From Boston to Houston: 1,800 miles for Hurricane Harvey Relief

Hello! My name is Stella Eliopoulos. This past summer, I was able to spend a couple weeks in the heart of Manhattan with the Summer Academy of the School of the New York Times. I was accepted into the Food Culture intensive program, taught by the established Gwen Hyman, a James Beard Award nominee and wife of award-winning chef Andrew Carmellini. I met students from all over. My best friend from the class was from Houston.

The program ended but I continued to keep in touch with my circle of friends. We’d talk about how much we missed the city and each other, and how much we’d prefer to be back in Manhattan rather than facing the upcoming school year. Around the time school started again, Hurricane Harvey hit Houston. I saw daily news updates and images online, but I wasn’t able to recognize the extent of the hurricane until my friend from Houston began to mention its impact, talking about how she was out of school for a couple weeks and sending pictures of the flood damage at her friends houses. The more I heard about her first-hand experience of the hurricane, the more I realized how detached we are from disasters like these unless we are being immediately impacted.

At this time, I had been trying to think of an idea for this year’s CCSR project. The Center for Citizenship and Social Responsibility is a club that requires each student to plan an extended service project designed to benefit the community. The mission statement of the club, combined with my newfound sympathy, inspired me to create a project that would help victims of Hurricane Harvey. I designed and executed a large, school-wide donation drive that gathered items like clothing, nonperishable foods, and toiletries. I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of donated goods I received.

After the drive ended, my advisor told me I needed to get into contact with an organization that would come to the school to help collect and transport the goods, because as a fairly new, non-profit organization, CCSR lacked the funds to ship everything to Texas. Looking at it optimistically, this was kind of a good problem to have because it meant we collected so many things! But now we needed to figure out how to get the goods where they needed to go. For a month I reached out to organizations, but to no avail. Each new prospective idea was a dead end; even the Red Cross was unable to help.

It began to seem like there was no way to get the donations to Houston. My submaster approached me and mentioned that he wrote a letter to Channel 5 about my project. It turned out that they were interested in interviewing me about my endeavors, so I needed a solution! My window of time was running out.

I sat down with my dad to think of an answer. He was able to reach out to a contact that he had made on a recent business trip to Houston, who was able to give us a destination for the goods. The 3rd and 5th wards had gotten the brunt of the devastation, so we were using our contact’s church as an outlet of distribution. Even if it meant trekking 1,800 miles by ourselves, these goods were getting to Houston. We rented a 10-foot U-Haul truck and decided to leave Sunday, November 5, planning to spend roughly three days making the drive and arriving in Houston on Tuesday the 7th. We’d spend Wednesday distributing the goods and return that night via JetBlue.

We ended up with a solid resolution and a way to get the goods to Houston. It hadn’t been easy, but I was prepared to undergo the challenges. It was important to me that this project be carried out, and I knew that by giving up and giving away the goods to a local organization, where I’m sure they would’ve been appreciated, Houston needed them too. Even though media coverage of Harvey damage had ended, citizens were still feeling its effects and it was important that I helped in whatever way I could. This is the story of my three day trip from Boston to Houston: 1,800 miles for Hurricane Harvey Relief!!