NEWFANE-After going strong for over four years, West River Valley Mutual Aid (WRVMA) recently announced in a post on Front Porch Forum that it will close its portal, citing a decline in demand over the past six months.
"It is with great joy that we announce our group's disbandment!" co-leader Juliette Carr wrote on behalf of its stewards.
A pandemic-spawned entity, WRVMA is summed up on its website as "Neighbors Helping Neighbors in Windham County, Vermont: West River Valley & Route 30 Corridor, including Brookline, Jamaica, Newfane, Townshend, Windham, & Nearby."
"We got together in the spring of 2020 during the Covid lockdown, with the mission of 'neighbors helping neighbors' through a crisis unprecedented in our lifetimes," Carr continued.
She praised "neighbors from all walks of life throughout the West River Valley" for their volunteerism and community service to one another.
"You have pulled off amazing things!" Carr wrote.
The group, she said, will maintain the website and email list "so we have basic infrastructure in place for the next crisis."
"But for now we are pleased to officially close up shop, unless and until we are needed again," Carr wrote.
Getting food to the West River Valley
WRVMA started, says organizer Gloria Cristelli, former Newfane Town Clerk, with a proposal she'd made to galvanize neighbors in her town to help one another in the wake of the pandemic's rise.
A need she saw emerge after Tropical Storm Irene intensified during the time of Covid: "People needed help, and so that was the initial setup."
Carr, of South Newfane, a family nurse practitioner at Grace Cottage Hospital, jumped in to embrace Cristelli's vision with action, as did Kate Gehring of Williamsville. Soon teacher Jeryl Julian-Cisse of South Newfane joined as, eventually, did Jamaica's Ilana Newton, a Grace Cottage R.N.
Cristelli recalls the need for "running errands and helping people with some small house projects," but, she adds, "getting food to people seemed to be the biggest need."
Cristelli and Julian-Cisse praise Stephanie Bonin, former director of the Downtown Brattleboro Alliance, with starting Everyone Eats, a statewide effort to get locally produced food for all, delivered in a win-win-win setup, where area restaurants produced meals using a percentage of locally sourced food to be available to all, regardless of need, on a regular basis.
"It was Jeryl's work that got Everyone Eats out into the Valley," Cristelli said.
Julian-Cisse recalls joining the effort in August 2020.
"I went to Brattleboro to volunteer with Everyone Eats there: they were serving only in five towns that did not include Newfane or the West River corridor - nothing up Route 30," she says. "Putney, Dummerston, Brattleboro, Vernon, Guilford were the only towns included then. I kept asking, 'How about the West River Valley?'"
"Then that December it opened up; they had excess funds and meals to deal with before the end of that month, and they said, 'Jeryl, can you get rid of 500 meals?'"
"That was a Tuesday," Julian-Cisse says. She called Cristelli, who mobilized Carr and others, and "within hours we were set up to distribute meals three times a week at first, then twice - and that would endure for 2½ years at a steady rate of 250 meals per week."
Cristelli initiated the actual delivery of meals.
"Volunteers came; we collected a [delivery] list [that included] how many meals were needed, who had what allergies and food restrictions, and so on," she recalls. "Volunteers took bags and drove miles to deliver to homes" of those who could not or would not leave the house during Covid.
"Delivery - that's what made it distinctive," Cristelli says.
Soon, WRVMA became the largest distribution center in the area, with a base of operations at Newfane's Congregational Church which, Cristelli adds, "was just great" availing use, under then-Pastor Rob Hamm, of its kitchen, freezers, and refrigerators.
"Initially we picked up meals in Brattleboro," Julian-Cisse adds. "Then we switched over to using local restaurants - Four Columns, Fat Crow, Newfane Store, and the Dam Diner."
Beyond meals
Carr's FPF post noted that WRVMA, which passed its fourth anniversary, has been the longest running mutual aid society in the state.
"In the last four years, we have done much more than we ever expected, including [responding to] individual requests [as] neighbors helped neighbors with errands, groceries, Foodbank deliveries, home repairs, company, pet care during hospitalization, snow shoveling, visiting with isolated neighbors, and much more," she wrote.
In addition to bringing Everyone Eats to Newfane and distributing thousands of local restaurant meals to hundreds of West River Valley families weekly from 2020 until the program ended in 2023, WRVMA engaged in several other projects - "some short term, others ongoing."
Those projects included support during the statewide flooding in 2023, Afghan refugee support, Share the Bounty stands, high school legislators' school lunch, community resources postcard, accessible Selectboard meetings, welcome-new-neighbors gift bags, a Newfane food insecurity panel, efforts to rename Negro Brook, responses to racist graffiti in Jamaica, Newfane, and Townshend, and work toward a Declaration of Inclusion statewide.
When a need arose in any arena, WRVMA worked to address it, engaging a range of services over time, among them: Townshend Food Shelf, the Newfane church, Restorative Community Practice of Vermont, United Way of Windham County, Grace Cottage Hospital, and Senior Solutions as well as the more than 200 volunteers who made the WRVMA possible through regular hands-on work.
Julian-Cisse extends a big thank-you to them all.
"It's hard to say how much we all depended on the volunteers," she says. "There are too many to name, but you know who you are, caring one-on-one."
Post-pandemic needs
There's really not much good to say about a pandemic, but such clouds often have silver linings.
"Yes, all got healthy food and it became the social hour of the week," Carr says. "Our delivery people were checking in on people" to essentially assess needs.
Julian-Cisse notes that the benefit was mutual: "The most important highlight of the week was visiting so-and-so or checking in - on the spot."
Newton adds that "the number of volunteers involved over the time period with [WRVMA] - in a way, that's a silver lining, because all these people that got involved in small ways or bigger ways were creating community."
Carr is grateful for "all these small interpersonal interactions across generational and political divides. We're all connected geographically - that's an interesting slice."
"We legitimately built something out of nothing. And we met a lot of needs," she says.
"I'm happy to see that our community is in a strong enough place that we don't need this at the moment," Carr says. "We're not stopping because we're burned out; we're stopping because we don't need to do this anymore."
Handing over care
Though the pandemic abated, some Valley residents still need support, especially with transportation and food.
"Whereas Everyone Eats was for everyone, Last Mile targets - and delivers to - those with more acute need," Carr says.
The Last Mile Project, which operates out of the Townshend [Community] Food Shelf, now delivers food at least once a week, and volunteers with that program will check in on families in the process.
"That's part of the program; we're not dropping it; we're handing it over," she says.
Currently, approximately 18 families in West Townshend, Townshend, Newfane, South Newfane, Brookline, and Williamsville are served, a number that fluctuates with needs and requests, Carr says.
"We identified folks who had transportation barriers and were in need of getting food and then we made a list; we coordinated who might need services continued," says Newton. "Their food need didn't end."
As of May 25, the Last Mile Project has taken over the delivery of food weekly from the Townshend Food Shelf, Veggie Van Go, and Newfane Community Dinner to housebound residents unable to access these resources easily on their own.
This program was initially funded through a Community Impact Grant from United Way of Windham County with administrative support from Restorative Community Practice of Vermont.
In her Front Page Forum post, Carr gave a shout-out to Mike Bills ("a dedicated driver from the outset") and Kathy Squires, Last Mile's leader, for their continued commitment.
Of Last Mile, Squires says, "It was a program which accomplished a service that the Townshend Community Food Shelf was never able to provide in the West River Valley towns and that was delivering food directly to people's doors."
"Our food shelf has been serving families here for more than 16 years but it was only at the end of the Everyone Eats deliveries by West River Valley Mutual Aid did we take on providing food to our homebound families in need," she continues.
"Our food shelf stepped up to continue serving simple meals [to some] 40 individual adults and children weekly," Squires says. "On Thursdays, two volunteers pack up bags of groceries for each family, including simple-to-make meals, canned fruits and veggies, cereal, and other staples."
While WRVMA's steering committee members Carr, Newton, Julian-Cisse, and Kate Gehring, of Williamsville, are quick to credit each other, Carr describes Cristelli as "the engine."
"She did a lot in that dark, cold, isolating time when 'don't-gather rules' ruled," Carr says.
By the time WRVMA had run its course, it had become a pretty well-oiled machine, a model to be replicated elsewhere and reinstated here should the need arise and, organizers say, should funding be available.
"Now we have good system in place [that] we can pull together when we need it - we know we have volunteers who would step up," Julian-Cisse adds.
With a sense of relief in her voice, Newton observes that "this sort of action is not possible everywhere."
"It doesn't happen everywhere," she says. "We are fortunate."
This News item by Annie Landenberger was written for The Commons.