Small Hands Doing Great Deeds

The NOM Collective is just what it sounds like—a collection of people focused on helping their neighbors get enough to eat...

BY JENN WEBSTER

During the pandemic, we’ve all been getting our noms on…I mean, maybe a little too much? (I’m donating pants now that I can no longer button.) But this may be a case of “count your blessings,” because for some of our neighbors, ample, healthy food has been hard to come by. Enter the NOM Collective.

The NOM Collective is just what it sounds like—a collection of people focused on helping their neighbors get enough to eat. They fundraise and crowdsource food and masks, and once a week, they deliver lunches, fresh fruit, water, juice and face coverings to homeless people and folks living in low-income housing.

Though small, the group is mighty. In the space of just a few months, they’ve delivered more than 1,000 meals and 200 face coverings, plus hundreds of bags of fresh fruit, according to Dominik Heinrici, lecturer in the English Department at UTC, who founded the NOM Collective this May.

“I know the name is a bit silly,” he writes, “but I organize our food runs on Facebook, and I needed a name quickly. I admit I was inspired by the ever-popular Cookie Monster.”

Heinrici may have been on to something, because the memorable moniker keeps the group front-and-center in many people’s minds. The NOM Collective now boasts seven active members plus a wide range of donors, including generous contributors from his home country of Austria.

The concept for the NOM Collective came out of Heinrici’s work with UTC’s Read 2 Achieve program, he says. Three years ago, when the class chose to focus on racial justice, Heinrici asked local authorities from the Black community to participate as guest speakers. In this way, he met Chris Sands, a pastor at Olivet Baptist Church, and Troy Rogers, Chattanooga’s public safety director, sparking ongoing friendships.

“When I saw on Facebook that Troy was bringing food to those in need every single day, I asked myself what I could do to contribute,” Heinrici writes. “I started with preparing 20 lunch bags every week and dropping them off. After some time, Troy asked me to join his endeavor, so one thing led to the other.”

The NOM Collective links Heinrici’s group of seven friends to a larger network of community giving, which provides direction and support.

“My friends in the larger operation, which is organized by leaders in the Black community, have distributed more than 17,000 meals at this time,” he writes. “It was really important to me to be invited into the community and to take directions from someone more familiar with Chattanooga than I am.

“At first, I was a bit uncomfortable about doing this interview, because I really don’t want to toot my own horn. However, there is one thing I learned during the last three months. Even if I can’t change anything monumental, every little bit makes a difference. When I started with 20 meals a week, it felt really insufficient to me, but then I realized that 20 people would not go hungry for one day. I think we very often get deterred from trying to change things by following the narrative that whatever we could do would be insufficient. Change what you can, don’t despair over things that are not in your control.”

The NOM Collective, an eclectic bunch of scholars and role-playing gamers, may sound like an unusual cadre of humanitarian workers. But Heinrici says it all makes sense. The NOM Collective gives its members a real-world chance to “fight for the greater good,” just as a paladin would do in in a Dungeons & Dragons game.

Get Your NOM On

If you need access to fresh food, the NOM Collective starts their weekly delivery run at the James A. Henry Elementary School, then stops at nearby housing projects, the tent city on 11th Street, and the Community Kitchen before finishing their route at the tent city near Workman on Rossville Boulevard, Heinrici says. Since they may run out of food, they rotate their route to ensure everyone has a chance to get their fair share.

They also practice extensive sanitizing along their way, attempting to keep the community as safe as possible during COVID-19.

In the future, Heinrici says, the NOM Collective hopes to add hygiene articles to their delivery routes and perhaps to expand to two runs every week. They’re also looking to build sustainability so they can continue their mission even as members encounter job loss or quarantine.

“At the moment, I am very scared about the prospect of an eviction crisis in the near future, which would make an already hard situation even much, much harder,” Heinrici says.

We may feel like there’s not much we can do to keep our Chattanooga neighbors from going hungry, but in fact, any one of us can keep one neighbor from missing one meal. Put those efforts together and you get a group like the NOM Collective. An RPG player would certainly find Tolkien’s words resonant: “Such is the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere.”

To learn more, contact Dominik Heinrici at dominik-heinrici@utc.edu.