“But what do you do if you can’t stay home? What do you do if you’re homeless?” Josiah Haken is helping New York City’s most vulnerable residents during the pandemic.
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00:00With this pandemic, the advice from the CDC and the advice from our government officials is stay home.
00:07But what do you do if you can't stay home? What do you do if you're homeless?
00:22Right now, during this crisis, we need to be an emergency food resource.
00:27So we've been prioritizing just meeting that basic need of emergency meals for our guests and doing so as safely as possible.
00:58Hi. Would you like bread and soup?
01:01The people that we serve are usually some of the most vulnerable people to the coronavirus.
01:06A lot of them are older. A lot of them are struggling with pre-existing conditions, health conditions.
01:13Homelessness is not usually the most healthiest of lifestyles.
01:18Access to medical care and preventative medicine is just not on the docket.
01:22We have put in a lot of safety procedures that we don't normally do.
01:28All of our volunteers are wearing masks that we've been able to miraculously locate.
01:33We are all wearing gloves at all times. We're changing our gloves every 15 minutes.
01:38We've set up handwashing stations for our guests to use because we understand that a lot of public restrooms are no longer available,
01:46say, in restaurants and coffee shops where our guests would normally go to wash up.
01:51I will literally walk out six feet for an entire city block and draw a line on the sidewalk in chalk.
01:58And then we have our staff and volunteers basically asking our guests to very graciously keep one person per chalk line while they're waiting in lines.
02:21There aren't a lot of places where people can go for showers.
02:36A lot of programs like faith-based programs that offer showers weekly or daily,
02:42they don't know how to offer showers to homeless folks while maintaining social distancing rules and following the CDC guidelines
02:50because the CDC guidelines are not designed for people who are homeless.
03:05We were typically bringing, you know, 15 or so gallons of soup to give away over a four-hour period.
03:12And a week ago Friday, we actually ran out in two hours.
03:36I started doing this 10 years ago because I'm a person of faith.
03:40I think that our purpose and meaning is found in loving our neighbors as ourselves.
03:50I don't think that we get to pick and choose when that law applies.