Giving bACK w/ Janis Carreiro, Executive Director for NFFRA Outreach Programs – Day One
Part one of Giving bACK’s first two-part episode. Arthur Bergeron and Sunny Daily talk to Janis Carreiro, who has run these programs since 2007, and spend most of the half hour on the food pantry. She starts with the name, which is longer than the sign suggests — food, fuel, rental assistance and medical travel, run as secular programs under the Nantucket Interfaith Council. Then the pantry’s history: a tiny basement room at St. Paul’s in 2007, one way in and out, pre-made bags that were ninety percent canned and shelf-stable; a move to the back of the NRTA station; and the pandemic, when it ran six days a week and shifted twice, to the White Elephant ballroom and then an elementary school cafeteria. It came out of that serving fresh fruit, vegetables and protein from island farms, restaurants and individuals, and it now reaches roughly 2,000 families — about 4,000 people — with 300 coming through on a busy evening. She also explains that the pantry has to leave the space it has long rented for a dollar a year and what that will cost; at the time of this recording a new home had not been found. The last stretch turns to rental assistance, begun around 2003 by two island reverends on a small Community Preservation Committee grant and helping about ten people in its first year, and to who needs it now: seasonal and self-employed workers with no unemployment to fall back on, construction and service workers through a long cold spell, families knocked sideways by sudden illness, and a growing number of older tenants whose pensions and Social Security have not kept pace with rents.
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