His shoulders hunched against the raw wind and freezing rain, Gerson Lima trudged through puddles earlier this month with his 6-year-old son, Cristian. But they didn’t have far to go: It was just a few minutes’ walk from their trailer to the parking area where the food truck was parked. Every two weeks it brings ingredients for meals for the family of two adults and two children, who arrived seven months ago from Guatemala.

“It’s made a big difference,” said Lima, 28, one hand gripping a black umbrella, the other holding his son’s hand. “It’s helped a lot. It’s everything, especially now, because we just arrived and have no other means of transportation except the bus.”

For the next hour, residents of the Middlebrook Mobile Home Park in Germantown, Md., streamed in, some in cars, many on foot. Each left with a cardboard box that included pasta, sauce, rice, beans, cereal and canned vegetables, and a paper bag containing fresh green beans, onions, potatoes, apples, cranberries, cheese and yogurt.

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The distributions were born out of the covid-19 pandemic, when Grace Rivera-Oven, a public relations consultant, noticed the effect it was having on some of the neediest people she had worked with. As businesses and schools shuttered, families in the Middlebrook park, many of them recent immigrants, found themselves stranded without work or resources.

“I knew that was a community that was going to be impacted,” she said. “The first thing we saw was the high infection rate; there’s very little social distancing that you can do in a trailer. Lots of people getting sick, a lot of people lost their lives early on.”

Rivera-Oven began collecting food donations for them in her garage. When she ran out of room, the BlackRock Center for the Arts, where she is a board member, allowed her to use their gallery space. She and other volunteers made and distributed 300 Easter baskets to children living in the trailer park. They began delivering donated food to the homes of 23 families, including some in quarantine or without cars.

Rivera-Oven eventually opened the UpCounty Hub, an organization that combats food insecurity in northern Montgomery County and also helps people connect to services such as SNAP, health care and rental assistance. Working with partners, the organization provided coronavirus testing and vaccination clinics, and kits with products like thermometers, toilet paper and plastic dinnerware. It helped kids living in the trailer park with broadband access, via hotspots, so they could log into remote learning. It also became a founding partner of Por Nuestra Salud y Bienestar, a program by the Latino Health Initiative focused on lessening the impact of covid-19 on the Latino community.

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By the second Easter of the pandemic, the organization had given out 1,300 Easter baskets. With $600,000 a year from the county and another $400,000 a year from foundation grants and private donations, it now distributes more than 30,000 pounds of food and other essentials to over 1,300 households a week, via drive-through distributions, home deliveries and other methods. It gives out Thanksgiving turkeys and other holiday food and toys, and also provides case management services.

Job Peña, 27, who lives in Middlebrook with his partner and 2-year-old son, started coming to the distribution a couple of months ago, shortly after arriving from Peru. “The oil, the rice — in Peru we make a lot of rice — it just brings the basic necessities and helps to save some money,” said Peña, an electrician who was picking up a box and a bag for his family. It also saves time, he added, noting that it takes 15 or 20 minutes to walk to the nearest grocery store.

Guacolda Flores, 74, a Middlebrook resident, lost her husband of 32 years early in the pandemic. “I fell into a depression, because it was always the two of us,” said Flores, who is retired and has no children.

The food distributions were a lifeline for her and her neighbors, she said, adding that she appreciates the freshness and variety. “The food that is included in the boxes is actually food we will be eating and food that we need.”

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Along with Latino immigrants, the distribution serves recent arrivals from Africa and refugees from Afghanistan.

“Most important is the psychological impact on this community that has felt lonely, even before the pandemic,” Rivera-Oven said. “Just having our presence and saying, ‘We are here, we care about you and most importantly, we see you. We see you, and you are not a foreigner.’ That is what resonates most of all.”

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