As part of its Jan. 6, 2010 “Community Giving Day,” 20 Whole Foods locations in the Northeast will give five percent of all sales that day to local charities.

On the Upper West Side, Goddard Riverside will receive proceeds from the Park West Village Whole Foods, at 808 Columbus Ave. and West 97th Street.

The West Side Campaign Against Hunger, housed in the Church of St. Paul and St. Andrew on West 86th Street and Broadway, will get proceeds from the Whole Foods at Columbus Circle.

Stewart Desmond, development director at the West Side Campaign Against Hunger, said that more clients are in need of services—a 30-percent increase over the last two years.

“That’s a real struggle for us, to support the food and counseling services,” Desmond said. “The money from Whole Foods will help us continue our open-door policy. No matter how high the numbers get, we don’t turn people away.”

The project was also organized by World Hunger Year, a non-profit dedicated to hunger and poverty. World Hunger Year will also be receiving a portion of Whole Foods’ proceeds from Jan. 6 sales.
Last year, Whole Foods’ locations in the city raised $50,000 during its five-percent day.

An error appeared in this story. Stewart Desmond is the development director at the West Side Campaign Against Hunger.

“One day, I cooked pasta with cheese. My wife asked me how I did it,” Ramos said. “She likes the way I cook now.”

Ramos’ new culinary repertoire is the result of a 12-week course he took at the West Side Campaign Against Hunger, a food pantry housed in the Church of St. Paul and St. Andrew, on West 86th Street and Broadway. He started volunteering there at the suggestion of a friend from church.

Ramos, who lives in The Bronx, is one of the program’s 132 graduates, many of whom return to volunteer their time and cook alongside current students. He signed up for the chef training and cooking program and completed the course about six months ago. The course imbued him with a desire to learn more, and he is now taking a class on cakes—in addition to waking up at 6:30 a.m. every day to travel to the Upper West Side and volunteer.

Chef and nutritionist Mark D’Alessandro looks over the work of (from left) Manny Ramos, Julissa Lopez and Matilde Lachapel. Photo by Andrew Schwartz

“I like the way they treat people,” Ramos said of the program, while eating a plate of chicken, rice and salad he helped prepare one day last month.

Now in the middle of its 24th session, the class teaches students and graduates cooking techniques, safety measures and nutrition. Each class begins with taking food straight from the pantry—outside food is banned from the kitchen—and studying the labels, nutritional facts and list of ingredients.

“We take students into the pantry in the morning and say, ‘What are we going to make for lunch?’” said Mark D’Alessandro, the program’s chef and nutritionist.

Part of the lesson includes cooking lunch for volunteers at the grocery store-style food pantry. Many of those volunteers—who can number 20 to 30 people on any given day—are clients of the pantry as well. Pantry use has grown 39 percent in the past two years.

The chef program started in January 2002 with the goal of teaching clients who were using the pantry the skills needed to cook healthy meals at home.

“We saw the need not just to give people food, but to educate them about healthy living,” said Stewart Desmond, development director at the West Side Campaign Against Hunger.

Students, many of whom are Latino, are chosen by the food pantry staff. Successful candidates for the program must demonstrate that they are interested in a food industry career, or may have a health condition that could be alleviated by a balanced diet. For some, finishing the course increases kitchen skills, which may result in better pay.

“There are a lot of jobs you can grow in if you increase your cooking skills. Home health care attendant is a good example of that,” Desmond said.

The program emphasizes nutrition and safe food preparation, and lessons are focused on learning to cook without draining food of essential vitamins. In the kitchen, counters are stringently disinfected with chlorine. Students even get a vial to make sure the level of chlorine used to clean surfaces is satisfactory.

Guest lecturers from New York University and Hunter College also stop by.

“If you’re going to give people food, give them more. Give them a nutrition education,” D’Alessandro said.

D’Alessandro, a 30-year-old “farm boy from northern Kentucky living in New York City,” came to the West Side Campaign Against Hunger a year ago with an extensive background in the food industry. He was a butcher for two-and-a-half years and he studied at a Cordon Bleu program in Miami. For the past four years, he has been teaching at the Center for Kosher Culinary Arts through Kingsborough Community College.

The rewarding part of the program, D’Alessandro said, is when students bring home the lessons they learn.

“We want them to cook a healthy balanced meal for their family in a nutritional and safe way,” he said.

Martina Santos, who was eight weeks in to the chef program, said she was already trying to include vegetables in her family’s diet. She admitted to sneaking chopped broccoli into her 14-year-old granddaughter’s food.

“I tell her why it’s important to eat vegetables because [D’Alessandro] is teaching me about nutrition,” Santos said.

But the program is more than a crash course in food for Santos, who has been diagnosed with depression and bipolar disorder. Classes motivate her to wake up in the morning, and she volunteers at the kitchen every day. After her lesson is over, she works in the pantry.

“I’m supposed to be here only on Monday and Wednesday,” Santos said. “But every day, you learn something new.”

This is the first time that Maldonado has sought this kind of assistance. He is independently employed as a house painter and receives food stamps and city benefits for one child. But that is still not enough to provide for his family, considering the economic downturn, rising food prices and crippling medical bills—every Monday, a doctor gives him three injections in his back and shoulders for pain.
“Sometimes, I got no money for food,” Maldonado said.

West Harlem resident Katherine Moncion shops at the campaign’s supermarket-style pantry. Photo By: Andrew Schwartz

In the past year, the number of people in need of food assistance has grown and their faces have changed. New patrons have jobs or high school diplomas and bachelor degrees, and many are visiting pantries for the first time.

This is partly why food pantries and soup kitchens throughout the city are facing a perfect storm: high demand coupled with cuts to government spending. And so food assistance programs are restructuring operations and cutting services. For many providers, turning away those in need is not an option.

On a rainy Thursday afternoon, prospective clients for the West Side Campaign Against Hunger waited in a full room at the church, on West 86th Street and West End Avenue. Keith Kaiman, the development director, has taken note of the increasing number of clients coming in for interviews with the nonprofit’s counselors.

“I’ve been here a year. For a Thursday this is very crowded,” Kaiman said.

This past August, new clients had almost doubled—an 82 percent increase—compared to August 2007. The surge has been steady, Kaiman said. There are about 200 people a day coming in for help, compared to 130 a day last year.

“A food pantry is the only way to save money,” said Jose Berroa-Saro, one of the campaign’s four social service counselors.

Counselors take note of potential clients’ living situations, in hopes of directing them to services better suited for their needs.

“Our motivation is that we don’t want to see them again,” Berroa-Saro said.
When the clients are accepted into the program, they are allowed to use the food pantry once a month. The pantry is a small space with visitors maneuvering around shelves with shopping carts. Rather than being handed a bag of food, clients are given the freedom to shop using a point system, somewhat like a supermarket. The campaign, which began in 1993, was the first customer co-op to use a supermarket-style pantry.

Across town, at the Yorkville Common Pantry on East 109th Street, staff braced last week for the flux of clients in need of a holiday meal or a food package. The pantry expects—and knows how to manage—a large crowd.

In the last several months, the pantry has experienced an 18 percent increase in visitors each week, a total of 1,700 patrons. Many of those new customers have been from East Harlem and the Isaacs/Holmes houses on East 93rd Street and First Avenue.

“We’re seeing a lot more people from the area,” said Daniel Reyes, director of programs. “Usually, it was a 50-50 split from people in the outer boroughs and people who live in the area. It’s changed to 70-30 now.”

The pantry has filled the vacuum created by smaller pantries and soup kitchens that have been unable to meet the needs of hungry New Yorkers. Reyes said he’s recently noticed repeat customers at the 24-7 emergency food service, where people can come in and receive a bag of food, no questions asked. Since the emergency service is not designed to continually assist customers, the staff expanded the regular pantry program, which allows clients to visit once a week. The qualifying zone, which previously covered East 75th to 125th streets between Park to Fifth avenues, now reaches up to 145th Street and over to the Hudson River.

Keith Kaiman, development director for the West Side Campaign Against Hunger, says he’s seen about 200 people coming in each day looking for help, compared to about 130 per day last year. Photo By: Andrew Schwartz

“We’ve extended to three zip codes,” Reyes said. “That’s part of the rise in the numbers.”

Last week, a survey by the New York City Coalition Against Hunger found that more than 80 percent of Manhattan food pantries and soup kitchens have experienced a higher demand for food over the past 12 months, a trend seen throughout the city. Much like at the West Side Campaign Against Hunger and Yorkville Common Pantry, most new clients are immigrants, employed people or families with children.

Nearly 90 percent of respondents in the city reported an increase in clients; more than half of respondents said the number of people coming in for food has greatly increased. And almost three-quarters of these organizations said they are not distributing enough food to meet the demand.

To compensate, organizations are trying to improve their own efficiency. The campaign has staggered clients’ monthly visits to the pantry. Volunteers try to move clients out as quickly as possible by informing them of what is available and how many points they have. Wait time has been cut down by an hour.
About 90 percent of the goods distributed by the campaign, which also buys supplies through a food budget and accepts donations, come from the Food Bank for New York City, an independent nonprofit that distributes food to more than 1,000 programs citywide.

“Fortunately, we’re a large pantry so we have the capacity,” said Kaiman, the development director. “But we’ve been ordering so much food we’ve had to dip into the savings.”

The Yorkville Common Pantry recently received a well-timed, unprecedented bump in food donations from its base of schools, synagogues and the nonprofit City Harvest. That allowed the organization to provide food without dipping into the weekly food budget.

Still, the pantry has been forced to make food packages smaller and increase the food budget to $11,000 from $8,000. Because of cuts, the 24-7 emergency food service program is now open only 16 hours a day, from 8 a.m. to midnight.
“At this point I’m hoping that we won’t have to cap the number [of clients] and tell them we can’t provide service,” said program director Reyes.

Although much is still up in the air, government support of food assistance programs is likely to contract as well. With revenue drying up, the city slashed agency spending last month in an effort to close a $2.3 billion budget deficit projected for 2010. Council members have held hearings to propose areas that can be cut.

“I sat through three days of hearings. It was like going to a funeral,” said Council Member Gale Brewer.

She has been a supporter of the campaign, reserving $7,000 in member item money for its English as Second Language classes next year. But that money is vulnerable to budget cuts.

“The cuts do hurt poor people,” Brewer said. “We’re still trying to negotiate with the mayor.”

Last year, Yorkville Common Pantry, with a total budget of $550,000, received $9,500 from Council Member Melissa Mark-Viverito; this year, it is running without member item money. In the first half of fiscal year ’09, the city allocated nearly $51,000 in food products to Yorkville.

“Money from the city is going to be very hard to come by for many groups that are providing an extremely important service,” said Council Member Dan Garodnick, whose district includes the Isaacs/Holmes projects. “Our goal in government is to try to take all creative steps to mitigate the impact.”

The pantry still gets money from the city: about $20,000 worth of food products a year, including funding through the Emergency Food Assistance Program. But the real damage will be done by state cuts, according to Reyes. In August, Gov. David Paterson released a round of budget cuts to state agencies which slashed more than $27 million from the Department of Health. That is trickling down to local programs like the pantry, which recently received a letter from the department’s Hunger Prevention and Nutrition Assistance Program asking the organization to outline its own budget cuts.

“The state is so nice,” Reyes quipped.

At the federal level, spending for food stamps and food pantry programs comes through the farms appropriations bill. In response to the New York City Coalition Against Hunger’s survey, Sen. Charles Schumer called for an emergency plan to increase federal funding for food stamps programs, food banks and tax breaks for corporate and individual donors. But until the federal government implements this plan, places like Yorkville Common Pantry must make do with state and city money, as well as private donors, which decreased by $150,000 this year. So Reyes is still bracing for the worst.

“We’re looking at at least $200,000 of cuts in our budget,” he said. “But I’m still waiting for the downturn to hit.”