By Scott Etkin
During the height of the COVID pandemic, food pantries and hot-meal distribution programs on the Upper West Side experienced a rush of new people in need.
More than five years later, the number of people who rely on these programs to get by remains greatly elevated compared with 2019’s pre-pandemic levels.
“2024 was our busiest year on record,” said Greg Silverman, CEO and executive director of the West Side Campaign Against Hunger (WSCAH), a nonprofit that distributes food to almost 30 sites across the city. As an example, Silverman said, St. Paul and St. Andrew United Methodist Church on West 86th Street, WSCAH’s largest distribution site, was serving roughly 200 families a day in 2019; by last year, that number had tripled, to 600.
Cathedral Community Cares (CCC), based out of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine on West 110th Street, said the pre-pandemic era numbers of people seeking aid there have also continued to go up, not down. On a typical Sunday, the program serves approximately “three times as many people” now compared to 2019, said Vanessa Greco, CCC’s outreach and volunteer coordinator.
Nonprofits say the influx of immigrants to New York City over the past few years is a main factor in the increase, though they aren’t necessarily living on the Upper West Side. It’s common for people to commute from all boroughs to visit WSCAH and CCC, according to the program heads.
While the need has grown, funding for these programs has not kept pace with that growth, Greco said. “The people go up, the grant money stays the same. That’s where the issue is.”
CCC relies primarily on federal and state grants from United Way and City Harvest, but those grants do not cover all program needs. “[We] blow through it in a heartbeat,” said Greco. The gap is filled with in-kind donations, including leftover food from local businesses and shelf-stable items from the Food Bank for New York City.
Donated food accounts for a third of the six million pounds of food that WSCAH distributes each year. Silverman stressed the importance of government funds for supporting food distribution programs on a large scale. “You can’t feed a city on donated food,” he said.
And even more people could come to rely on pantry and meal programs like WSCAH and CCC if the Trump administration succeeds in its proposed budget cuts to SNAP, the food stipend to low-income people. Roughly one in eight Americans use SNAP benefits.
“When you start restricting SNAP, you start restricting the amount of dollars in respect to local grocery stores, and bodegas, and food stands, and that leads to less business,” Silverman said.
Decisions about New York City’s budget also have an impact on local food programs. An important source of funding for more than 700 community kitchens and pantries in the city is Community Food Connection, formerly known as the Emergency Food Assistance Program. The CFC’s funding from the city government has remained at approximately $60 million per year since 2022, and will continue at this level in the city’s fiscal year 2026 budget, Mayor Adams recently announced.
WSCAH and several of the city’s other largest nonprofits, such as City Harvest and the Food Bank for New York City, had called for an increase in funding for CFC to $100 million.
“A budget is a moral document,” said Silverman. “Hungry people are not what’s a priority for our government, and that’s a sad statement.”
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