In the blink of an eye, Anna Scardina’s title at Benefits in Action went from SNAP enrollment specialist to food delivery and resource coordinator. And in that same eye blink, her organization – traditionally a service connector -- became a direct service provider.
In the first month of the pandemic, calls came to the organization from two older adult living facilities in Denver looking for referrals to help them fill the gap for food as organizations who traditionally served them stopped operating. Benefits in Action stepped into the breech, organizing food boxes. Then a fortuitous thing happened. The Denver Police Cadet program could no longer deploy cadets to community events that allowed them to receive hours of community service and some compensation. Scardina married the two needs and launched delivery of boxes to those initial two facilities with the help of the Denver Police Cadets. Those initial two facilities grew into five in Denver.
Knowing there was more need and using their organizational strengths, they developed a website where anyone in the Denver metro area could sign up for help, no income verification, just pure honor system. Next, they found connections to food sources in Jefferson County. Now they continue to serve the five older adult living facilities in Denver as well as families across Jefferson, Adams and Arapahoe counties. At last count, 796 households were on their list for food. And a crew of between 20 and 30 volunteers deliver the boxes across the metro area. With restrictions loosening, the Denver Police Cadets were called back to other duties.
All of this has happened since March.
“I think we started running before we thought much about anything beyond meeting the need,” Scardino said. “We started by figuring out how to get through one week. It wasn’t until two or three months ago, we started talking about long term goals. When we started, we thought it would be temporary so it didn’t matter if all the wheels didn’t run perfectly.”
But now as months pass with no clear resolution, Scardina said the organization has begun the arduous process of trying to restructure while also still running. Scardina manages the program on her own, pulling in various colleagues in other parts of the organization as needed and relying on generous food bank partners and volunteers to fill in the gaps.
Among her goals for stabilizing the effort are, increasing ways for families receiving the food boxes to help in alerting the organization when a box isn’t needed. Stabilizing and standardizing the volunteer force needed to do the deliveries. And finding creative ways to make additional change slowly enough to avoid breaking the delicate machine she has built, but quickly enough to avoid that same machine’s collapse. The need continues unabated.
Benefits in Action