Students find ways to help during the pandemic
The COVID-19 crisis has brought disruption, loss, and jarring change, but it has also fired in many students the desire to help and inspired creative ways to make a difference. Shortly after Isabella Di Pietro ’20 returned home to New York last month, Mayor Bill de Blasio ordered restaurants and bars in the city, the nation’s pandemic epicenter, to shut down, except for take-out and delivery business. That decision shook through Di Pietro’s family, their Tarallucci e Vino restaurants, and all of their workers. “I was mourning the end of my senior year, and then came back to New York, and it hit me just how bad things were when my father had to lay off 95 of his 102 employees” and temporarily close four of his five locations, said Di Pietro, a history and literature concentrator. Soon after, a friend in Toronto reached out and asked whether she could pay to have...