Bridges Continues to Serve During Coronavirus

Bridges is on the streets continuing to serve people experiencing homelessness — those who have nowhere to go to self-isolate, and have increased risk to contract and spread COVID-19. It’s important we work together to serve the susceptible and halt the spread of this virus.

What Bridges Is Doing

1. Protecting our teams – gloves and masks for those in direct contact with clients. We have created new setups on the Runs with more tables and are holding off on soup distribution.
2. Increased outreach – Bridges is now doing outreach 7 days a week in Newark, checking on people experiencing homelessness who are living on the streets or in shelters.
3. Continuing our Runs – we continue our Runs to Newark and Irvington. We are working with the City of Newark Health Department and their street outreach seven days a week to ensure all unsheltered residents are connected with, sheltered, and directed to services. We have returned to Manhattan on Wednesday and Friday nights (April 2021).
4. Continuing to serve our neighbors in need each Friday at our Summit office. We just reopened the Summit office for showers and services on Wednesday and Fridays, 9-12.
5. Partnering with the Department of Health & Community Wellness, as well as Newark’s Commission on Homelessness, in planning and preparedness.

With a 100% drop in volunteers for much of 2020 (which was the right  thing to do!), we had limited incoming supplies of lunches and toiletry kits. With a slow increase of volunteers and a year of Covid behind us, we are excited to still be doing the work and still need supply help! We remain committed to helping our neighbors in Summit, Irvington, Newark, and Manhattan.  We are still creative with our food supply– partnering with vendors, encouraging restaurants to share– and we will keep that as long as it takes.

Please help us fund this effort.

How you can help the most vulnerable in our community

We have no plans to cease operations. This is when we are needed most.
Please keep checking back with us as needs change and the situation progresses.

Thank you for your continued support!

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