Amid the local coronavirus pandemic, food and resources have been scarce at many D.C.-area grocery stores. Lines snake around corners of Trader Joe’s locations and shoppers crowd aisles to grab toilet paper the moment store attendants drop it on the shelves.

But for the city’s historically underserved communities, the coronavirus emergency echoes longstanding issues of food access. This is especially true east of the Anacostia River, where there are only three major grocery stores to cover all of wards 7 and 8 (a total of 149,750 people). A Ward 7 Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner, VJ Johnson, spoke with DCist last week after visiting the Southeast Safeway in Good Hope Marketplace. What he saw wasn’t much different from store crowds during previous emergencies.

“I don’t know if it impacted [that Safeway] any different than I’ve experienced any other time,” Johnson said. “Long lines are always there, so I can’t say that the corona scare has negatively impacted that Safeway. It was business as usual to me.”

[Read the latest updates about coronavirus in the region]

Some advocates have pointed out that the demand will only increase, placing greater pressure on grocery stores already serving more than their fair share of residents. Groups of neighbors have stepped up to fill in the gaps, sharing resources and information as anxiety over the coronavirus outbreak mounts. By Thursday and Friday of last week, organizers had started mutual aid programs and shared forms for people to sign up to share food and toiletries.

A collective of entities citywide—among them, Black Lives Matter, Collective Action for Safe Spaces, Bread for the City, Black Youth Project 100, the Peace House, and a number of public and charter schools—have joined forces to create the D.C. Mutual Aid Network for Ward 7 and 8. For those who are homebound, a hotline was set up on Monday for volunteers to deliver food and supplies to residents’ doorsteps. (More info on that and other resources below).

“There’s nothing I can call on to compare this [pandemic] to,” says Samantha Davis, executive director of Black Swan Academy, which has helped lead the mutual aid program. “However, these are extremely interesting times for us all. What we’ve been trying to get across to folks from wards 7 and 8, and citywide, is that we want everyone to be safe. We want everyone to protect themselves, their families, and others.”

Davis says organizers have taken three main approaches for mutual aid: launching in-person stations to provide extra food and supplies at public school sites where student can get free meals; meeting people where they are, especially seniors who can’t travel to supply sites; and providing childcare for those who can’t work remotely (which Davis says is the “one thing we are still grappling with and haven’t quite figured out an answer to yet.”)

While several businesses are offering free meals to kids, many of those are unreachable for residents east of the Anacostia River, says Nikki Peele, a marketing consultant who runs the blog Congress Heights on the Rise. She’s been collecting job listings, information about which schools are collecting food for families in wards 7 and 8, and distributing information about which businesses east of the river remain open.

“We are only as strong as a city as our weakest ward,” Peele says. “The most under-resourced communities always have to be the most resourceful, and now they’re going to have to be even more resourceful.”

Peele notes that there’s a lot of misinformation spreading online about the virus—some are taking it seriously, while others continue to treat it largely like a joke. A healthy amount of fear is necessary, she says, to ensure that the community can survive: “I obviously have a lot of faith in the community’s strength and ability to come together, but I also have a lot of concerns because their challenges are three and four-fold.”

Navigating all of the separate GoFundMe’s and social media posts can be overwhelming, so for anyone who doesn’t know where to start, there are a few helpful spreadsheets and comprehensive Google Docs going around. Here are a few resources to get your started:

• Ward 7 and 8 hotline: 202-630-0336
• A D.C. mutual aid spreadsheet with a collection of mutual aids across the city.
• Collective Action for Safe Spaces’ COVID-19 toolkit with one-pagers in multiple languages.
• Black Lives Matter’s citywide mutual aid Facebook page and East of the River GoFundMe.
• Black Swan Academy’s mutual aid flyer and monetary donation link.
• Congress Heights on the Rise’s resource page which lists meal programs and distance learning tools for parents.
• The People’s School of D.C.’s coronavirus general resource page.