43: Tanya Melendez
Community Worker, 18th Wonder
Tanya Meleńdez does a lot of community service and outreach work both independently and with the 18th Wonder Improvement Association. Since the pandemic started, she has been planning a lot of COVID friendly activities for children, like scavenger hunts and a Halloween parade, since there was no trick-or-treating. She also does enrichment projects like establishing community gardens and libraries. Tanya has always been very civic minded, a trait which she attributes to her family’s values. She was raised to believe that it is important to help others and give back to the community, that you owe it to the world to give something back and that you owe it to yourself to learn about and see the world.
Tanya used to run her parent’s bakery, but when the pandemic began, she needed to devote herself full time to homeschooling her 7-year-old daughter, who does not do well with digital learning. Raising her daughter as a single parent is also something that inspires her volunteer work. She wants to teach her daughter by example how make the world better by taking it one piece at a time. The pandemic really lit a fire under Tanya. At the beginning, it was hard for her to not give up and not to lose her faith in people, but she thinks people have gotten better recently at seeing that other people have needs and empathizing with those needs. The way Tanya views her work has changed though; she has found herself thinking less about “what is our next big project” and more in terms of community enrichment as smaller, everyday acts of care and improvement.
She thinks also that the pandemic is highlighting, for a lot of people, the structural issues society faces. Volunteering at a food bank is important, she says, but it’s also important to fix the underlying problems of food disparity. We have to do what we can because the safety and wellbeing of other’s is everybody’s responsibility. In general, she really hopes that the experiences of the pandemic will have taught people how important it is to care for emotional, not just physical, health of ourselves and our loved ones.
