When the pandemic hit last March, Christopher Donohue, who was a senior at Red Hook High School at the time, worked with Dan Budd to start up Red Hook Responds to address the ever-growing needs of people in the community impacted by the pandemic. Chris set up schedules for volunteers and helped out with the website, as well as provided transport and organized “neighbor chats” to bring people a sense of comfort. Many Red Hook residents found that with the pandemic, food insecurity and trouble getting necessary medication was rampant. To help address this need, Red Hook Responds provided meal and pharmacy deliveries. Soon, Chris realized that RHR not only provided people with necessary services, but it provided volunteers with an opportunity to get out of their houses during quarantine and ready to have something to do. “There were crazy different demographics of people,” he recalls. “College students working with seventy-year-olds!”
Now, Chris is a freshman at Middlebury College in Vermont, with a newly declared global health minor and potential sociology major. Middlebury funds four weeks of unpaid internships, and for this summer Chris is returning to Red Hook Responds. With his current global health and data science classes, he hopes to be able to make some sort of report for Red Hook Responds and is excited to see what comes next.