Approximately 221,000 people on Long Island suffer from food insecurity.
“There are so many individuals in our community who are food insecure. It doesn’t matter your zip code or the kind of home you’re living in,” Susan Berman, the associate executive director of Community Engagement at Sid Jacobson Jewish Community Center, said in an interview with the Roslyn News Times.
“It’s our responsibility as good neighbors to ensure that everyone has healthy, balanced meals.”
Through Sid Jacobson JCC’s Retail Rescue program, they have been trying to give access to meals to those who need it most.
Since February, they have been collecting 15,000-20,000 pounds of food and distributing them to pantries throughout the North Shore of Long Island every single month.
Sid Jacobson JCC is an East Hills based community organization that promotes Jewish identity and provides a comprehensive program based on Jewish values, traditions, heritage, and culture and is committed to enriching the lives of all individuals and families in its community, the center’s website states.
They are a distribution organization for Island Harvest Food Bank, a hunger-relief organization with a mission to end hunger and reduce food waste on Long Island according to their website.
Working together with Island Harvest with funding from a Feeding New York State grant, they began setting up food rescue.
“We were able to hire a full-time driver, get a refrigerated van, and that driver goes to partner markets and picks up food nearing expiration as well as frozen baked goods and can directly get those products to the pantries that we are serving,” Berman said.
Sid Jacobson JCC has been doing perishable food recovery for years, opening its own Community Needs Bank in 2018 to serve its community. Berman said that in addition to helping serve other food pantries, Retail Rescue has helped restock their own pantries supply
“It’s been a win-win, the pantries have been really happy and able to help the guests who come to them on a weekly basis” Berman said. “I knew it would be successful, I had no idea what success would be like but the metrics have been shocking”
Working closely with the pantries, according to Berman, has helped the Retail Rescue team identify what items to prioritize for any given community.
“The relationship that we build with the pantries is really important because we get to understand what’s trending, what people are in need of, and helps us clarify cultural differences,” Berman said.
Drivers in the program, who work Monday through Friday, pick up food in the morning, then call a given pantry afterward and tell them what time they have. If pantries can accept, the driver will drive the food to the pantry and it is up to the pantry to distribute the food accordingly.
While currently working with pantries in the North Shore in areas such as Great Neck, Port Washington, and on occasion Syosset and East Meadow. Berman has said that they will work closely with Island Harvest to expand their operations throughout Long Island.
“As we work more closely with Island Harvest we’re going to depend on them to help us feel out which markets we can add to the rotation,” Berman said. “What we need to do now is increase the capacity of what we can accept and look at the capacity of what the pantries can accept.”
Berman expects that the upcoming Holiday season will see an increase in the amount of food collected as well as an increase in demand for food, but Berman believes that it is worth doing whatever it takes to fight food insecurity throughout Long Island.
“Being able to put food together in someone’s refrigerator that would have otherwise ended up in a landfill is a beautiful thing” she said.
