At the height of the COVID 19 pandemic, 6 months into Sixth Street Community Center running their Emergency Food Distribution Program — SSCC’s Deputy Director, Jen Chantrtanapichate and anthropologist and filmmaker, Naomi Schiller began a collaborative community engagement based research project to unpack and explore the emerging needs of our Lower East Side community.
The majority of SSCC's Emergency Food recipients are low-income Chinese elders, immigrants and Chinese-American. Unequipped to communicate with this population, interpreters Chloe Lin and ZiYi Li were brought onto the project to support a meaningful understanding of their experiences and needs.
An evolving project, filmmaker and artist Dan Fethke learned of the project and joined the collaboration to help film and produce a short documentary, "On the Line," about SSCC's Emergency Food Distribution Program, the people they serve and their needs during this period of deepening food insecurity. Watch the film here.
As the project developed, the collaborators recognized the sore structural and systemic issues surrounding food insecurity- especially exacerbated the by the COVID 19 pandemic. We developed the zine (below) to further unpack and frame food insecurity as a systemic issue and how the government's role perpetuates hunger and poverty.
This collaborative project was supported by the CUNY Graduate Center, The Center for Humanities Andrew W. Mellon Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research.
The majority of SSCC's Emergency Food recipients are low-income Chinese elders, immigrants and Chinese-American. Unequipped to communicate with this population, interpreters Chloe Lin and ZiYi Li were brought onto the project to support a meaningful understanding of their experiences and needs.
An evolving project, filmmaker and artist Dan Fethke learned of the project and joined the collaboration to help film and produce a short documentary, "On the Line," about SSCC's Emergency Food Distribution Program, the people they serve and their needs during this period of deepening food insecurity. Watch the film here.
As the project developed, the collaborators recognized the sore structural and systemic issues surrounding food insecurity- especially exacerbated the by the COVID 19 pandemic. We developed the zine (below) to further unpack and frame food insecurity as a systemic issue and how the government's role perpetuates hunger and poverty.
This collaborative project was supported by the CUNY Graduate Center, The Center for Humanities Andrew W. Mellon Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research.
