A Year in the Life of a Global Pandemic

A year ago on Wednesday, March 11 at 10:30 am, I sat in a room full of Northside partners — nonprofits, schools and grassroots groups that serve Northside residents — and we reckoned with our new reality. What assets do we have as a community? How do we mobilize if we have to go into quarantine? Who are our most vulnerable residents and how do we continue to support them? While we deliberated, our phones beeped as the University of Wisconsin suspended classes and the World Health Organization declared a global pandemic. That was the last time we were in a room together. 

We didn’t have Zoom accounts yet but had our first virtual Zoom meeting that Sunday, March 15. I know I felt like a deer in headlights, even while I facilitated. Since then, we have met at least 30 times. We have collaborating to bring hundreds of thousands of dollars of COVID support to the Northside in the form of meals, rental and utility assistance.  We have grappled with census outreach and voter registration, increased incidents of domestic abuse, helping families cope with isolation, the murder of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, and the COVID death of a Northside student who had attended our schools.

Now, as we turn the corner, and we see more and more of our community members and workers get vaccinated, I wonder what lessons will remain.

First and foremost, I am struck by our resilience. We have all just lived through a mass casualty event — I will never forget the images coming out of New York City in the early days of the pandemic. But, even more so, I am struck by how resilient and nimble our grassroots level groups were able to be. We reinvented ourselves. NPC, for example, launched FEED To Go on March 19 and delivered over 30,000 meals in 14 weeks to vulnerable residents in quarantine.

We found ways to connect. We learned, with over 850 views of our District 18 candidates Facebook forum, the pandemic made civic life more accessible to some and less accessible to those without high speed internet.

We are now grappling with 2021: when can we come together again? When do our buildings reopen? How long will we continue to wear masks? 

Most of all, I wonder if we’ve learned gratitude — to be thankful for the simple joy of the friends and family that we have not been able to safely enjoy in over a year. I know I am thankful for my community.