City Harvest
With rising inflation and an economy still recovering, food insecurity has grown across the city. WFUV’s Madison Colombo spoke with volunteer organization City Harvest, about how they're working to feed the most vulnerable:
Colombo: So what is City Harvest?
Granger: City Harvest is New York’s first and largest food rescue organization, so we started back in 1982. We rescue food from all types of food related businesses where that food would otherwise go in the trash. So, it's perfectly good food, we focus on nutritious food, most of what we rescue is fresh produce. And we work with 400 partners around the 5 boroughs to get that food out to the community.
Colombo: Tell me a little about your most recent campaign, the "Feed our Kids" drive?
Granger: The "Feed our Kids" food drive is one of our largest annual food drives, where we engage schools, businesses, individuals across the city to collect food for City Harvest…It has the focus of raising kid friendly nutritious food, specifically for children, before the school year is up. We know free meals that kids would normally get in school might be harder to come by.
Colombo: And how has the need for food grown since the pandemic?
Granger: We do know that food insecurity in children has gone up a lot since the pandemic. One of the cleartest stats is that 1 in 4 New York City children is struggling with food insecurity since the pandemic has begun. So with City Harvest specifically, we worked with our community partners last year to serve nearly 8 million meals to children and their families specifically. And that as a point of comparison that is over double pre-pandemic levels. So we know the need has gone up, especially with rising grocery prices, rising gas prices. As we know the food budget is usually cut first.
The feed our kids drive ended earlier this month, but you can still get involved with City Harvest’s upcoming food drives at the link below.
