27: Allison Piscitelli
Helping Harvest Food Bank
Allison Piscitelli works at the Helping Harvest Food Bank, a collective of pantries and mobile markets that distribute food to those who need it across Berks and Schuylkill County. She has worked in the business department there for 4 years and works about 20 hours a week. The bank was extremely busy throughout the entire pandemic and shutdown, especially so in the first March, to the point where they had to add more locations. But things had started to settle down by the time of the interview. The food bank was finally able to have volunteers coming back, having needed to use temporary employees during the shutdown.
Allison lives with her 18-year-old daughter and her husband, a probation officer who worked through the whole shutdown. Her daughter was furloughed from the dry cleaners where she worked. For the first two weeks of the shutdown, Allison did not go into work either. She was terrified of becoming infected, due to her serious medical conditions. But then her boss let her start coming in during the off hours when nobody else was around so that she could feel safer. After about a month and a half, she felt more comfortable going back to regular hours because they were so good about taking proper masking, sanitation, and distancing precautions.
Allison was fortunate in being able to get the vaccine fairly quickly. Her family had also always been very cautious with hygiene, even before the pandemic, because of her health issues. One challenge for them all was learning to balance their fear of the virus and taking appropriate precautions, while also not letting themselves live in fear and stop enjoying the time they have. She believes that human contact and family and friends are so important and that people need to be able to enjoy each other again for their wellbeing. Allison hopes that, if nothing else, that at least the number of people needing food doesn’t increase at the rate it has been. It has been so heartbreaking to see how many people are in such great need.
