THE PEOPLE’S ISSUE | SUMMER 2020
Meet Your Makers
Knowing What We Know Now
For JACK COMSTOCK at THE HOMESTEAD SCHOOL in Glen Spey, ‘Homestead’ isn’t just a name. His parents founded the Montessori school in 1978 when he was two years old. He grew up there, went to school there, and today, in addition to being Homestead’s assistant head of school and a teacher, it is also his home. He lives next door with his wife Nisha (also a Homestead teacher), their two children, and the permaculture homestead they are growing on their property. By ALEXANDRA MARVAR Photography MORIAH ASLAN
“WE WERE PROTOTYPING THE FIRST FEW DAYS, IN HEAVY PRODUCTION BY THE WEEKEND EARLY INTO THE NEXT WEEK, AND FROM THERE OUT, IT WAS FULL-ON”
In mid-March, as COVID-19 began to tear through New York City and hospitals were in dire need of P.P.E., one employee at Mount Sinai knew where to turn. She called her friends, Jack and Nisha. The school had 3D printers, and she knew that Jack knew how to run them.
Despite the mayhem of transitioning the school to online learning, Jack launched into a plan to supply as many hospital workers as humanly possible with 3D-printed protective face shields.
“We were prototyping the first few days, in heavy production by the weekend early into the next week, and from there out, it was full-on,” Jack said. “I was on a mission. It took an hour to print each piece, so I adjusted my routine to be over there loading as late as I could, 11:00 or midnight, and then I’d be up at 5:30 getting a new one running for the day.”
He realized he needed more 3D printers, and the community heard his call. Parents donated them, local libraries loaned them, Homestead purchased more of them, and the Stourbridge Project coworking space in Huntsdale came through with yet a couple more. Over the course of days, they had multiplied the size of their printing operation fivefold. “We took over an entire schoolroom at the upper elementary and spread out our production,” he said.
While Jack ran the printers, Nisha was the contact for hospitals, the Department of Health, and grantmaking foundations. A fellow Homestead teacher coordinated production with the help of other school staff.
Essentially, they had launched a small business in a matter of days, with no budget, creating a business plan in real-time, working around the clock to manufacture and ship what amounted to more than 2,000 face shields in a matter of weeks. This, in the middle of a pandemic that collapsed the global supply chain.
When the plastic filament they required to keep producing face shields ran low, when inventory across the U.S. was back-ordered, when orders were getting delayed, or disappearing in transit, Jack and Nisha say the universe handed them a solution in the form of an unlikely savior: a direct line to the distribution heads at Amazon. When they then ran up against a seemingly hopeless elastic shortage, yet another solution materialized: an obscure old sewing supplier in New York City swept in with a stock seemingly no one else in the country was able to supply.
Jack’s printing operation first supplied hospital workers in New York City, like his friend’s colleagues at Mount Sinai. Once the Comstocks started outreach and learned the extent of local needs, they also equipped local hospitals: Bon Secours in Port Jervis, Crystal Run in Middletown, Orange Regional, plus local E.M.T.s, fire departments, Catholic Charities, and some nursing homes. When Catskill Regional got replacement ventilator elements that didn’t fit, Jack was able to print new parts that did, serving COVID-19 patients in emergency care.
Meanwhile, he worked to be there for his students. “Homestead has a theme each semester, and this spring’s theme was balance,” Jack said.
“It was amazing because our entire spring trimester was online, and we were trying to work with our students to maintain balance despite having a lot more screen time than we’re used to. I was thinking about it, and realizing what little balance I had,” he said. Wherever those extra reserves come from, they helped Jack find some semblance of balance, he said. “But, we definitely could not have maintained that pace.”
Who knows what quantity of “extra reserves” we each have. Who can say what month of 21-hour workdays will make us better and stronger and what will shatter us? Who knows how much help is enough, and when to stop helping, if everyone needs help. In his Free Range essay in this issue, Jack wonders: “Why, in a nation with so much wealth, did so many of us have to take on the second job of ‘rescue worker’?”
When the community mobilized to work together to meet the call of his friend at Mount Sinai, and soon after, the calls of local frontline workers, Jack found gratification, learning, and beauty. But he writes, he was left asking: “How is it that time and again the system fails us and continues to reward those who already have so much?”
For now, the system that didn’t fail is the system of community that fuels the Comstocks’ homestead. For now, the peak of the crisis has passed. And for now, the Comstocks have other riddles to solve, like how best to bring children back to the classroom, and what form a post-pandemic classroom could take. But after now, it will be hard to forget the systemic flaws and fractures that the pandemic is laying bare, and it will be hard for Jack to shake the idea: Maybe we have been putting our stock in the wrong system all along.
“WE CREATED A NEW COMPANY OVERNIGHT”
BRIAN FACQUET LIKES MAKING THINGS. He was a human resources technology consultant until one day, he wasn’t. “I Googled how to make alcohol. And now, that’s what we have here,” he said of Prohibition Distillery in Roscoe, which he co-founded, and where he and his team have been distilling award-winning spirits for nearly a decade. “We maxed everything out. We hired at least nine new people, spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on inventory in a week-or-two period. We created a new company overnight,” he said. “We were doing this in real-time.” The product is no-frills: no scent, spartan packaging, just the formulation laid out by the W.H.O., to the letter. But, a former Navy veteran, Facquet, is driven by an appreciation for balance and quality. He didn’t need it to smell lovely. He wanted to make something that was utilitarian and reliable.
And for it to really come to the rescue, he knew it needed to be big. “We realized people need volume,” said Facquet, who has been working seven days a week, often from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m., getting the operation off the ground. “We didn’t get all caught up in designing little bottles. We focused on five-gallon buckets with pumps.” He wasn’t wrong. In the past four months, they’ve turned out bulk shipments of hand sanitizer for buyers from the Visiting Nurses of New York to the Staten Island Ferry to the Navajo Nation. He takes pride in that. For his quick problem-solving, the distillery was even thanked in a speech on the White House lawn. The profit margin on the sanitizer is low, very low. But it was what people needed. “We’ve just been helping wherever we can and however we can,” he said. Soon, revised federal regulations will force independent beverage distilleries like Facquet’s to use only beverage-grade ingredients, which are much more expensive. Due to pandemic supply chain issues, much harder to come by, to boot. So, big companies will step back into the game, and Prohibition Distillery will get back to business as usual — to the extent possible. “We wish we could continue [with sanitizer],” he said, “but it’s going to get harder and harder to make, and I’m so happy to get back to what I like doing. As much as we were happy to pivot and help who we could, we’ll be happy to pivot back.”
“PEOPLE WERE STRUGGLING PRIOR TO THE
CRISIS, AND THINGS ARE ONLY GETTING WORSE”
KIRSTEN AND SIMS FOSTER’S IDEA WAS SIMPLE: Get kids excited about real, good food. “We were painfully aware that Sullivan County for years, has ranked the second most unhealthy county in the state,” said Kirsten. With Sims, she runs Foster Supply Co. and oversees several of the Catskills’ premier hotels and eateries. “We associate this area with an abundance of healthy, natural, local foods, open space, all of these wonderful things. There are a lot of problems in our county, but this one, we thought — being familiar with food and the restaurant business — we could maybe make a difference.” The couple co-founded Livingston Manor-based nonprofit A Single Bite, which since 2016, has run classroom programs teaching Sullivan County eighth-graders the difference between fresh and processed foods, introducing them to new food experiences, and helping to make good food exciting. But when the pandemic arrived in the region, their classroom programs came to a halt. At the same time, they realized a more immediate need was at hand.
Before the novel coronavirus crisis, Kirsten said 30 percent of Sullivan County children were food insecure, “which means any given day there is an uncertainty of whether or not they can get a meal,” she said. “That statistic, especially as a mom, I find it hard to come to terms with. Between that and knowing that the only meal these kids can rely on is the meal given to them in the cafeteria in school, which is now closed,” Kirsten said, “we had to do something.” When schools shut down in March, Sullivan County’s school districts continued to provide free lunch, and sometimes also breakfast, to children who qualified. The families in need were identified through this existing list. Knowing that one school-aged student who needs a meal likely indicates a whole extended family that may also have less than they need, A Single Bite stepped in to kick their offerings into high gear.
“We piggy-backed on what they were doing to provide a family meal to an entire household,” Kirsten said. “Being in the restaurant business and relying on incredible purveyors and farmers who saw 99% of business disappear. We realized we could help replace at least some of the restaurants that stopped purchasing from them and feed our neighbors with food grown and raised by our neighbors.” With chickens, venison, vegetables, farm fresh eggs, and other locally sourced food, and with the help of Foster Supply Co.’s chefs who were on payroll and waiting for restaurants to reopen, A Single Bite prepared fresh restaurant-quality meals, sometimes multiple meals per week, for families in need throughout the county. Now they are distributing as many as 2,500 servings each week.
The positive COVID-19 case numbers may be dropping, but that doesn’t mean hungry families’ needs are diminishing. Instead of reverting all their focus to their initial classroom programs, A Single Bite has only ramped up its home meal delivery, hiring an executive chef and settling into a commercial kitchen. Fueled by community donations, at the cost of five dollars per person per meal, they distribute almost $10,000 in food per week to Sullivan County families. “I don’t know if we thought about how long we’d be doing this, but people were struggling prior to the crisis, and things are only getting worse. At this point, we have no intention of stopping the meal program. We don’t see how we could, knowing what we know now. Frankly, the system and the government have failed to take care of people, and somebody has to.”