6 Ways to Volunteer to Fight Hunger

In this post, we’re going to cover all the things you can and can’t donate to the network of food pantries and soup kitchens that power our work at the Food Bank For New York City. While our donation dos and don’ts may differ from other hunger relief organizations, they should still provide you with a better understanding of what kinds of resources organizations like ours are generally looking for. But before we get into our full donation chart, we want to cover a few tips and tricks for optimizing your next donation. Consider Refrigeration While several organizations in our member network may be able to refrigerate things like produce, dairy, and meat, not all food pantries and soup kitchens have this same capacity, so always make sure to double check before you donate. If it’s unclear, stick with shelf-stable goods like canned food, flour, cooking oil, or rice. Skip the Expired Goods Yes, “best of” or “expiration” dates aren’t always accurate, but that doesn’t mean you should donate expired goods to hunger relief organizations. When thinking about what to give, consider whether or not you’d be comfortable serving the item to your family. If you wouldn’t eat something past its “sell-by” date, chances are you shouldn’t donate it. No Leftovers Please You might be the best chef in the entire world, but unfortunately, we can’t accept your home-cooked meals or food items. Without knowing how the items were prepared, we’re unable to control for things like allergies and dietary restrictions. The same thing is true for any baked goods or meals you might buy from a local grocer. Don’t Break the Seal Food pantries and soup kitchens in our member network are only able to accept unopened or unused food items. This means that you can’t donate a half-used box of spaghetti or bring us a Ziploc bag of items your family no longer needs. We appreciate the spirit of this gift, but want our clients to have the same experience that any of us have when shopping for and selecting the new food items they want to eat. Prioritize Nutrition To bring a little more care to your donation, think about the nutritional value of what you’re giving. When donating canned vegetables, for example, consider giving low-sodium veggies. And if you’re thinking about donating grains or pasta, we say prioritize things like brown rice and whole grain noodles. We want to serve our clients quality ingredients that not only taste good, but do good things for the body. Now that you’ve read through these tips, take a peek at our official donation chart below. We’ve organized items into things we’d like to “prioritize” and ones we’d like to “reduce.” To learn more about our approach to community nutrition, click this link.

September is Hunger Action Month, a time for all of us to stand up and fight back against food insecurity in the boroughs of New York City and the United States at large. In NYC alone, food insecurity has increased by 44 percent due to the ongoing pandemic – that's 1.6 million New Yorkers struggling every day to feed themselves and their families. Though the numbers are daunting, the truth is that we can fight hunger together. To see how you can join us in nourishing our neighbors this Hunger Action Month, check out the actions below. Donate An easy way to get involved in the fight against food insecurity is to give generously to hunger relief organizations that inspire you. At Food Bank, $1 can provide up to 5 meals for our neighbors in need. Click here to help power the programs that get food into our most vulnerable communities. Fundraise Want to kick your giving up a notch? Then consider launching an online fundraiser to encourage your family and friends to join you in supporting our mission. It’s as simple as clicking this link and spreading the word on social media. And don’t worry, the link above will provide you with all the guidance you’ll need to get started. Raise Awareness Speaking of social media, a fantastic way to engage with Hunger Action Month is to raise awareness about food insecurity and poverty online. You can either share the content we post or let our cache of social media assets inspire you. No matter what you share, make sure to use the #FeedAll and tag us @FoodBank4NYC! Advocate Food Bank’s advocacy work seeks to organize and engage community action in the fight against hunger. Join us now in urging Congress to support anti-poverty priorities in the American Families Plan, including permanent expansion of the Earned Income and Child Tax Credits, expanded Summer-EBT, and additional investments into The Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP). Click here to raise your voice. Learn While all of these actions are incredibly valuable, perhaps the most important thing you can do is learn. Learn about food insecurity and the systems that cause it. Learn about the work being done to fight it. Empower yourself with knowledge and you’ll be amazed by the things you can do. To start, read our recent interview with Food Bank President & CEO Leslie Gordon in which she chats about the significance of Hunger Action Month to the work we do.

In New York City, over 30 percent of our trash is made up of food waste at the same time that 1.6 million New Yorkers are facing food insecurity. Every day, food sits in landfills while our neighbors go hungry, a crisis only heightened by the rising costs of food, gas, and rent in our city. To fight back against this immense waste, we at Food Bank For New York City work with local grocery stores, restaurants, bakeries, and farms to rescue and redistribute an average of 1 million pounds of food a month. Last year, we rescued over 11 million pounds of fresh, nutritious food for our neighbors all across the five boroughs. This Hunger Action Month, we’re taking this work a step further by partnering with two Brooklyn-based businesses (Threes Brewing and Runner & Stone bakery) to create “Food For Thought,” a beer made from locally sourced and rescued bread. Try our collaboration at a special Beer Tasting on September 13 or anytime onsite at Threes Brewing. Click here for details. Brewers at Threes cutting the rescued baguettes from Runner & Stone for the brew; the finished product. One of the most difficult food items to rescue is bread. Baked goods have a short shelf life, which means there’s a small window in which they can be redistributed in their normal state. So, while Food Bank is able to distribute thousands of pounds of bread each year (with nearly 630,000 pounds distributed last year alone), there is still a potential for waste depending on when bread products can move out of our Warehouse & Distribution Center in the Bronx. Though bread itself may expire quickly, the active ingredients in bread can be turned into so many other things... like beer! While we may not have a brewery of our own at Food Bank, we thought it would be fascinating to see if we could partner with local businesses to save bread from the landfill and transform it into a beer that would both taste delicious and raise awareness about food waste in NYC. Enter “Food For Thought.” “When Food Bank approached us, they expressed a desire for this project to alter people’s perceptions about food waste,” explained Matt Levy, Head Brewer at Threes Brewing. “Brewing a beer with this objective presented an intriguing challenge and is a unique means of raising awareness about hunger and encouraging more conscious consumption of food.” Brewing "Food For Thought" at Threes Brewing. With Threes on board to brew, we reached out to Runner & Stone, a bakery located two blocks down from Threes in the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn. Runner & Stone enthusiastically agreed to contribute bread that would have otherwise been composted to the project, a move aligned with the bakery’s creative approach to food waste. “We work to repurpose any extra or scrap doughs that we produce, and the kitchen always tries to find innovative ways to use all parts of an ingredient (think turning carrot tops into pesto or bones into home-made bone broth),” said Peter Endriss, head baker at Runner & Stone. “We also partner with ‘Too Good To Go’ [an app that connects consumers to restaurants with surplus food] and donate leftover items to our local soup kitchen, CHiPS [a Food Bank member agency that serves communities in Park Slope, Brooklyn].” Enjoy a pint of "Food For Thought" at Threes Brewing in Gowanus, Brooklyn. Every purchase of beer will provide five meals for New Yorkers in need. Together, this collaboration between a brewery, a bakery, and a Food Bank produced “Food For Thought,” a spicy, snappy lager with notes of red current and rye now for sale at Threes (located here). Every purchase of beer will provide five meals for New Yorkers in need. To learn more about “Food For Thought,” click this link. You can also visit our Hunger Action Month landing page to join us in taking action against hunger today.