by Christopher S. Pineo
The resident services coordinator for the Fresh Pond Apartments at 362 and 364 Rindge Ave., spoke at the April 6 contributors meeting of The Alewife held at the back table of Porter Square Books.
“My job is as an advocate for the tenants,” said Scott Cole, who works for Federal Management, the management company for two of the three Rindge Towers.
“We really do want to work with the tenants and there have been some problems in the past but it’s such an incredible community over there,” he said.
“I’m not lying. There is a real concern for the tenants from the top, even in the Boston corporate office,” he said.
“I started working there in January,” he said. “We’re trying to work together with the tenants first time ever.”
Cole said his position was created in response to a list of problems that the apartment complex has faced in the past. “There is like a laundry list of things going on and we’re trying to address all of them.”
Cole, who speaks both Spanish and Somali and teaches English at the towers, said he has been attending the tenant association meetings to further identify the needs of the community. “I heard about all these problems and I read in The Alewife about all these meetings they have.”
City Councilor Anthony D. Galluccio, who is the chairman of the council’s housing committee, said he is pleased to see the way Cole interacts with the residents at the meetings. “Scott is a great addition to the community at the Fresh Pond Apartments.”
In 2000, when he was mayor, Galluccio convinced Federal to keep their two towers as affordable housing units, despite the financial incentives to take the towers into the private market.
Galluccio said he likes Cole, but he is taking a wait and see attitude. “People have been really impressed with him, but I want to see actions back up his words.”
Cole said his breakthrough with the tenants came at the February tenant association meeting.
“They asked me to come to the meeting and apparently that was the first time they had asked a member of the management to come to the meeting in 15 years,” he said. “They have them the second Tuesday of every month in the community room.”
Cole is also with the president of the tenants association as well, he said. “We have sat down many times we talk almost every week.”
The major problem facing his residents is poverty, he said.
“We’ve got a largely immigrant population working two jobs with families, and its too hard to put food on the table,” he said.
Cole said, “We’re talking to different non-profits in Boston and Cambridge to see if we can bring in an emergency food program, grocery supplication program, just to help them out a little bit with finances and what not.”
Federal is also developing a program with Fair Foods in Dorchester, he said. “They are an emergency grocery supplication program.”
The program picks up food products stores would regularly throw away, he said. “They take a lot of stuff that’s perishables that grocery stores can’t sell anymore but still its completely fine to eat,” he said.
“We will go pick it up and we’ll bring it to the tenants,” he said.
“They actually have this program called dollar bags and it is a bag of groceries and we sell them for a dollar,” said Cole.
“In each bag there is bread, some vegetables like drinks and dessert,” he said.
The program is not fully implemented yet and that he is interested to see how the program will work in practice, he said.
“So we did a sign up and we had 200 people sign up, which is really exciting,” he said. “I don’t really know what it is going to look like, so it could be kind of crazy,” he said.
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