NEW YORK CALLING: BEHIND THE SCENES

For many, New York is a city of constructed community -- people come from all over the world to join the rat race and seize new opportunities. But for all its imagery of dreams and ambition, it is also a city of inequality and division. As the COVID-19 pandemic reached New York, the areas hardest hit were an obvious link to communities that were already disadvantaged. Queens, which has the largest working class population among the five boroughs, soon became the epicenter of the disease.

New York City alone has 190,546 confirmed cases and 19,563 deaths attributed to COVID-19, as of May 12, 2020. These cases are not evenly distributed across race, class, and other social divisions. Preliminary data shows that black and Latino people are dying at double the rate of white people. 

Wealthy private hospitals are more able to access protective gear and testing equipment while others still rely on crowdfunding. Images circulated on social media of nurses making their own personal protective equipment (PPE) out of garbage bags at Mount Sinai shed light on the severity of equipment shortages in hospitals serving large segments of New York’s population.  Elmhurst, Queens is home to many immigrants, many of whom are poor and uninsured and dependent on a hospital system that is already overextended. Elmhurst Hospital was one of the hospitals forced to use refrigerated morgue trucks for the first time since 9/11 to house the deceased outside of the hospital due to limited space.  

Having relocated to New York from Los Angeles to pursue new personal and professional projects at the start of the pandemic, Dara Krausankas, Operations and Logistics for New York Calling, felt moved to act. Upon seeing a social media post about protective acrylic boxes manufactured in Tunisia to assist doctors in limiting contamination during operations from long-time friend, Katherine Li Johnson — art-dealer based in Tunis, Tunisia, and Queens-native — Krausankas reached out with an idea. Krausankas’ background in the fashion industry gave her valuable contacts in the same materials being used as PPE in hospitals around the world. 

Krausankas and Johnson established New York Calling and assembled a team of 9 in 3 different cities from their personal and professional contacts in the creative field to use their niche expertise in new ways for the COVID-19 crisis. The team decided that manufacturing 3-D printed face shields would be a low-cost, high impact way to support their local communities. “We’re not a factory,” says Krausankas, “The idea is never to be moving mass volumes of it… But I think the idea is just to build that sense of community. And be like, ‘We’re here for you. We got you.’”

In the three months since they started, New York Calling has distributed over 3,000 face shields, just shy of their original goal of 5,000, which they plan to exceed soon. With funding from individual donors through social media, and matched grants from PayPal, the team is prepared to expand their operations beyond the 22 hospitals they are already serving. Donated time and printing equipment from industry contacts have been essential to supporting their mission. 

The work of New York Calling taps into a shared sense of the loss of community life, work, and social distancing around the pandemic, but strives to rebuild and expand the definition of community through mutual aid. Despite the gruesome statistics of the pandemic, it has forced us to rethink how we can serve our communities and create support networks that may permanently reformulate our social relationships. 

Watch the short film above to learn more about New York Calling.