SULLIVAN FRESH COMMUNITY CUPBOARD: STORIES FROM THE ROAD Submitted by Martin Colavito, Sullivan Fresh Community Cupboard Program Manager So, the reason I’m doing this introduction is because, for the better part of a year, we’ve been serving our neighbors in Sullivan County during times of crisis. It is important to know that I am not a writer and suck at grammar. I did everything I could to screw up school (You see what I mean?) growing up. But what the heck, I’m giving this a shot anyway. Every situation, every person, every experience over the past year has become a very personal matter for me and if you would have told me a year ago that would have been the case, I’m not sure I would have agreed, When we started the Sullivan Fresh Community Cupboard it was Tom Bosket and myself, out of Cornell Cooperative Extension Sullivan County and Sullivan Allies Leading Together (SALT). At that time, the most telling thing at that time last March was how deafening the silence was in our communities. The people we met along the way were collectively starving for leadership, guidance, and consideration I can only remember one Page 8
agency that was a continued presence from a grassroots point of view during the past year and that was Action Toward Independence. Once Tom and I started to address access to food issues there were several things that were really important to us. One was that folks understood we were not a charity, a notion that was a little offensive to us because we realized that at any given time, we all need a little bit of a human touch to get us through the rough patches that occur in our lives. The idea that we are anything but neighbors collaborating with neighbors seemed a little above our spiritual pay grades! Think for a minute about the times in our lives when we may have felt consumed by something, a problem that we may have felt was insurmountable and how Extension Connection
May 2021
hopeless we were left to feel. Some of us have avenues of support and still felt all alone to suffer with these demons, and some of us had no support leaving us devastated. We may have just needed a little bit of consideration, a shoulder, a hand to hold, someone who would listen. We needed HOPE! The other thing that was important to us was sustaining folks in regard to hunger, rather than “treat” their conditions. Let me explain. From the onset Tom and I realized that we could provide a meal for folks or take hunger out of the picture by delivering enough food for a week (at minimum two meals daily). We had this crazy notion that if folks did not have to worry about hunger, then maybe they could devote some