Glen Cove High School has been holding food drives and making deliveries to families in need since March. The school collaborated with the local Sikh community, with efforts led by Jasleen Sabharwal.
Jasleen Sabharwal has always been inspired by her faith to help those in need — one of the essential values of Sikhism is selfless service. “The biggest summation of Sikhism is brotherhood and to love everyone equally,” she said.
At the beginning
of the coronavirus outbreak,Jasleen Sabharwal
started off by buying hand sanitizer, face masks and gowns to deliver to
rehabilitation centers. Then, she and some friends started delivering
home-cooked meals to hospitals.
Jasleen Sabharwal works with other Sikh volunteers during Glen Cove High School's food drive on Wednesday.
After doing this
for some time, she felt like a need had been met, but didn’t want to stop
there. So, she took to social media to find out about food drives going on in
her area.
That’s how she discovered the food pantry and deliveries to local families in her community of Glen Cove. Every Wednesday, a team of faculty, students, alumni and community members gathered at Glen Cove High School to put together packages of food for local families struggling during the pandemic.
Sabharwal knew she wanted to be involved in a hands-on way.“I could easily write a check of $100 to go and give somebody,” she said, “but part of our religion is to not only donate; our religion tells us to go out and do something.”
So, she
mobilized a team of volunteers: “We are Sikh women who carry out [our] faith by
doing service to all, which is without any questions.”
Her group, which
she calls "Volunteers Without Walls", collected donations every two weeks,
Sabharwal said. Once they’ve raised about $700 to $1,000,one of the
volunteers, a caterer, purchased food in bulk from Restaurant Depot. By
doing it that way, they've steadily provided food contributions to Glen
Cove's pantry for months.
Many of their
monetary donations have come from people they know through the Sikh Gurdwaras in Glen Cove and Hicksville. She has also received donations from
Indian communities on Long Island.
Glen Cove High
School assistant Principal Allen Hudson III leads this effort. volunteers
started making food deliveries to local families. Each package
included canned goods, pasta, cereal and produce, Hudson said.
“Jasleen put me
in contact with other members of the Sikh temple, and a lot of them became our
drivers,” he said.
He added that a
typical donation to the pantry usually includes “two or three bags of food,”
but Sabharwal and her volunteers would show up with “a trunkload of food.”
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