Thomas Breen photo
Hill South Management Team Communications Director Angela Hatley announces grocery store gift card idea.
Over 100 food insecure seniors in the Hill are slated to receive $50 worth of free help each with their grocery store bills thanks to the neighborhood management team’s decision about how to use its annual “participatory budgeting” allowance.
At Wednesday night’s regular monthly Hill South Community Management Team meeting in the cafeteria of Betsy Ross Arts Magnet School on Kimberly Avenue, the roughly 30 team members present unanimously voted to allocate $5,500 of their Neighborhood Public Improvement Program (NPIP) grant money towards buying grocery store gift cards for local seniors.
“Our seniors never get anything when it comes down to this community,” Management Team Communications Director Angela Hatley said as she explained how the team’s NPIP sub-committee settled upon recommending the grocery store gift card idea.
The team plans to buy 110 $50 gift cards for Shoprite, Stop & Shop, and Walmart, Hatley said. Any senior who lives in the Hill South neighborhood and is over 62 years old is eligible to apply.
All they have to do is send an email to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) with their name and age and where they live, and the management team will set up a time and place for the gift cards to be picked up. That will likely be at the team’s February monthly meeting, Hatley said.
Hatley said she remembers a former elderly neighbor of hers who used to eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches alone at home because she didn’t have enough money to buy groceries on a regular basis. When she ran out of bread and asked her neighbors for help, Hatley recalled the pain of knowing that a senior living next door was in such need. “It hurt me,” she said.
“We don’t even have a senior center here,” she said about the Hill South area.
“We have to be very accountable with this,” Hatley said, meaning that the team does plan on doing its due diligence to ensure that recipients are over 62, live in the Hill South neighborhood, and spend the money on food.
“Is it per household or per person in the household?” Hill/City Point Alder Carmen Rodriguez asked about how the gift cards will be distributed.
Per household, Hatley replied. “We want to try to hit as many households as we can with this.”
Wednesday night’s management team meeting.
She said that the team has already received approval for this idea from the city’s anti-blight and neighborhood-support Livable City Initiative (LCI), which administers the NPIP program.
This fiscal year, each of the city’s 12 community management teams received $20,000 in NPIP funds to spend on whatever small-scale community project or projects they would like. That’s $10,000 more than teams usually receive through the “participatory budgeting” endeavor to make up for the lack of NPIP funding in last fiscal year’s budget.
In the past, some teams have spent their NPIP dollars on mobile, radar speed signs and public ping pong tables and underpass graffiti mural projects and poles used to hang banner advertisements above highly-trafficked thoroughfares.
In addition to the $50 grocery store gift card initiative, two fellow Hill South regulars presented Wednesday night on other opportunities for food insecure neighbors to get a free bite to eat.
Jamilah Rasheed pointed out that she has been running the New Haven Inner City Enrichment (NICE) Center food pantry out of the Howard Avenue police substation for the past four years. Residents can pick up free food there on the last Saturday of every month.
“The majority of people who are working poor,” she said, “they use pantries and soup kitchens to make it through the end of the month.”
And Wilson Branch Librarian Luis Chavez-Brumell (pictured) noted that the Hill library branch hosts a monthly “Body and Soul” program where residents can get a free dinner and talk with experts about physical, mental, and emotional health.
The latest “Body and Soul” meet up and free dinner will be at the Wilson Library on Tuesday, Jan. 28 from 6 to 8 p.m., and will focus on the social determinants of health.
Hatley said that the remaining $14,500 of this year’s NPIP grant money for Hill South was allocated to a variety of local causes, including a school backpack giveaway, a neighborhood pop-up festival, the Kimberly Square holiday tree lighting, and to cover the filing fee for a street sign renaming, among others.