With a mission to “foster self-reliant families in healthy, sustainable communities,” Isles is responding to the COVID-19 pandemic by delivering essential items to residents across the city of Trenton.
With students and families struggling with basic needs during the stay-at-home order, Isles has launched a delivery service to provide food (from the Mercer Street Friends food bank), home-made masks, school supplies, activities for young children, and healthy home kits utilizing safe, non-toxic cleaning methods.
Through a collaboration with the Social Profit Center, Isles staff and dedicated volunteers have sewn masks which has exceeded over 1,000 in number. Made with the love and care of others, these masks have been distributed to the Trenton Area Soup Kitchen and many local businesses downtown such as the Big Easy and Starbucks, who in turn hand them out to their customers.
Stacey Heading, a Trenton native and staff member at Isles, has been actively involved in providing for the Trenton community and has shared his fulfilling experience of helping and educating those at TASK on how important it is to social distance.
“When times are hard and people are stressed on where their next meal will come from, they may not know and understand how important it is to practice social distancing,” Stacey Heading, After School Service Manager for Isles YouthBuild Institute says. “That is why it is important to teach people with love so that you connect with them and explain to them the value of it. At the end of the day, it feels good to serve people as people and not as another statistic or number, so I had the pleasure of giving out masks to those who needed it.”
For information on Isles’ COVID-19 resources visit https://isles.org/2020/03/covid-19-resources.
