The COVID-19 crisis has brought disruption, loss, and jarring change, but it has also fired in many students the desire to help and inspired creative ways to make a difference.
Shortly after Isabella Di Pietro ’20 returned home to New York from campus, Mayor Bill de Blasio ordered restaurants and bars in the city, the nation’s pandemic epicenter, to shut down, except for take-out and delivery business. That decision shook through Di Pietro’s family, their Tarallucci e Vino restaurants, and all of their workers.
“I was mourning the end of my senior year, and then came back to New York, and it hit me just how bad things were when my father had to lay off 95 of his 102 employees” and temporarily close four of his five locations, said Di Pietro, a history and literature concentrator.
Soon after, a friend in Toronto reached out and asked whether she could pay to have some Tarallucci e Vino meals delivered as a thank-you to health care workers in the city. Di Pietro’s parents delivered 40 to NYU Langone Medical Center that same night, and Feed the Frontlines NYC was born.
Di Pietro built a website and enlisted friends from Harvard to help her create a sign-up and payment system for others to buy and deliver restaurant meals for overworked hospital staffs. With help from her friends, Di Pietro contacted hospitals, fielded requests from reporters, managed partnerships with other restaurants and volunteers hoping to participate, and posted social media updates, working long hours with her father, Luca, at the restaurant.
“It’s been a bit of a reaffirmation of a lot of my amazing friendships that I’ve made at Harvard, because my friends have been willing to step up and help with this right away,” said Di Pietro. “I think that a lot of people are struggling to find meaning and motivation for their schoolwork, so this is a really welcome outlet for some people to be able to make a difference in this crisis.”
In the past six weeks, Feed the Frontlines has delivered 73,000 meals in New York and brought 35 employees back to work at Tarallucci e Vino (and many more at 16 partner restaurants). Ten “sister” organizations have launched in other North American cities, including Boston. And Di Pietro recently took a leave of absence from Harvard to focus on the organization full time with plans to expand FTF to reach New Yorkers experiencing food insecurity as a result of the pandemic.
“For now, I’m committed to doing the work that I’m currently doing until there is no need any more,” said Di Pietro. “Even after the acute part of this crisis is over, there are going to be so many longer-term effects on the economy and on the workers who were laid off. There’s going to be a need for matching resources of free meals with communities that really need them, whether it’s health care workers or communities that have more traditionally needed support.”
Evelyn Wong ’21 returned home from campus looking to help. Wong knew that many elementary and secondary students were facing weeks of unstructured time, and many of her friends had mentored kids in college-readiness — and now had more free time themselves. On the plane from Boston to Los Angeles, she started planning a digital mentoring platform that would bring those groups together, and she asked friends from Harvard and MIT to help.
“I was thinking about a lot of the school closures in my area [in East L.A.], and equitable access to education is something that I’ve been passionate about,” said Wong, a joint concentrator in neuroscience and romance languages and literature. “This pandemic has exposed and exacerbated these inequalities, and because of that we wanted to target communities that needed help the most, whether it’s those that are undergoing housing insecurity or going through a difficult family situation.”