Canopy’s Covid-19 Response: And How You Can Help

MAR 17 2020

A word from our Executive Director, Emily Crane Linn, on the Covid-19 pandemic.

These are intense times for everyone in our community as we all do our best to protect ourselves and our neighbors from the current outbreak of Covid-19. We know many of you are worried about this impacts our work and our families, so here is a quick overview of how it’s affecting us, what we’re doing to help our families through this and how you can help. 

How it’s impacting our families:

• We have several single-parent households who will be the most directly impacted by school/daycare closures. Most of them do not have any sort of paid time off and will lose income if they are forced to stay home with their children. 
• Many of our clients work in the hospitality/food service industry and are vulnerable to layoffs as business slows.
• Because of language barriers, our parents often have difficulty communicating with our schools and both sides will need extra help as they work together to ensure our kids are able to continue learning from a distance.
• Many of our kids rely on free and reduced meals at school and will need help accessing the meals that the schools are making accessible during school closures.

What Canopy is doing:

• We are reaching out to all of our clients by phone with the help of interpreters to ensure they have up-to-date information about how to protect themselves against the virus and to assess current or expected needs that will arise from school closures, reductions in hours and other secondary impacts of the outbreak. 
• Our Youth Services Coordinator is collaborating with the schools to help them communicate with our parents as they move to alternative modes of instruction. They’re also helping the schools in their efforts to ensure that our children who receive free and reduced lunch are able to continue accessing food during the school closure. 
• Our Employment Specialist is in touch with our major employers, advocating for flexibility and support for our families who may face absences from work and discussing strategies to mitigate the effects of layoffs. 
• We are doing our best to ensure our clients continue to receive the support they need from us during this especially challenging time. In order to comply with public health guidelines, we are shifting our office staff to primarily working remotely; this includes a shift to remote meetings whenever possible. We’re taking extra measures to clean and sanitize our office space and vehicles and we are extensively limiting traffic through our office.
• We’re temporarily expanding the scope of our client emergency fund in order to support our families who are at risk of losing their jobs or income due to the outbreak. 

What you can do: 

• Support Canopy’s Crisis Relief Fund! This will provide short-term financial support to families who experience a loss of income due to the outbreak. It will be accompanied by case management and employment services designed to help the family regain self-sufficiency as quickly as possible and will be combined with other forms of assistance available in the community. 

Give Now.

But here’s the thing—none of the impacts of this virus are unique to refugees.

All across our community, lower income, working class families will find themselves in need of food, short-term financial assistance and help accessing resources, regardless of where they were born. We truly are all in this together. As such, another way that you can support refugees right now is to support the following resources that we will all be depending on to get us through this crisis:

• Hark’s Help a Neighbor Fund: This fund provides emergency financial assistance to families facing a short-term financial crisis. We know many families will be turning to them in the coming weeks and months as they face losses in income due to illness, layoffs or lack of access to childcare. You can support this fund by giving here. 
• The NWA Food Bank: They help stock many of the food pantries throughout our community that families will be turning to during this time. They accept both monetary donations that allow them to purchase food as well as in-kind donations.  

As the needs of our refugee families continue to change, we will continue to share those needs with you all, so please, if you haven’t already, subscribe to our newsletter and follow us on social media to stay up to date on everything going on in the refugee community. 

One final thought: as this virus reaches into every corner of our lives, disrupts all our plans and causes us fear, may it give us compassion for the thousands of people whose lives are unexpectedly disrupted every day by violence and persecution all around the world. This uncertainty is startling and scary because it is so out of the ordinary for most of us.

But millions in conflict zones around the world live in this sort of fear every day.

We hope this moment will pass quickly but that we will not soon forget what it is like to have our lives upended by circumstances outside of our control.