Page 7 - BusinessWest January 6, 2021

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always come forward and stepped up at especially challenging times to meet greater and often different needs.
With that, Mina offered some history lessons. During World War II, for example, the agency, historically linked very closely with the Red Cross, worked to provide a number of services to returning veterans, and in the case of the local chapter, there was a specific focus on helping to reunite families broken apart by the war, and then help them assimilate to a very changed landscape.
“There was a lot of upheaval back home,” he said. “The men were off fighting overseas, the women were in factory jobs ... there was a very different kind of assimilation. When a lot of these men came home, their wives, who were basically homemakers prior to them leaving, many of them had good jobs and careers in facto- ries. This wasn’t something that any of them were used to seeing.
“When the men came back, there was a great amount of adjustment that had to take place,” he went on. “The women had
“The names have changed, the faces have changed, but the work is the same.”
PAUL MINA
to go back to their previous domestic role because the men had to get their jobs back to go back to work. There was a lot of assimilat- ing, and that’s when philanthropy really took off because, now that women had been outside the home, they were involved in many, many things they hadn’t been involved in before, charity being one of them.”
That’s just one example, he said, noting that the agency has stepped up during other periods of turbulence, change, and need, providing help with everything from administering the polio vac- cine in the 1950s to supplying food to the many who needed it
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during the Great Depression.
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Bringing things right up to the present, Mina noted that, in
recent years, the agency has added new services and new ways to
Printing
help those in need, with everything from prescription savings to
financial-literacy efforts to a Mass 211 hotline and its companion suicide-prevention ‘call-to-talk’ line.
And during this pandemic, UWPV, which serves Hampden County, Granby, and South Hadlaeyd, hlaesYcontinued that pattern of stepping up.
Indeed, it created a COVIPD-r19inretlienfgfund that including the
awarding of grants to roughly 40 organizations, bringing a truck-
load of 5,000 hot meals to the Food Bank of Western Massachu-
setts, delivering another truckload of food-relief boxes (20 pounds
per box) to the Holyoke Boys & Girls Club for distribution through-
out the city, an initiative called Project Toybox that brought 15,000 new toys to affiliated agencies across the region for distribution to young people, and even a drive-up Halloween event at the TD Banknorth building in downtown Springfield, which served to fill a void left by formal and informal bans on trick-or-treating (more on some of these later).
For this issue, BusinessWest talked with Mina about the many things being celebrated as this agency celebrates this milestone, and how the work being carried out during the pandemic is in many ways simply the latest chapter in a century-old story of meeting needs within the community.
Past Is Prologue
To emphasize his repeated points about how things have changed over the past century or so — and how they haven’t — Mina pulled a clipping from the pile he had collected, an adver- tisement of sorts for something called the ‘Charity Chest,’ and pointed to the date, 1918, and then the headline over the piece:
“Charity is not a pocket for the shiftless to dip into,” it read, with the subhead “Far from it. Charity is a long ways from being a lazy man’s paradise.”
Mina noted that this was a reference to how many looked upon
BusinessWest
FEATURE
JANUARY 6, 2021 7
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