West Side Campaign Against Hunger expands reach with new warehouse
NEW YORK -- Hunger numbers grow after the holidays, and one of the city's most impactful food pantry nonprofits is celebrating a major move to Uptown in an effort to address that need.
The West Side Campaign Against Hunger has a new distribution center inside an old post office in Washington Heights, where volunteers are shipping out groceries to nonprofits and neighbors alike. Chef Greg Silverman, the nonprofit's CEO and executive director, said the new space significantly simplifies how the teams can transfer food to their more than 80,000 clients.
"That's the nature of the emergency feeding sector, people lugging things up and down, back and forth," Silverman said, "but we want to be able to say it's more important to be get people, the customer, food."
WSCAH introduced the very first supermarket-style food pantry 45 years ago. Its brand new warehouse allows it to expand food storage from 1,800 pounds to 54,000 pounds.
The organization primarily operates out of the Church of St. Paul and St. Andrew on West 86th Street, a shared space.
"We used to be able to hold about two pallets of food in our small little walk-in cooler," Silverman said, standing in his new freezer. "This walk-in cooler can hold 70 pallets of food."
Volunteers like Martina Santos offer cooking lessons and support, just like family.
"I make a little breakfast for the workers to start their day because belly full, happy heart," Santos said, "and also I'm going outside talking to the customers, saying good morning to the customers, how you feel, and give a little advice, a little bit of joy."
Now the WSCAH team can meet those in need with greater speed and capacity, growing a healthier community, closer to home.
"Our customers were coming from the 1, 2, 3 lines down," Silverman said, pointing to a map showing the outreach, "so we traced back up to find great community partners, and you can see our new location up here in Washington Heights, we have a cluster of eight community partners, just in this cluster area."
The new warehouse also brings the West Side Campaign Against Hunger closer to Hunts Point farmers market, where most of the fresh food comes from.
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