Page 22 - BusinessWest September 14 2020

RE-INTRODUCING THE 2020 >>
Ronn Johnson
Meeting Community Needs Has Become Even More Critical During a Difficult Year
When times got tougher for struggling families back in March, they appreciated any resources they could access,
from emergency food supplies to educational assistance to ... lotion?
“With children being home every day, parents were super stressed, and they needed a way to manage it all,” said Ronn Johnson, president and CEO of Martin Luther King Jr. Family Services Inc. in Springfield.
“We said, ‘let’s deliver pampering products to these women — lotions, bath oils, shower gels, facial scrubs — things they can use to pamper themselves with on occasion, once the children are down,” he told BusinessWest earlier this month. “With the response we got, it was like we’d given them a pot of gold — they said, ‘these are things I’ve never been able to get for myself.’”
Those items were complemented by deliveries of hard-to-find cleaning supplies and paper products. But they certainly didn’t replace the bread-and-butter services of the organization, from educational resources to healthy-food access.
The pandemic, in fact, only laid bare a growing need for such services — and new ways of delivering them.
“It was a tremendous challenge to pivot on a dime. We’ve had to restructure ourselves from being an after-school resource to being a remote-learning center,” Johnson said,
noting that the organization serves many
economically disadvantaged families
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BusinessWest
Johnson
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Photo by Leah Martin Photography