Many in Baltimore’s struggling Cherry Hill enclave could have gone hungry amid COVID. But a small band of neighborhood activists stepped up.

On a cold March Saturday afternoon last year, three community activists showed up one by one to the empty school in Cherry Hill. They’d been called by an elder of their historically Black neighborhood in South Baltimore. For several weeks, Michael Middleton had been tracking the news of COVID-19 as it spread around the globe. Now the disease had surfaced in Maryland.

“All I could think was: What if it comes here? Do we have the resources to survive this?” says Middleton, 71, who grew up in the neighborhood. While Baltimore had yet to report a single case of COVID-19, with 26 confirmed cases across the state, Middleton feared it wouldn’t be long before the virus hit Cherry Hill.