Cassie
She shifted her priorities to make sure families didn’t go hungry.
Inside this re-purposed gymnasium in Houston, Texas, “there’s always 100 million things that can be done.”
That’s how Cassie A. Jones feels most days since Hurricane Harvey hit Houston.
In addition to her normal workload, she now manages a food and supply warehouse for Hurricane Harvey survivors. It’s filled with diapers, sanitary napkins, cleaning supplies, canned food, pet food — there’s a 99% chance any item a family might need to pick up the pieces after a hurricane can be found in this fully-stocked room.
Cassie is the Health and Wellness Manager at the Harbach-Ripley Neighborhood Center, one of five centers run by a well-known, 100-year-old, Houston-based nonprofit, BakerRipley. The center was a charter school at one time. Now, it fulfills a variety of functions in the community — there’s a vegetable garden in the backyard, a room where seniors play Dominoes, and a space for learning about health and wellness.
Cassie is proud of her work. And proud of the way BakerRipley rapidly shifted its priorities to meet the needs of vulnerable families who are still reeling two months after Hurricane Harvey barrelled through Houston.
“Here in Houston, it looks like business as usual because we get the roads up, people are driving around, but there’s still families out here who are really suffering. There’s people living in their cars. There’s people who are denied by FEMA, and they don’t know how they’re going to get back into their house. They don’t know what they’re going to do. And for us to be able to provide, even just a little bit of support, something — a smiling face, a case of diapers, some food — I can’t imagine what it would be like to be a family who can’t even access food in America today. That just drives me nuts,” Cassie said.
“The families who were food insecure before the storm are probably in dire straights at this point. So, the fact that our agency is doing it, I’m really proud of the fact that we can do it. Because this is the kind of stuff I love. You can get your hands on it, and it’s my workspace every day, but it’s always changing,” she said.
Cassie is originally from Colorado Springs. After Harvey, she has a deeper understanding of Texas.
“You hear a lot about stuff being bigger and better in Texas. But I guess that could be true because we doing it bigger and we are doing it better than anywhere else to try to help our community,” she said.
This is a story from GlobalGiving’s “After the Storm” series.
