Gifts at Work - Arts Offer Sense of Normalcy

GIFTS AT WORK Arts Offer Sense of Normalcy at Family Pantry

It’s a sunny, warm Saturday morning in the middle of July, perfect for a day at the beach where lines of cars have already formed, full of people eager to soak up the best the Cape has to offer.

In Harwich, outside the Family Pantry of Cape Cod, another line has formed, though this one speaks to the imperfections of life in our region. Here people are eager for the free food the pantry provides.

Inside the relatively nondescript building, three teenagers — Nora Swidey and her older sister, Sophia, and their neighbor Brynn Garrity, summer residents of Dennis Port — quietly chat with Amy* a seven-year-old who paints an assortment of flowers, each different colors, on an 8x10 canvas as her mother picks up groceries for her family.

The Swideys and Garrity talk to Amy about everything from her favorite color — she mentions pink, purple, green and yellow — to the drawings she likes to make at home. There’s a sweet innocence to the scene that belies the reason she is here.

With a simple arts and crafts table, six local youths — Susanna Swidey along with Fiona and Maeve Garrity are the others — have created a sense of normalcy for children of the pantry’s clients.

It started last summer when the two sets of siblings approached the pantry about offering a creative outlet, two days a week for a total of six hours, to local children. That first year they self-funded the initiative by selling their own handmade jewelry at Harwich Port’s summer strolls and in front of Woolfie’s Bakery in Dennis Port.

“Part of the reason we started this, is a lot of arts programs on the Cape, most of the kids have to pay for them,” says Brynn. “We wanted to create one for free where they can learn and explore.”

This summer, the AFCC provided a grant to support this grassroots effort.

Having served 9,300 clients and 3,796 households throughout Cape Cod last year, the pantry has more than enough traffic to warrant this type of creative outlet.

“It has been a big plus for the pantry and the kids of clients who come here,” says Pat Brophy, the program manager for the nonprofit who has steadily seen demand for its services rise since he started working there in 2011 . “We really consider ourselves a sustaining pantry for families in need of assistance.”

On this day, the pantry is busy, meaning parents can spend as long as an hour collecting their free groceries while their children take part in a range of crafts Nora, Sophia, and Brynn have laid out on a table in a room separate from where food is distributed. These include painting; weaving; creating beach scenes in a jar using Model Magic clay; making dream catchers; and decorating rocks.

Every two weeks, the art projects change, coinciding with how often the clients are allowed to return for food.

After completing a piece, Nora says, children are often filled with pride “and go and show their mom what they made. It’s really amazing to see.”

When asked to explain the impact of the arts and crafts program, Nora shares a story of a boy and girl, each roughly four years old, who were both making animals out of clay earlier this summer. Though the boy only spoke Portuguese and the girl English, Nora says, “they were laughing and having fun. Even though they didn’t speak the same language, they were able to communicate through art.”

*Amy’s name has been changed for this article.