As restrictions eased, SISU Staff partnered with the Lawrence Police Department to deliver ice cream in hard hit neighborhoods. Lawrence Prospera has never been an organization to shy away from adversity, and the spring of 2020 proved no different. Lawrence Prospera’s nutritional services and the SISU staff compiled and delivered weekly grocery boxes for Lawrence Family Development Charter School and SISU families. Quintana and SISU staff adopted “Zoom” for programming and used this platform to help address the brain drain caused by months of being stuck at home. The SISU Outreach Team turned to online video games to conduct street-level outreach, and joined with the Lawrence Police Department’s Community Outreach Department to deliver ice cream from the LPD ice cream truck to hard hit neighborhoods on some of the summer’s hottest Friday afternoons. As the fiscal year ended, Lawrence Prospera began planning for re-opening and the new normal. The Lawrence Prospera facilities staff was trained in sanitizing and maintaining a building during a pandemic, and plexiglass barriers were installed in offices to limit face-to-face contact. The SISU Screen Print Shop has begun using their resources to print customized masks for the organization as well as for the Lawrence Family Development Charter School. Threats of increased Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activity in heavily Staff used Zoom to replace in-person programming during the lockdown immigrant communities and policies like the “Public Charge” rule, which penalizes immigrants who have used forms of public assistance including Medicaid, contributed to untold numbers of immigrant parents disenrolling their U.S. citizen children from Medicaid and preventing them from seeking testing and/or medical assistance during the pandemic. www.healthaffairs.org (April 2020) LAWRENCE PROSPERA FY’2019–2020 ANNUAL REPORT PAGE 9
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