Title:Student volunteers fight for social justice, COVID-19 relief

Fighting food waste during the pandemic

Cooper Adams (B’21), Elisabeth O’Brien (C’20), and Peter DiGiovanni (C’21) spent the summer working remotely for the Farmlink Project, a grassroots charity run by college students that aims to connect farms with surplus produce with food banks facing food shortages.

“Just being able to talk to and understand the lives of people who are growing the food for all of us to eat in the U.S. is something I never envisioned myself doing but something I’m extremely grateful for,” says Adams, a management and international business major.

Farmlink has delivered over 12 million pounds of produce and served more than 10 million meals. The Georgetown students worked remotely with Farmlink to coordinate food donations in several states across the country, including Washington State, New Mexico, California, North Carolina, and New Jersey.

Adams said reduced demand in the food service industry has hurt farmers, who continued to grow their supply even as movie theatres, ballparks, and other businesses stopped or cut back on food orders. “To say that COVID-19 has increased food insecurity is a vast understatement,” he says. The group continues outreach to growers and consumers across the country, with hopes of growing their volunteer force to help facilitate more donations.

Delivering PPE where it’s needed most

Shortly after her medical school peers were pulled from their clinical rotations due to COVID-19 health restrictions in March, Hannah Day (M’22) texted her classmates, asking if they would be interested in collecting personal protective equipment to donate to hospitals in need.

Five other third-year students responded and began work on what would become an international nonprofit organization called MedSupplyDrive.

“I don’t think any of us really imagined what it was going to turn into,” says Day. “Things kept taking shape and it kind of caught on fire on social media.”

Within the first two weeks, the organization gained more than 341 volunteers from 37 states. Volunteers came from 41 undergraduate universities and 66 medical schools. They collected PPE from research labs, tattoo parlors, construction firms, auto body companies, and other businesses.

This past summer, Georgetown students worked remotely with other Farmlink teams on the ground to help bridge the gap between two problems brought on by the pandemic: farmers with surplus produce and people facing food insecurity.

After initially focusing on relief efforts in New York, volunteers shifted toward securing donations for hospitals in Florida, Arizona, and California, where cases rose dramatically over the summer, according to Allison Rooney (M’22), who helped over- see regional coordinators for MedSupplyDrive.

“We began focusing on smaller facilities or clinics in rural regions with less opportunity to acquire these supplies,” Rooney says.

When protestors marched in major cities in response to the murder of George Floyd, MedSupplyDrive began work to ensure Black Lives Matter activists would have access to PPE. “As health care professionals going into a field dedicated to protecting human life, the Black Lives Matter movement was extremely important to all of us,” she says.

Rooney said the medical students who started the initiative transferred leadership of the nonprofit to regional coordinators in July to ensure MedSupplyDrive continued when their medical school classes resumed.

“There’s a common misconception right now that the supply chain caught up and there are no longer PPE shortages. This is not true.” Rooney says. “The pandemic is not going anywhere.

As long as there is a need we’re going to try and fill it and adapt to the changing realm.”