Before COVID-19 hit New York City, Brooklynite Juana Garcia was employed as a house cleaner, and her husband and 18-year-old son both had restaurant jobs. Then, the family Garcia worked for moved to the country, one of the restaurants closed, and the other laid people off because business was slow. Now, all three members of the Garcia household are unemployed.
Garcia, who moved to the U.S. from Mexico five years ago, says she and her family are looking for work. But in the meantime, she’s making weekly trips to the St. John’s Bread & Life food pantry near where she lives in Bed-Stuy.
“Thank God we have this support,” she said, standing outside St. John’s with her son and the two bags of groceries she’d just picked up Tuesday morning. “If this wasn’t here, I don’t know what would happen to us.”
At St. John’s, customers no longer make selections from a digital menu of food items and pick them up inside, as they did prior to the pandemic. For safety reasons, the pantry now distributes pre-packed produce, canned goods, juice, and other kitchen staples, giving away an average of 450 bags of food daily, in addition to meals from the soup kitchen.
There’s often a line stretching down the block, as there was Tuesday morning, says Sister Marie Sorenson, associate executive director of the hunger-focused nonprofit.
“Some people have been registered for our food pantry prior [to the pandemic],” she said, “but we also get a whole lot of new people each day.”
With the economic impact of COVID-19 ratcheting up food insecurity, the city’s food pantries and soup kitchens have seen 65% more people this year than they did last year, according to a new report from the group Hunger Free America. The city has estimated that some 2 million New Yorkers went hungry this year because of the pandemic, about double the number of those experiencing hunger in 2019.
Food insecurity in New York was already on the rise in recent years, with the city’s pantries and soup kitchens seeing 10% more people in 2019 than 2018. But this year’s dramatic increase in demand for emergency food, along with shifts in how people can safely access food, has forced nonprofits and community groups addressing hunger to find ways to quickly scale up, forge new partnerships, and make major changes to their operations in order to meet people’s needs. Despite these efforts, some have still reported being unable to fully meet the demand in their communities.
Before the pandemic, Jon Harper was director of operations and facilities at the Henry Street Settlement’s Abrons Art Center, a 40,000-square-foot space with three theaters on the Lower East Side. With indoor theater off limits during the pandemic, the nonprofit converted the space into a food distribution center and Harper’s title became acting director of emergency response food distribution. The center now delivers about 750 bags of groceries to people in need each week and provides about 200 boxes of food a week for pick-up.
“It’s definitely the right thing to be doing and the right way to be using our spaces,” Harper says. “The Henry Street Settlement has been around for 127 years serving this neighborhood and community and this is the way they need us most right now.”
Some of the smaller food distribution programs have shut down during the pandemic, according to Hunger Free America’s survey, but others have launched or scaled up.
Father Mike Lopez, a priest with the All Saints Church in Ridgewood, Queens started the Hungry Monk Rescue Truck as a homeless outreach program three years ago and partnered with Trader Joe’s to launch a weekly pop-up food pantry before COVID-19 hit. Now, the all-volunteer operation sources food from City Harvest and supports seven different pantries, serving some 10,000 families a week, Lopez says. Many of the people Hungry Monk helps feed have also become volunteers, as have “new gentrifiers” in the area.
“I keep saying I want to be done with this already,” Lopez said on a phone call taken while out making deliveries Tuesday, “but the need keeps growing.”
Even the handful of larger, more established food distribution centers in the city have had to adapt. One of many changes the West Side Campaign Against Hunger had to make was to find lots of new volunteers, since many of the existing volunteers were over 65 and couldn’t continue to work safely. “We had to totally dismantle the program from what it was and partner with New York Cares, which is a real leader in New York City in terms of volunteerism,” Erika Freund, chief development and communications officer at West Side Campaign Against Hunger, said. The group has added some 1,200 new volunteers during the pandemic.
The West Side Campaign Against Hunger has been able to meet the increase in demand during the pandemic with new donations from individuals on the Upper West Side and charitable foundations that have shifted their focus to hunger, Freund says.
But more than a third of the nearly 200 pantries and soup kitchens that responded to Hunger Free America’s survey said they have had to turn people away, reduce portion sizes and/or cut their hours this year because of limited resources.
The food bank I volunteer at on the UWS is seeing THREE TIMES the normal numbers it gets in November. Line is often two blocks long for hours. If you are in the position to donate to your local food bank pls consider doing so. https://t.co/wE5zso8RpI
— Glynnis MacNicol (@GlynnMacN) November 21, 2020
The Henry Street Settlement has hundreds of people on its waitlist for deliveries, Harper said.
And what began as a disaster relief effort is now a suite of emergency food services that Henry Street Settlement has to figure out how to sustain long-term, said David Garza, the nonprofit’s CEO.
“We’ve been fortunate enough to get both increased government support and increased private funding, but as we go into the endurance phase we do have concerns about sustaining that,” he said. “The economic trauma and impact [of the pandemic] is probably going to last multiple years.”
The economic downturn will affect not only demand for emergency food, but also the budget the city has to support organizations addressing hunger, Garza said. “We definitely anticipate resources becoming increasingly scarce and competition becoming greater for shrinking resources.”
Food pantries and other emergency food resources are supposed to be a last resort to supplement programs such as the federally funded Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP (formerly known as food stamps), which gives people who qualify money to buy food themselves. SNAP enrollment has spiked during the pandemic, growing by about 15% between March and September, when some 1.7 million New Yorkers were enrolled. But some people don’t qualify for SNAP because of their immigration status (the program is only available to U.S. citizens and limited categories of legal residents), some make slightly too much money to qualify, and others find that SNAP doesn’t fully cover their household needs, says Joel Berg, CEO of Hunger Free America.
Berg and other food security advocates are pushing for more federal funding for SNAP as well as other federal assistance to help people who are struggling to put food on the table.
“Our belief is that food pantries are the least economically efficient way to fight hunger,” Berg told Gothamist in an interview. “It’s far more efficient to give people more cash through government stimulus, expanded unemployment checks and more SNAP benefits.”
In its report, Hunger Free America lauded the city and state, saying they have “worked rapidly to meet the growing need for food” during the pandemic.
A 15% increase in SNAP funding has been included in the federal COVID-19 relief bill known as the HEROES Act. But while two versions of the bill have passed the House, it keeps stalling in the Republican-controlled Senate.
“[On] Thanksgiving, families across New York will actually go hungry,” US Senator Kristin Gilibrand, said at a remote press conference Hunger Free America hosted Wednesday afternoon. “But instead of providing them with the support they need, Senator [Mitch] McConnell...has put the Senate in recess and walked away from this problem.”
The HEROES Act shrank from $3.4 trillion to $2.2 trillion between the first and second versions, but McConnell, the Senate majority leader, said earlier this month that around $500 billion in relief would be more appropriate.
Gilibrand and New York Congressman Joe Morelle, also hope to pass the HOPE Act, a bill they introduced in January that would streamline the process of applying for and receiving SNAP benefits.