers of color. Additional details can be found here.