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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC, and now part 9 of our 10-part end of year gratitude series with 10 heroes of community well-being for 2020, we are bringing on 10 individuals or leaders of community groups who may not make the headlines very much, but who have helped make life livable in this year of so much grief and so much need and so much thirsting for justice and equality. There are many more groups out there doing great work than we can bring on the air in 1 series, but these 10 have been brought to our attention, some by listeners, some by colleagues or friends, some do come from you when you've called in on previous shows.

We are sharing at least these 10 stories to represent all the ways that some of us are serving the many of us in need of help this year. We will also have a live Zoom event tomorrow night, December 9th, to honor 3 champions of community well-being with what the radio station is generously calling "The Lehrer Prize for Community Well-Being."

You can make a free reservation to attend tomorrow night Zoom event at wnyc.org/lehrerprize, wnyc.org/lehrerprize. It's not one of these zooms like you do with your friends or your family, where everybody sees each other, but you will be able to see us present this event. We'll have the famous chef who is also an incredible humanitarian, Jose Andres, with us as a special guest, also some videos about the three heroes of community well-being, who we are profiling, and I will speak to them live in person as well.

It should be an interesting and worthwhile event tomorrow night at seven on Zoom. You can make a reservation at wnyc.org/lehrerprize. For today in this series, I'm joined by Tanya Veltz who, with her group Tree House Cares, a non-profit organization based in Newark helps provide food, toiletries and other resources for people in need. Tanya, thanks so much for sharing some time with us today. Welcome to WNYC.

Tanya Veltz: Hello, thank you for having me. It's my pleasure.

Brian: You want to tell people first, basically, about the organization. Why Tree House Cares? Why is "Tree House" in your name?

Tanya: Okay. The correct name of our organization is Tree House Ent Cultural Art. We formed in 2017 and we organized special events, music festivals, and just a plethora of different events, but it changed direction shortly after, and we started an outreach called Tree House Cares. What Tree House Cares is, is we have a food and clothing pantry, we offer a variety of services to help people sustain in our communities.

Every day we provide hot meals from 3:00 to 5:00 PM, we're located in the city of Newark at 462 Sanford Avenue. We provide hot meals to over 400 people per day. Each week we provide free groceries and whatever else we have to over 500 individuals, families and our homeless population here in the city of Newark and surrounding areas.

Brian: You said 400 people per day.

Tanya: Per day.

Brian: I read that book before COVID you were providing meals to 150 people a week. Does that indicate the scale of the increased need during COVID?

Tanya: Yes. It has increased at, I want to say, an alarming rate. We've been doing outreach for many years, and we've always provided groceries and whatever we had to people. What I would do is set up food pantries, right on street corners. I would set up pantries in high schools and wherever there was a need, housing projects, anywhere.

We would always have a lot of people who will come out and receive, but not as many as now, since March, since the pandemic first hit, we started to do delivering meals to home bound. We had to find a safe way to do it. What we did was, we started delivering, I started cooking meals, and then we would get a small group of people and we would drop off to seniors and anybody who couldn't get out during that time or was suffering from food insecurities.

As time went on from March to, I'm going to say, April, we partnered with the United Way and they started assisting us with food boxes and we were getting over 200 boxes per week. We were doing the 400 meals, we started out with 200, I'm sorry, and then it increased to 400 deliveries. The lines that we have now, it's overwhelming.

We're getting 400 to 500 individuals coming through our lines every single Saturday, we distribute groceries every Saturday at 3:00 PM, and the lines are literally wrapped from the door to around the corner. Sometimes we prepare all the boxes. We have everything ready. We try to give food that will last the people at least a week, sometimes more. It depends on the donations that we receive.

A lot of the assistance we get is through sharing with other partners, with other organizations, we very seldom get monetary donation. All of it is through partnerships. It's a bit of a struggle. It's like, my husband and I are a two-man team. We travel near far to pick up donations and we try to help as much as we can and we're really been at it almost six to seven days per week since COVID started.

Brian: Amazing. I want listeners to have a sense of how much this is a hands-on thing for our guest, Tanya Veltz from Tree House Cares. She did just mention that she and her husband are doing this pretty much as a two-person operation. There was an nj.com article in March that said there's a mother of seven with no food for her children, or an infant drinking soda from a baby bottle because the family has no formula, or a disabled neighbor who can't get out and hasn't eaten in days, and then it goes on to describe how you and your husband are helping these people individually. Can you talk about being a two-person operation that has scaled up to the kinds of numbers that you've talked about?

Tanya: It's very difficult, but it's my passion. I always explain to people, I think Tree House Ent Cultural Arts moved into a different direction. One of the reasons why is because I got really sick. It was back in 2013. I was suffering so bad. Instead of plan to live, I was just asking God to take my life because I didn't want to be in the pain that I was in.

Brian: Whoa.

Tanya: I asked Him that if I recover from this, I promise You that I will be a testimony for You, and I will do Your will. From that point on something switched, I got better and, boy, have you been keeping my husband and I busy, it's non-stop. If you read in the article, my husband explained to the reporter, that is non-stop. I have to do something nice for somebody every day, every single day. The obstacles we face, right now we transport and pick up everything ourselves, he and I. We're unloading dock, sometimes we have to travel 5 miles, and sometime we have to travel 25 miles or 30 miles.

We have an old beat-up yellow van, but it gets us to point A and point B. We've been working on trying to get some kind of help to get a cargo van or larger truck so that we can move these donations and get the stuff out to where it needs to go. We do all the lifting. Sometime we receive 200 boxes, and it's just he and I, and we pick them up, apples, oranges. We give perishable foods, non-perishable foods. We don't ask for any ID, and the help is limited because of COVID. We operate in a fairly small-sized space. We can't have, but so many volunteers come in and help us out. On Saturdays is when we get about four to five people so that we can practice social distance there, but it's hard. It's hard, but I love doing it. I wake up each and every day and look forward to it because the need is so great right now because of this pandemic. It's just a lot and-- I'm sorry.

Brian: I was just going to say, if I'm hearing you right, and our listeners are thinking, "This is so worthwhile. How can I help?" It sounds like you're not looking for volunteers, but donations to help you get that bigger vehicle would help. Yes?

Tanya: Yes. I very rarely asked for monetary donations. Again, most of the operation, we just do partnerships. I have about three other organizations. We're small, so we share. I have food, they have clothing, we give away toiletries, baby formula. We cook. I've been blessed to partner with World Central Kitchen. They have been providing 200 meals per day to us to give. That was such a blessing because that took a little weight off of us being in the kitchen.

We asked for things like cups and soup bowls, because we also go to New York Penn station where our homeless pop, we call them "neighbors without addresses." We also provide to our neighbors without addresses clothes, when I cook for them, it's almost like Thanksgiving every week. We go and we fill up coolers, we serve the line.

I get volunteers to come out for that because it's an outside thing, where we're outside and we bring all the tables down, we bring the clothing racks down, tall and trees, and they can select clothes from the rack and gloves and hats or whatever we have, we take it down, and then we fill the coolers up. I take woolen coolers and we go in the train tracks and under the bridges and find the ones who are unaware that we're over in the park serving and we go and assist them as well.

I bring people down with us that can offer other resources like shelter. Some of them don't have IDs. We give them all that information. If they need detox or some type of mental health resources. I try to bring people along that can assist with that as well. When we serve the homeless people, we always need volunteers, and they come out because, again, that's outside, we don't have to be in a confined space where we would be unsafe from practicing social distance.

Brian: You said you were affiliated with World Central Kitchen. That's the Jose Andres place, right? You know him?

Tanya: World Central Kitchen is like a whole group of chefs that came together. They provide meals to over- so I can't even count the amount of people. We partnered with them in April. Since April, they have provided over 30,000 meals to my organization alone.

Brian: Wow. That's amazing. Go ahead.

Tanya: Every week since, I'm going to say since March, we have literally picked up and provided over £300,000 of food, and it's no exaggeration.

Brian: We will talk to Jose Andres on a Zoom event tomorrow night about World Central Kitchen and his work there. In our last minute or so, do you want to tell people how they can get in touch either if they want to make a donation or if they want to volunteer to the extent that you need volunteers or if they want your group's help?

Tanya: Sure, absolutely. We're located in Newark at 462 Sanford Avenue, the zip code is 07106. If you need to contact us through our website, it's www.treehouseculturalarts.com, or you can find us on social media at Tree House Cares. We have a cash app, it's Tree House Cares, or you can PayPal treehculturalarts.com.

Brian: Tanya Veltz, founder of Tree House Cultural Arts and Tree House Cares, one of our heroes of community well-being for 2020. Thank you so much for your work and thank you for sharing it with us.

Tanya: Thank you for having me. Have a wonderful day and be safe.

Brian: You too. The Brian Lehrer Show is produced by Lisa Alison, Mary Croke, Zoe Azulay, Amina Srna and Carl Boisrond. Zach Gottehrer-Cohen works on a daily podcast. Our interns are Dan Girma and Erica Scalise this fall, they're almost done. Megan Ryan is the head of live radio. Now is Juliana Fonda at the audio controls today. I'm Brian Lehrer.

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