Food Bank For New York City Celebrates Graduation of Third Annual Masterclass Cohort

Food Bank For New York City’s 2022 Pride Month theme is #ProudlyFed. For us, this means we not only serve the estimated 1 in 5 LGBTQ+ New Yorkers struggling to put food on the table, but that we do it with joy, love, and pride. We also recognize that food insecurity in the LGBTQ+ community is often compounded by things like workplace discrimination, healthcare inequality, and housing insecurity. A citywide survey conducted in 2017 found that over 18 percent of LGBTQ+ New Yorkers had experienced homelessness, with these numbers soaring up to 60 percent for individuals who identified as Black, Hispanic, transgender, or gender non-conforming. Over 20 percent of respondents also reported that they had been denied a promotion, not hired, or been forced to resign from a job due to their sexual orientation or gender identity. To address these diverse and varied challenges, we partner with and distribute food to community-based organizations that not only feed our LGBTQ+ neighbors, but work to provide them with free legal services, educational opportunities, healthcare enrollment assistance, and nutrition workshops. One such organization is Make the Road New York, a Food Bank member agency that serves immigrant, working-class, and transgender communities throughout Brooklyn and Queens. Make the Road doesn’t shy away from difference; on the contrary, the group finds power in bringing together New Yorkers from all different walks of life to advocate for collective change. To learn more about the group’s unique approach to service, we spoke with Mateo Guerrero-Tabares, the Trans Justice and Leadership Program Manager at Make the Road New York. Mateo pictured at Make the Road New York’s office in Queens. Photo credit: Feeding America. Mateo found his way to Make the Road in 2010 after arriving in New York City as an undocumented minor. He began his journey as both a client and volunteer, receiving aid from the organization to adjust his immigration status and stay permanently in the United States. Make the Road quickly became a “political home” for Mateo and was one of the first public spaces in which he felt comfortable embracing his identity as a transgender man. As he told us: “It was very special to be able to say, ‘Mateo, he/they pronouns’ and be uplifted and cared for in such a beautiful way.” Volunteers working the weekly food distribution at Make the Road New York. Photo credit: Feeding America. Now, in his role as the organization’s Trans Justice and Leadership Program Manager, he’s working to bring that same level of solidarity and support to the immigrant and transgender New Yorkers he serves, especially when it comes to providing them with reliable access to fresh, nutritious food. In fact, Mateo started a special “bike brigade” at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic to deliver groceries to nearly 400 families a week. It was a way to sustain the sense of togetherness that has long fueled Make the Road’s mission to build a more equitable future for New York City’s most marginalized residents. “I want our members to be able to define what it means to exist in New York — and not just survive — but have a dignified life,” he said. “That sense of pride comes from a place of resiliency and community.” Mateo pictured at Make the Road New York’s office in Queens. Photo credit: Feeding America. We couldn’t be prouder to partner with and provide food to organizations like Make the Road New York that put our LGBTQ+ neighbors first. For more on how we serve these New Yorkers now and throughout the year, click this link. You can also donate directly to our Pride Month fundraising campaign to help raise crucial funds for organizations just like Make the Road. Give here. *** A special thanks to Feeding America for partnering with us on a suite of stories featuring LGBTQ-serving agencies in our extensive member network of over 800 food pantries, soup kitchens, and campus partners across the five boroughs. View the stories here.

At Food Bank, we are proud to be a grant recipient of the Grubhub Community Fund, which provides resources to organizations like ours to empower and support our neighbors. This Hunger Action Month, Grubhub has taken its partnership a step further by sponsoring our “Together We Rise” series, which features stories of resilience and strength from the folks who power our mission every day. One such person is Brett Swanson, the Head of Community Affairs and Social Impact at Grubhub, who spoke with us about what community means to him and how he stays motivated through tough times. Brett standing with Food Bank Senior Leadership at a pop-up food distribution during Hunger Action Month 2021. Where in NYC do you live? What’s something special about your neighborhood that people may not know? Greenpoint, Brooklyn. It gets its name from a piece of land jutting out into the East River that, to sailors passing by, literally appeared to be a "green point." The mid-to-late 1800s saw Greenpoint become a bustling center for industry, which drew many residents of Polish descent. What does community mean to you? It’s that bond that unifies all walks of life, and provides support to those most in need. What keeps you motivated when times get tough? Keeping things in perspective. We as individuals can sometimes be self-centered and narrow-minded, and helping our fellow community members helps alleviate the “world is against me” mentality. Standing with our neighbors and working with like-minded individuals is the easiest way to dig yourself out of a hole when times are tough. As inflation drives food, rent, and gas prices higher and higher across the city, how are you staying hopeful? Tough times can bring out the worst in people, but focusing on the positives, developing concrete goals, and putting plans into action allows me to constantly maintain hope. Yes, costs are high, but companies, non-profits, and city officials are rolling up their sleeves to see what they can do to help. I would like to thank city leadership for their constant support in the fight against food insecurity. We must be innovative and collaborative now more than ever, and Grubhub’s partnership with Food Bank aims to do just that. What do you rise for? I rise for unity and harmony. Food Bank For New York City’s “Together We Rise” series is presented by Grubhub, our Hunger Action Month partner whose immense generosity is enabling us to continue the work of feeding and nourishing ALL New Yorkers in these challenging times.

There exists in New York City a groundswell of green. It’s not located in Central or Prospect Park, nor is it located in the forests of The Bronx. This green lives in the nearly 100 acres of community gardens and farms planted across the five boroughs of the city. Rooted on rooftops and vacant lots, these greenspaces are vital sources of food, fellowship, and education for the communities they serve. They’re also in constant danger of being destroyed from gentrification, displacement, and development. In this blog post, we’re going to explore the history of urban agriculture in New York and talk about why it's so important to the fight against hunger in our city. We’ll also chat with The Campaign Against Hunger, a Food Bank member agency that currently operates two farms in Brooklyn. ''They were getting ready to take something away from our community, something too important to lose... I told them I was born poor, I live poor, and I’m going to die poor. I don’t beg. But these are for the community. I asked [the city] to help me.” Out of context, these words from a 1982 New York Times interview could be about anything: affordable housing, local grocery stores, schools, churches. But spoken by then 82-year-old activist and environmentalist Hattie Carthan, they were about trees, specifically the 1,500 trees she had spent her twilight years planting as the leader of the “Bedford-Stuyvesant Beautification Committee.” When Carthan first moved onto Vernon Avenue in 1953, it was a beautiful tree-lined street in the heart of Bed-Stuy. But over the course of a decade, all but three of the trees had died, thanks in large part to neglect from the city. To fight back against this deterioration, Carthan organized her neighbors into the T&T-Vernon Block Association. Together, they held a BBQ to raise funds for four trees, which, when planted, quickly died. But thankfully, a much sturdier seed had taken root. By 1966, the Beautification Committee was in full swing and breathing new life into Bed-Stuy. At its height, it powered over 100 different block associations, each of which took ownership of its respective trees. In addition to her duties as Committee chair, Carthan also taught classes on tree care and conservation to students in the neighborhood. She would then hire and pay these same students to be part of her “Neighborhood Tree Corps,” which oversaw the maintenance of the hundreds of ginkgos, sycamores, and honey locusts blooming in the borough. Though Carthan received occasional grant support from the city, the Committee was always run by and for the community. In truth, her trees didn’t just beautify the neighborhood... they saved it. Carthan’s work marked a major turning point for urban agriculture in New York City. Though victory gardens had been popular throughout the 1940s (yielding some 200 million pounds of fresh produce for New Yorkers during the war), they mostly faded away by the early 1950s. After that, the only farm gardens left were owned and operated by city parks. Carthan, then, was one of the first to bring the practices of conservation and environmental education out of the bureaucratic system and into the streets. In many ways, she identified something that would come to inform the movement for years and decades to come: Greenspaces could revitalize and sustain historically underserved communities. This idea was put into practice throughout the 1970s by a variety of groups, most notably Liz Christy’s “Green Guerillas,” who planted sunflowers in traffic medians and threw seed bombs into vacant lots along the Bowery. The group blurred the lines between private and public space, seeing every crack and crevice as an opportunity to grow something beautiful. As the still operational collective writes on its website: “The green guerillas began rallying other people to use community gardening as a tool to reclaim urban land, stabilize city blocks, and get people working together to solve problems.” And work together they did. As the financial crisis of the 1970s left public and private lands abandoned by NYC developers, groups like Christy’s moved in to transform and repurpose these plots for the good of their surrounding communities. There was such a gardening boom at this time that the Department of Parks and Recreation established the GreenThumb Program to provide resources, licenses, and protection to these spaces. But as the green revolution began to feel more and more unstoppable, the economic prosperity of the 90s and early 2000s brought things to a screeching halt. Gardens were razed to make way for storefronts. Farms were decimated to grow high-rises instead of neighborhood-sustaining produce. Though coalitions were formed and lawsuits were leveraged against the government, there was little that gardeners and farmers could do to safeguard their land. As recently as last November, a group of 54 organizations came together to present the city with “From the Ground Up: A Petition to Protect New York City’s Community Gardens.” In it, they make a clear argument for why these spaces are so important: Community gardens alleviate food insecurity by providing folks with ready access to fresh, nutritious food. By increasing access to fresh fruits and vegetables, community gardens help to confront public health disparities caused by racial and socioeconomic injustice in historically marginalized Black and Latinx communities throughout the city. Community gardens are a community-led response to environmental racism, helping to curb disproportionate air pollution and susceptibility to illness. Community gardens help to correct unequal access to greenspace in NYC by providing low-income New Yorkers with space to learn from and connect with nature. At Food Bank, we recognize the vital role that urban agriculture plays in the fight against hunger in our city. That’s why we partner with organizations across the five boroughs that operate their own community gardens and farms. One of these member agencies is The Campaign Against Hunger, which currently has two farms in Brooklyn: Far Rock Farm in Far Rockaway and Saratoga Farm in Bed-Stuy, not a stone’s throw from where Hattie Carthan planted her first tree nearly six decades ago. Like Carthan, TCAH takes a community-first approach to everything it does, which Director of Programs Tamara Dawson told me is what makes its farms so special. “For us, it’s important to understand our community and what it needs,” explained Dawson. “Before every growing season, we do a survey with our clients to figure out what they want to see, what they want us to grow. This is why we grow things like callaloo, snowy eggplant, and dwarf okra... we grow over 100 different species of produce because we want to meet the needs of individuals. It’s so nice when you see a family come in from wherever they’re from and say, ‘Oh my God! You have this?!’” It’s a transcendent moment, one that speaks not only to the importance of access and representation, but to the very power of food itself to affirm who we are and where we come from. By planting vegetables, fruits, and herbs from all over the world, TCAH builds an instant bridge to home for its neighbors, a bridge that might otherwise not exist at all. Aside from growing culturally appropriate food, TCAH also educates and employs students from the neighborhood to run and operate its farms. The Green Teens Program hearkens back to Carthan’s Neighborhood Tree Corps in that it empowers kids to give back and protect their communities. It also pays them, which allows them to support local businesses, take care of family, and live their lives with more dignity and freedom. “We are a product of our environment and of what we eat, [which is why] it’s so important that our farms are youth-run. It’s important for us to educate our youth not only on how to grow food, but how to stand up and be an advocate for food justice. Our green teens go out and partner with seniors in the neighborhood, show them different plants they can grow in their apartments, show them how to grow a tomato plant on the fire escape. It’s important that we give back to our community and that we educate from within.” Now more than ever, we must do our part to protect these invaluable spaces. As the New York City Community Garden Coalition (NYCCGC) and Earthjustice write in “From the Ground Up,” the way to do this is to increase legal protections for community gardens and farms by designating them as Critical Environmental Areas. That way, farmers will be able to grow food, educate the public, and sustain neighborhoods without fear of having their livelihoods destroyed. So spread the word, contact your local councilperson, and visit a garden in your neighborhood today! Taking the time to connect with the land and the people who work it will undoubtedly change your relationship with whatever city you call home.