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WSQ COMMUNITY GROCERY
Following the viral TikTok sensation that is NYU students quarantined in campus housing with no access to food? So are we. Pretty crazy stuff. For those who maybe haven’t seen this, students at NYU, whose classes will be meeting in person this fall, are required to self-quarantine in their on campus housing prior to the first day of class. In order to facilitate this quarantine, NYU Dining Services had implemented a plan to deliver 3 meals each day to the quarantined residents. Of course, the number of students isolated in the dorms far outweighs the capacity of the Dining Services staff to prepare and deliver adequate meals to each of these individual students, resulting in students receiving all 3 meals simultaneously at the end of the day, or otherwise not enough food to feed one person. Popular TikToks show watermelon salad, a side of one whole lemon, and the vegan option of a steak and cheese salad.
I, like you, had a negative response to this. Especially during this time of mass fury toward the elite, why should I care whether these rich NYU kids have enough to eat? A quick trip to my favorite website, twitter.com, provided the same dose of new perspective it always does. A tweet from @anyamcneal asks readers to be mindful of the diverse financial demographics in a university setting: “not all nyu students are rich...many students rely on scholarships and on campus housing to attend.” Anya is right, of course. Though many students at NYU can afford to secure an apartment in the astronomically expensive post-gentrification East Village, there is an equally great number of students, at NYU and in colleges broadly, who receive money from the federal government and the school to attend and for whom dorms are the only option. The fact remains that while some of the students quarantined in NYU dorms are the rich kids we love to see suffer, a far greater majority of the students in housing need the meals they were promised.
Waif Intern Joan Flaherty, an NYU student herself, is stepping in to pick up some slack. At the end of last week, she and one of her classmates, Maxim Estevez-Curtis, connected through TikTok and created WSQ Community Grocery - a grassroots initiative to provide low income and food insecure NYU students with free meals. Collecting food donations from her peer network and monetary donations through Venmo, Joan and Maxim hand-delivered over 100 meals this weekend and are gearing up to deliver more in the coming weeks.
If you are willing and able, WSQ Community Grocery is seeking help with deliveries in and around the NYU neighborhood. Take a second to fill out their volunteer form and they’ll get back to you with the details. If you’d like to make a donation, you can Venmo Joan (@joan-flaherty) or Maxim (@maxim-estevez-curtis).