This Q&A is part of a series highlighting the work of the 2020 Funds to Feed Grantees, community organizations who provided critical food during the COVID-19 pandemic. Answers have been edited for clarity and length.
Salina Imam and Zeenat Hasan from ICNA Relief Programs sat down with LISC to talk about the impact of their Funds to Feed project.
What was your organization doing before the pandemic? What new opportunities opened up due to your Funds to Feed project?
Selina Imam: Before the pandemic, we were doing the food distribution. Mainly we're just distributing non-perishable stuff and during the pandemic there's the opportunity to awarded with the USDA food boxes, which included dairy and milk and produce products. That helps the community to get a little bit of everything. The Funds to Feed project helped a lot. ... We got about $2.4 million worth of food, and we had to immediately rent the cold storage and this money helped pay for that rental.
How did you use the grant money?
Selina: The grant helped me partner with more than 20 organizations. A lot of city officials and a lot of our partners came together and we're able to increase our distribution from 12 to 25 every month. And we are feeding about 1,500 to 2,000 families every month, which included 7,500 to 8,000 family members.
Can you share the positive aspects of incorporating cultural practices in your project and how the cultural focus helped reach new communities?
Selina: We always want to make sure we are providing the right food to the right community. Muslims, non-Muslims, immigrants, refugees, Latinos -- everybody has a different choice of food. And with this money, we're able to purchase the food they want. We make separate bags and separate location, and we distribute the food they like.
Did the Funds to Feeds Grant and your project support new community leaders?
Zeenat Hasan: The grant was inclusive of the Food Justice Fellowship that we were doing with youth. Youth were stepping up in ways that they hadn't before. The food justice project was a way to bring youth from all these different cultural backgrounds – Asian American, Pacific Islander. They work in the community to connect with each other over food. Our chef leader was a Navajo chef. To us, the main component of leadership development was investment in these youth and volunteerism and connecting them cross-culturally.
Why is this work important to your community? In other words, how will this impact future generations?
Selina: We wanted to make some youth leaders who can carry this work and just help us build a healthy community here.
Zeenat: Exactly. And do it in a way that is doing movement-building with other communities of color. And, of course, Islam is one of those cultural communities that encompasses so many different ethnic groups and races. It's not any singular group. Doing cross-movement work and cross-collaboration with different black, indigenous and people of color communities, it just seems like that is the important work to be done right now.
The Funds to Feed Grant was about seeding a future, not just responding to the urgencies of COVID-19. What will be the lasting impact of the project? In other words, what does the project look like in the future?
Selina: This is something we've been doing, and we'll continue do. Funding is always a big challenge. But we try to do whatever we can. We don't want to stop the work and making relationships with the other partners that bring a lot of resources for each other. They do something we don't, and we have something they don't. That was a great resource for each other to find out during COVID and through this grant. We look forward to continuing that relationship with other organization and working together to build this community.
Zeenat: Being able to have cold storage now is a major impact. Now it’s not OK, we can distribute food, but most of it will go to waste if we don't distribute it on that particular day. Cold storage allows us to provide the full nutritional profile. You can have meats. You can have dairy. You can have like the full spectrum of foods that people actually eat. Building the infrastructure is just as important as having the foodstuffs. In the future, there is huge potential to have the capacity to serve more and more people in a [culturally appropriate way]. Meat is a very important product in in Muslim diets. Halal meat, halal foods, need storage for that. This is the only food pantry that serves Muslim culturally appropriate food that has the food storage capacity. It’s the only one in the state, It’s mind-blowing to me. This is the only way that this happened.
What is one thing you learned from this past year?
Selina: For me, that unity is the big thing. Working together, we had that mentality to help each other out. Even during COVID, people were not scared to volunteer. We had over 1,300 volunteers come to our food pantry last year, during COVID, to help us make the boxes to distribute. Working together with the community members and team and the volunteers and with all the organization, we had teamwork and unity.
Zeenat: I think for me it just revealed more and more the deep disparities in our community and the fact that we were the only organization out there serving like just basic needs to folks. And then the people that it brought out. We found people that were truly hidden in our community that are not connected to any support system. Smaller communities have this problem. We’re constantly overlooked. The pandemic revealed fully to us the necessary scale of investment that our communities need in terms of community development. There's a lot of like community development happening. It's just that if you're hidden in the data and you're hidden in the community, where is that investment actually going? That became glaringly apparent.