Food Bank Merges With Coalition for the Hungry and Homeless
The ability to feed Westchester County’s hungry has vastly improved thanks to a merger of two organizations dedicated to the cause.
The Food Bank for Westchester and the Westchester Coalition for the Hungry and Homeless signed an official merger agreement Friday morning, creating the largest hunger relief organization to ever exist in the county.
“Together we will be the voice for a higher goal to address hunger and to reduce hunger by creating solutions that work,” said Coalition for the Hungry and Homeless Executive Director Jeanne Blum.
The coalition, currently based in White Plains, will move its day-to-day operations to the Food Bank’s headquarters in Elmsford. The partnership, which will operate under the Food Bank for Westchester name, will allow both organizations to provide better food sourcing and allocation as well as greater access to more volunteers. It will also create a greater platform to deliver the message of hunger relief.
Under the merger, Blum will become the vice president of strategic partnerships and advocacy for the Food Bank. She will be able to focus more of her time toward developing relationships with volunteers and organizations that can help alleviate hunger and reduce logistical problems.
“[Blum] brings to this fight an enormous amount of emotional intelligence, communication skills and a real passion for working with community,” said Food Bank President and CEO Ellen Lynch. “When she spends half of her day trying to find out why the coalition office has no Internet service, no one is helped; there’s no hungry people helped by that so we’re wasting that resource.”
One of the driving factors behind the merger is the dwindling number of funding sources available to each organization as a separate entity. Richard Rakow, the Food Bank’s chairman of the board, said county government funds previously dedicated to administrative costs accrued by the two organizations will now be reallocated to purchase an additional 250,000 meals per year.
“We…don’t have the wherewithal anymore to just give money out to every well-intentioned organization and well-intentioned idea,” said County Executive Rob Astorino, who attended the event.
“Oftentimes there are people, who in order to get on their feet and to get their life in order, they need to get something in their stomach first. So, we want to make sure that the people in this county never go to bed hungry, especially the elderly and the children in this county,” Astorino said.
In addition to providing funding for the organization, Astorino explained that the county has initiated a food rescue pilot program, which will allow unopened and unused food from entities that operate at the Grasslands campus in Valhalla, such as the county jail, to be used to feed Westchester’s hungry. Meanwhile, food that was served but not eaten will be composted rather than thrown out, he said.
Although Westchester is a wealthy county, it is estimated that about 200,000 residents are hungry or are at risk of being hungry. The Food Bank for Westchester distributes more than 7.4 million pounds of food each year for families through more than 265 hunger relief programs. The Westchester Coalition for the Hungry and Homeless has provided financial and technical support to hunger relief agencies and serves as a resource for those seeking help with poverty issues.
The Food Bank and the Coalition for the Hungry and Homeless have served the county since 1988. Representatives from both organizations hope that the new partnership will spread awareness of the issue in Westchester and help eradicate the problem.
“There are pockets of wealth in the county and there are pockets of poverty and we need to bridge the gap between the two,” Blum said.
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