by Elizabeth Langgle-Martin, Community Engagement Manager
The introduction of COVID-19 to our world and our city has created devastation for so many. And while COVID-19 did not break our systems, it has exposed and deepened our country’s existing inequalities, gaps in care, and further alienated some of our most vulnerable members.
As a people of fierce hope who believe in intersectionality and interdependence, we’ve also seen generous creativity implemented to help neighbors care for each other. We found this type of resistant and persistent care in the work and community fostered by Legacy Mission Village.
Legacy Mission Village (LMV), as explained by their Director of Operations, Tim Mwizerwa, “was founded by refugees to serve refugees in Middle Tennessee.”
“Traditionally, we are an educational organization that works towards workforce stability and economic stability for families,” he says. LMV typically provides English learning, financial literacy, digital literacy, citizenship test preparation, and children’s education support. Tim notes that their goal is to support every member of the family “from cradle to grave.” He explains that seemingly standard programming, such as after-school support for teens, can be drastically different for refugee families. Often a teen or child may be the only person fluent in English within a household, leaving them to navigate complex situations like insurance claims, tax documents, and other elements that lead LMV’s team to provide intensive support that spans beyond traditional homework help.
With the risk of COVID-19 continually looming, LMV’s community is unable to meet in any kind of classroom setting so their team has been challenged to imagine how to support the families they serve in relevant ways that span beyond their core programming.
Earlier in the summer, LMV began to purchase pantry goods in bulk to help their participants experiencing food access struggles. Staff soon wondered how they could offer their clients a more balanced COVID-19 relief box beyond the non-perishable items they had secured.
The Nashville Food Project was able to support LMV’s existing efforts by sourcing local, fresh foods to enhance the dry food items that LMV was offering the families they serve. Each week TNFP was able to leverage our resources and relationships to source locally raised proteins from TN Grassfed, eggs through KLD Farms, milk from Hatcher Family Dairy, and robust quantities of fresh produce from our Growing Together farmers, Sweeter Days Farm, West Glow Farms, Green Door Gourmet, and others. Throughout the summer approximately 80 families had access to fresh, local, high-quality food through this vibrant collaboration. In addition, through TNFP’s relationship with Henley Nashville, which acted as a satellite TNFP kitchen during the early days of COVID-19 shutdowns, LMV was able to receive culturally appropriate family-sized, scratch-made meals. Over the course of a month and a half, through Henley, TNFP, and LMV, a total of 1,360 servings of from-scratch goodness was shared with families alongside the bulk groceries provided.
As we move into fall, LMV is pivoting once again, to support the families they work with as they navigate the complexities of online learning. While making this shift they’ve heard from about 40 families that fresh food support is still a critical need for their households. This opened an opportunity for TNFP to continue to provide support in a new, specialized way. TNFP will provide weekly produce boxes of culturally-appropriate produce, grown by and purchased from the farmers in our Growing Together program. Many of the families that LMV works with share a Burmese heritage with several of the Growing Together farmers. We love that the vibrant, organically-grown produce that Growing Together yields can be leveraged to nourish the needs of that same community.
During a recent conversation, Tim shared that the silver lining through current struggles is that this time has allowed for the fostering of new community partnerships. For LMV, he says that has allowed them to step up and provide new types of care for the families and continue to adapt and serve in more substantial ways. Our relationship with LMV has allowed us to leverage our resources to share high-quality food in new ways that are meeting expressed community needs while simultaneously allowing us to invest in Growing Together farmers and other local farms who have long been generous and supportive of our work.
Tim shared some notes that the Legacy Mission Village crew has received in response to the food assistance they have been able to provide:
“We are good. You take care [of] our family.”
“I'm good and my family too, thank you for everything you helped me and my family [with].”
For the millionth time, we are reminded that we belong to each other, and we are grateful to be a small part of the collaborative work happening in Nashville. In a time when we are socially distant, this type of connection feels more delicious than ever.