COVID-19 response

Summer COVID-19 Response Summary and Updated Report

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What an impactful summer at Circle of Hope! In June and July alone, Circle of Hope made 34 deliveries to our partner shelters, clinics, and programs. We provided 20,000 essentials for health to homeless families and individuals, including 4,000 PPE items to protect them from COVID-19.

We updated our COVID-19 Response Report to include our deliveries, stories, and impact from June and July. Our summer highlights are summarized below. To read the full updated report, please click here.

We resumed deliveries to Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program (BHCHP), Fenway Health, and Framingham State University (FSU). For various reasons, these three partners were more difficult to reach in the earliest months of the COVID-19 crisis. BHCHP and Fenway Health both set up COVID-19 testing sites and BHCHP has been actively treating COVID-19 patients. FSU closed its campus when the COVID-19 crisis began.

With persistent outreach and careful planning, Circle of Hope is back to providing hygiene supplies, hand soap, sanitizer, face masks, and essential new clothing to students and patients who are experiencing homelessness at these locations. Homeless students can now access Circle of Hope donations by appointment through the Rams Resource Center food pantry on campus. BHCHP employees now pick up donations for their Transgender Program and other clinics. We made two deliveries to Fenway Health in July, including a 24-hour emergency response, providing new clothing in the correct sizes for an individual in the Violence Recovery Program there.

This summer, we received several generous grants to fund our shelter deliveries and COVID-19 relief efforts from the City of Framingham and the MetroWest Health Foundation. In July, we also received 100 new face masks from COVID Shield Boston as well as many generous donations from our Emergency Response Wish List on Amazon. We are still reaching out to new companies and organizations for mask donations and gratefully accepting donations to our Emergency Fund.

We will share details about our September re-opening plans on our website, social media, and e-newsletter in late August and early September.