City & State: Queens Heroes
The COVID-19 crisis that unfolded at Elmhurst Hospital earlier this year hit home for Francisco Moya, who represents the surrounding neighborhood as a member of the New York City Council. Moya, who was born at the hospital and worked there years ago in business development and external affairs, recalls the “eerie feeling” he would get seeing the lines of people waiting in the rain outside the hospital, not far from the refrigerated trucks with the bodies of those who fell victim to the pandemic.
What hit Moya the hardest was hearing from the family of a 12-year-old boy who had lost his mother to COVID-19 and would soon lose his father as well. The boy’s family – immigrants from Ecuador – did not have money for the burial and were not eligible to apply for the $900 in assistance provided by the city’s Human Resources Administration due to their undocumented status.
“When that happens, it’s like, how can you not get emotional?” recalls Moya, whose family is also from Ecuador. (He became the nation’s first Ecuadorian-American elected to public office in 2010, as a member of the State Assembly.) “I reached out to people I knew and we were able to help.”
This experience inspired Moya to help others who find themselves in the same situation, spearheading an effort to establish an emergency burial fund with help from Corey Johnson and the New York City Mayor’s Office. Announced in May, the fund is available to low-income and undocumented New Yorkers, and provides up to $1,700 in funeral expenses as well as reimbursements of up to $3,400 in funeral costs.
Moya says the coronavirus pandemic “has shown the inequities – housing, racial, socioeconomic inequities – that exist in the city of New York,” and has hit immigrant communities particularly hard. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only 16.2% of Latino workers are able to telecommute.
“These are the individuals that are delivering our food while we’re here at home,” Moya says. “They’re the ones manning the cash registers and stocking the aisles at our local supermarket.”