“El Paso Strong.”

Those words on digital traffic boards along I-10 in this Texas city bordering Mexico couldn’t mask a pervasive sense of sorrow.

The day before, 22 people of Hispanic origin were murdered, and 24 seriously wounded, while shopping in a Walmart. The shooter, a white nationalist racist, traveled over 500 miles and hunted down Hispanic people like prey in the store aisles.

Just over 24 hours later, thousands of Texans held a solemn vigil at a sports field located near the crime scene. They heard speeches of solidarity from leaders, including rabbis, priests, imams and ministers.

Local politicians spoke against hatred and about El Paso’s reputation as among the nation’s safest of cities.

A Hispanic woman identifying herself as only Theresa shouted, “This is our Kristallnacht, this is our Holocaust,” and said her mother was a Crypto Jew from the Dominican Republic. Theresa said she had taught courses in Holocaust education in El Paso’s public schools.

“This is just so painful,” she said. “It closely resembles what I believe happened to the Jewish people during the 1930s.”

A day later, we met another Hispanic woman who knew all too personally the pain of gun crime.

Lupita, a grandmother of three, entered the US at El Paso from Juarez, Mexico. She arrived with the children after her son was gunned down in a Juarez bar. Her daughter was also killed by gunfire in the same city. A third son, who entered the US in El Paso, is being detained in a federal camp in Louisiana pending his asylum application.

The children were separated from her at the border, taken to New York, where they stayed until finally being returned to a small, run-down, largely Hispanic El Paso suburb.

Rabbi Steven Bayar, JSurge Executive Director, and journalist Phil Jacobs met Lupita as well as many others impacted on both sides of the US-Mexico border. Their trip, in cooperation with The Good People Fund, focuses on bearing witness to the struggle migrants face leaving untenable situations in their home nations with the hope of settling in the States.

Rabbi Bayar and Jacobs went from homeless shelters to meetings with El Paso community activists deeply involved in the migrant conundrum.

At a visit to the Familias Triunfadoras community center, Bayar and Jacobs met the facility’s founder and director, Maria Covernali. She was converting an old adobe style post office into a place for computer education training, a play area for children and a family counseling center.

This is where Lupita showed up one recent day, looking for work and a purpose. For $30 a day, Ms. Covernali hired her to help with clean-up chores. Lupita and her recently arrived grandchildren are living in a nearby church for free.

“I had to leave Mexico,” she told JSurge. “I left everything behind, everything I had, including my house. It just wasn’t safe anymore. My son said that we will be okay here.”

But she added that when the immigration officials separated her from her grandchildren, she was heart broken.

On this day, with contributions from The Good People Fund, those same three children, two boys and a girl, received brand new, complete sets of clothing. The children will attend area schools.

Lupita will continue to work at the community center … and await the status of a humanitarian asylum acceptance to the US, which could take months.

For now, though, she said, “It feels good to smile.”

By Phil Jacobs

We’re at Metuchen High School in New Jersey, where students are working to end child slavery in Ghana under the leadership of their social studies teacher, Evan Robbins, Founder/CEO of Breaking the Chain Through Education, a Good People Fund grantee organization.

The Good People Fund is sending essentials to migrant individuals and families detained in indescribable conditions along the US southern border. GPF Executive Director Naomi Eisenberger speaks with human aid partners about the Jewish imperative to act.

We talk with Fran Held, Founder of Mitzvah Circle Foundation, a Pennsylvania non-profit organization and Good People Fund grantee that provides donated and purchased goods like clothing, children’s books, toiletries, housewares and more to individuals and families in crisis.

She described some health challenges that she believes developed due to years of not-so-great eating habits, like drinking a couple of liters of soda every day and eating lots of fast food.

But she could easily host her own healthy eating show now if she wanted, fluent as she’s become in the terminology and practice of controlling portions, reading and interpreting nutrition and ingredient labels, and getting the best healthy bang for every food dollar she spends.

“I’ve come a long way and this program has been amazing and life changing for not only me, but for my family,” she said. “We are on the right path now.”

This 40-year-old mother of three, who lives in New York City’s East Harlem, is one of about a dozen adults who graduated this past spring from a 12-week program designed to examine their food stories and equip them with the knowledge, motivation and support to alter default behaviors and make better food choices.

The program is an initiative of FEAST (Food, Education, Access, Support, Together), a Los Angeles-based organization that not only advocates for food security for vulnerable populations, but also runs community-based wellness programs, like the one in East Harlem, to empower individuals and families, many of them low-income, to navigate what can be a confusing, defeating and fatal ecosystem of food and choice.

FEAST, formerly known as Groceryships, is a grantee of The Good People Fund, which has supported the expansion of the wellness program and outreach to New York City.

“This is a program that is changing lives and futures in a holistic way,” said Dana Rizer, FEAST’s executive director, who has a Master’s degree in Food Studies from New York University and co-authored the organization’s curriculum with FEAST founder, Sam Polk. “With Good People Fund support, we expect that our impact in New York will continue to grow.”

The graduation in East Harlem in the spring was one of three that took place in New York, along with one in Brooklyn and one in Queens that collectively recognized 30 participants.  At PS 112, where the program took place and where most of the participants have children attending school, some students celebrated with their parents.

One participant, a mother of two pre-teenage boys, said the program had done nothing less than enhance family dynamics and connection as she discusses food choices with her sons, goes food shopping with them, and makes eating together a more communal and regular affair.

“We are having conversations at home now about what we are eating and why we are eating it,” she said. “And we are sitting around the family table more now sharing food and stories, and my older son wants to even do some of the cooking now. It’s been transformative in ways I couldn’t have seen.”

To FEAST, that is, in fact, the entire point, recognizing that food can and should be a connector within families and communities, with the power to sustain, nourish and strengthen not just the person consuming it.

The challenges are enormous, Rizer said, as people’s food choices are so often mired in culture, income status, fads, body image, family history, and, especially in economically challenged areas, all-important access.

“Thanks to the success of food marketers and lobbyists, the overall system is set up so that people too often are misinformed, and fail to know how to make the right choices,” she said.

“We are trying to break through that, not only through education but also through a deliberate support system that allows participants to set goals and come back every week to report back, celebrate successes and troubleshoot problem areas. Taken together, it makes an enormous difference with numerous ancillary benefits.”

Tom Colicchio, the celebrity chef and restaurant owner, who has been an outspoken advocate in communities and on Capitol Hill for food justice issues and for the FEAST approach to food education, attended the East Harlem event to underscore his support for the grassroots work that is often necessary in economically challenged neighborhoods.

“FEAST is the missing link in just so many ways here and elsewhere,” he said. “We are two generations removed from the Depression, when our grandparents and great-grandparents cooked everything.  Now we are around fast food and convenience stores and no one knows how to find the proper food and cook it.

“But once you know how to cook, then you can stretch the dollar, know what healthy means, and make better choices and have an impact on yourself and your family and its health.  It’s a way to take control and take back a piece of your life. This program is making that happen.”

Graduates of the East Harlem program said they will remain a support group beyond FEAST, yet another trickle-down benefit from their months-long class.

“We have come together and supported each other through change,” said one. “There’s no telling what we can do to improve others’ lives too.”

By H. Glenn Rosenkrantz, for The Good People Fund

While in DC, we stopped in to talk with change maker Abby Sondak, Founder of Just Imagine. With support from The Good People Fund, her organization is giving summer overnight camping experiences to disadvantaged inner-city youth and leveraging the moment to prepare them for success in college.