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| Lori Cannon, center, Jose Jimenez, right. |
You can't buy shampoo, toothpaste or toilet paper with food stamps. An echo of tightfisted Dickensian notions of charity, making sure the shiftless poor won't be living it up on their dime, washing their hair and brushing their teeth and similar displays of wild extravagance.
"I don't consider toilet paper a luxury, I consider it a necessity," said Lori Cannon, when I visited her Saturday afternoon at GroceryLand, 5543 N. Broadway, the Edgewater food pantry for people living with HIV and, between us , for anyone else in need who stops by. "What we need are personal care items because people on food stamps aren't allowed to use them for anything but food."
Cannon prefers donations of goods rather than money, given the very public disintegration of the umbrella organization that used to shelter GroceryLand. "This has been a very stressful year," she said, thanks to "the utter and complete collapse of the Heartland Alliance."
Heartland Alliance was a major provider of social services in Chicago and considered itself among the oldest social welfare organizations in the country, tracing its roots to Jane Addams.
Cannon, joined by local AIDS activists Greg Harris, Tom Tunney and James Cappleman, created OpenHand Chicago in 1988 to feed those in the LGBTQ community affected by HIV/AIDS.
"We had one thing in common," Cannon told the Sun-Times in 2019. "Everyone we knew was either dead, dying or struggling to help someone who was heading there. We were tired. We were scared. We were angry. And we needed to do something other than sew AIDS quilt panels.”
When I first reported on Cannon's efforts 30 years ago, the idea was to give AIDS patients independence by allowing them to select and prepare their own food themselves, rather than being forced to eat whatever meal was delivered that day.
Then she was serving 40 people a week. Now it's 400.
A flamboyant woman with magenta hair, Cannon tries to make GroceryLand as colorful and festive as she is.
"What we try to do is create a space that doesn't look like a doctor's waiting room or a government office," she said.
In 2011, OpenHand was renamed Vital Bridges and came under the umbrella of Heartland Alliance Health — a vital distinction, since HAH was spun off and survived when Heartland Alliance collapsed, kicking its staff to the curb.
Cannon credits her core of volunteers and donors for getting them through.
"The LGBTQ community is very familiar to being in a place of struggle," she said. "We live another day to fight, and I'm very happy to lead the charge."
Does Cannon, 74, ever think about retiring?
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The decency of some people is overwhelming to me. She has spent her life helping others with exhausting effort, for no recompense other than the knowledge she has helped the least among us.
ReplyDeleteI marvel at what I call zero calorie righteousness, in vogue in the political right, where people have a thought that makes them feel superior to others. No effort whatsoever and they think they invented decency.
Bless Lori Cannon for showing us what true decency is.
Thanks Neil for the info about Groceryland. I’m ordering from Costco today to have it delivered directly since I live in Indiana. Sounds like a great organization.
ReplyDeleteHow we treat the less fortunate is more a reflection on us than anything else.
ReplyDeleteHere in South Dakota, my church is downtown, and we have all kinds of supplies, including sanitary products for women, toothpaste, toothbrushes, sanitizer, shampoo, soap, etc., and we all pitch in to keep it stocked and ready for the homeless and anyone else who comes in.
ReplyDeleteI see an Aldi shopping bag on the far left in the photo.
ReplyDeleteYou should talk about Aldi sometime.
Local grocery chains once competed with the reginal and national chains, like Kroger and A &P. The largest of these groups was the Independent Grocers Alliance (IGA). Other wholesaler-retailer chains included Royal Blue, Supreme, Centrella Stores, Certified Grocers, and Grocerland Cooperative.
ReplyDeleteBy the 1950s, these voluntary chains counted more than 2,000 Chicago-area stores among their members. Hadn't thought about the Grocerland stores in decades. This story jogged my memory. Thanks, Mr. S.