Your security clearance still hasn’t come through. Folks around the Bronx Family Justice Center are running out of projects to give you in the meantime. So you jump at the chance to help out with the biannual Share the Love Food Drive that the BxFJC puts on in order to restock their food pantry. Clients can take what they need from it if they’re short on food. Because of the high demand, it’s always dwindling, and this drive is their chosen method of stocking up to critical mass. The concept is rather ingenious; bring in canned goods or other nonperishable food items, and get access to a sumptuous spread of baked goods. Sophia, who heads up the food drive with a purple apron and a steady hand, tells you that recently the Center had an awakening. “The lawyers,” she says, referring to those who work in the DA’s office next to the Center, advocating for clients in court, “were telling us that they didn’t have time to go and buy food, and could they just donate money instead? So we have a box. You have a box, I mean. I’m not allowed to touch money, it’s a conflict of interest.”
So you hold your blue donation box under the table and you think on that. You know New York is tireless and you have spent plenty of time waiting in Trader Joe’s lines that seem endless, but is there truly no time to pick up a few cans of soup from a bodega? Logistically, you know that donating money achieves much the same effect; all of it is directly taken over to the grocery store and used to round out the landslide of nonperishables. Still, it seems less personal, less connected to the cause. You have been thinking about donations and money and ethics, ever since A) the Zero Tolerance benefit that you attended as a volunteer for Sanctuary for Families and B) a choice reading about where nonprofits get their resources from. It is something you cannot quite solidify your feelings on.
You hardly have time to think in the moment. You rip a contact at nine-thirty AM and spend the rest of the day in a soft haze of half-blur and quiet pain. One blink of your blurry eyes, though, and there are two tables set up in the lobby of the Center’s office building, visible to all the lawyers and guards and others who come through to get to the elevators. Another blink and there are baked goods, both handmade and store-bought, covering the entire surface area. You sit sandwiched by the table and the food drive’s banner, explaining the process to formally-dressed folks who come by, give you a dollar, and then demur when you offer the baked goods, patting their (usually pretty flat) stomachs and saying that they can’t afford the calories. The fruit and coffee go the fastest. Someone hands you a fifty-dollar bill, and you can’t say you’ve ever held one before. You thank folks ubiquitously as the box in your lap gets heavier and heavier.
And then there are the Center’s clients that come to the table before or after their appointments, and these encounters are so different they won’t stop sticking to the sides of your mind, especially in contrast to those described previously. Many of them riffle around in purses and pockets and pull out a crumpled dollar or two, or just a handful of change. Everyone working at the table with you tacitly agrees on a course of action, and the lot of you fill plate after plate at the client’s suggestion, wrapping things up in foil, handing out stacks of little desserts to bring home to their children or to save to eat later. A second after a young mother moves off towards the elevator with two balanced plates (one of fruit, one of pound cakes and cookies), a man in grey pinstripes carelessly drops you a five and moves off, taking nothing, hardly even looking at the food under his notes. These interactions hang so differently in the air, next to each other in odd discordance.
You have many wonderful conversations with lawyers; you don’t mean to suggest that they care less about the cause. In fact, all of them have dedicated their work to advocating for the very clients that came by the table. Regardless, it makes you think about the different faces of support, and what it looks like for different people. At then end of the day, you have a heavy donation box and a heavy cart full of goods to restock the pantry, a tangible, visible outcome of objective good. You load things into the food pantry and eat a leftover slice of angel food cake, rubbing your blurry eyes, ruining your makeup, and letting these thoughts weigh in your mind.
Sounds like this opportunity to help with the food drive created some space to think about giving in ways that you might not have (silver lining to delayed security clearances). I wonder about your reaction to giving cash. I’ve heard that often from donors, especially around the holidays when they want to give a family what they (the donor) think would be nice for a family to receive. At the shelter, we asked families to make wish lists so we could match what they hoped to have for their families with donors who wanted to help, but there were moments of tension when donors wanted to give teddy bears, fluffy pink sweaters and elaborate building sets, when families wanted gas cards, a winter coat and groceries. In those moments, I often wished they would just give cash, so we could let families make the decisions for themselves – have more agency and control over their choices and lives, if only in what gifts they bought for their kids or what foods ended up on their pantry shelves. It made me think about about where this notion of in-kind giving came from–why does it “feel” better to some?
Agreed–I thought about this too, but the medium of a food drive seemed relatively different from that of something like a wish-list item. One could say, though, that giving money allows the BxFJC staff to get a variety of things that their clients need the most, instead of just leaving it up to disparate others. Something is lost in either choice of how to give.