Safety Nets That Sustain Community

City Harvest used a grant to support food banks in the city, including one run by Hour Children in Queens. Hour Children focuses on serving incarcerated and formerly incarcerated women, but also has a food pantry that is open to all community members. During the pandemic, the pantry began serving about 200 people a day, three days a week, compared with 70 people before the pandemic began. (City Harvest is also part of the network of Feeding America, a beneficiary agency of The Neediest Cases Fund.)

Jaclyn Terrasi, who lives nearby, had sporadically turned to the pantry when she and her daughter, Giovanna, were short on food. But when she quit her job as a marketing coordinator at a construction company in September 2020 in order to help Giovanna with remote school, their needs became greater. Read more from The New York Times here.