Founded in 2008 as a “healthy soup kitchen,” The Kitchen is the only emergency food organization providing nutritionally balanced food for immune-compromised individuals struggling with diabetes, obesity, and malnutrition. East Harlem has one of the highest rates of hunger as well as the highest rate of obesity in New York City, with 62% of the population reported overweight or obese. The East Harlem community also has the densest concentration of diabetes in any borough. These apparent contrasts can be explained by the heavy presence of affordably-priced yet nutritionally void fast food and the scarcity of affordable fruits and vegetables.

The Nourishing Kitchen has expanded its mission in an effort to incorporate healthy eating into clients’ everyday lives. In addition to a hot meal service, The Kitchen offers a food pantry, produce distribution, nutrition classes, and yoga classes – all free and open to the community.

A foundation stone of The Kitchen is not just providing food for low-income clients, but connecting an otherwise marginalized and underserved community with the green movement. As the only certified green soup kitchen in the country, The Kitchen does this primarily through the use of a number of community garden plots. The produce harvested in these plots is served in our hot meals and distributed in our Urban Free Produce program. The Kitchen also runs educational programs and events that expose the community to recycling, composting, seasonal eating, and growing their own produce at home.

One of The Kitchen’s most important projects is the Junior Chef program, a summer program that takes kids ages six to thirteen and gives them hands-on culinary and nutrition workshops. This program was created to connect underserved and undernourished youth to the culinary arts while educating participants and their families on issues of nutrition and wellness. In addition to direct training, participants receive ingredients and recipes to prepare meals at home with their families, plus a local gym membership to engage in physical activity. Through this curriculum, participants learn how to protect themselves and their families from the threat of diabetes and obesity raging in their neighborhood while having fun and gaining comfort in the kitchen.

I’m writing about this organization today because The Nourishing Kitchen (specifically the Junior Chef program) needs your help. The Kitchen is currently a finalist in the national Post Grant for Good Health for $25,000 to support and expand the Junior Chef program. The catch is that it all depends on votes. Each person can vote once per day until July 12 and the winner will be announced on July 22. It takes less than a minute of ‘e-volunteering’ a day, just one click and you are on your way to pursuing food justice for all. Click here once a day to help.

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In the fall of 2007, I returned to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor as a junior and worked with a friend to start an innovative nonprofit: WILL WORK FOR FOOD. Following this idea of “healing of the world,” we wanted to find a way to help our own communities while also raising relief funds to fight child malnutrition in Darfur.

WILL WORK FOR FOOD encourages people to volunteer in their own communities and to ask a friend or family member to sponsor this work with a donation. The money raised then helps our affiliates, Doctors Without Borders, purchase and distribute life-saving nutritional supplements to severely malnourished kids.

With the support of the University of Michigan Hillel, our dream for the WILL WORK FOR FOOD “volunteering locally to save children globally” initiative was born. In the past year we have raised nearly $60,000, enough to treat over 700 malnourished kids, and stimulated over 1,200 commitments to local community service. We have also been sanctioned by the Clinton Global Initiative for Universities and recognized as an international semi-finalist in the Dell Social Innovation Competition.

Now, we have an interactive website, www.willworkforfood.org, that we are using to launch our initiative to 25 different high schools and colleges campuses around the country.”
-Steven Weinberg, Founder

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(there are only so many cucumbers you can give to friends and have them still call you a friend). The notion of simply throwing the extra produce away was unacceptable. I’ve known too many people who were hungry in the past, including my mother-in-law who spent five years hungry in the Soviet Union during WW II.

I decided to deliver 40 lbs of produce to the local Battered Women’s Shelter. The woman who took it thanked me, and then commented that it would be good to finally have fresh produce. That comment stayed with me. Last year when I brought more food to the shelter, I encountered the same woman, same comment, and same feeling of discontent.

In Oct 2008, when I took over as director of the West Milford Community Garden (I’m a master gardener and Rutgers Environmental Steward), I realized that a good deal of produce had been thrown out in past years. People went on vacation, they grew too much, got bored, etc. AmpleHarvest.org remedied this situation.

To those who are hungry, food pantries are the local “retail” establishment. Food banks are their regional “wholesale” providers that supply the pantries with most of their supplies (usually with the exception of fresh produce, which most pantries never have). AmpleHarvest.org is currently working with more than 2,500 food pantries around the country.

As it turns out, while setting out to help backyard gardeners find local food pantries, we also enabled the pantries to reach out to the community for the items they need the most.”
-Gary Oppenheimer, Founder

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