Amid the seasonal shopping frenzy of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, bargain-hungry New Yorkers should remember to set aside a few bucks for Giving Tuesday — today — when local charities ask for donations to help the needy among us. I invite you to join me in sending cash to ten of the best New York–based organizations that help our neighbors who need food, as well as groups that tackle the toughest forms of serious mental illness and substance abuse.
“47 million Americans live in households that can’t afford enough food; this is not some little niche issue. Here in New York City, 1.2 million city residents don’t have enough food,” Joel Berg of Hunger Free America told me. “Hunger is often equated in people’s minds with homelessness. But 90 to 95 percent of the people hungry or food insecure in America and New York aren’t homeless, they’re just poor.” Berg’s organization conducts research and advocacy on hunger nationally and locally. “New York City still has the lowest school breakfast participation rate out of every big city in the United States,” he says. “Every one of the last three or four mayors promised to fix that, and they just haven’t.” Donate here.
About a quarter of our children are food insecure, but the problem is also acute among homebound elderly New Yorkers. Citymeals on Wheels brings food and companionship to 22,000 seniors five days a week with the help of 18,000 volunteers and support from donors. Citymeals recently completed an eye-opening report on the growing dimensions of hunger and loneliness in our midst. About 20 percent of the group’s clients are 90 or older; 400 of them are over 100 years old. “Think about what the city was like 100 years ago and what they’ve seen in their lifetime,” CEO Beth Shapiro told me. “Many of them built the city for us, and we need to be respectful and pay them back with a simple meal.” Donate here.
In keeping with tradition, a few family members and I spent part of Thanksgiving serving food alongside several hundred volunteers at the Bowery Mission, which has been helping hungry New Yorkers since 1879. “Over the last year, the Bowery Mission has served 27 percent more meals than we did the prior year. And so the need is really evident right now for these meals,” the group’s CEO, James Winans, told me. “The city says they’re sheltering 130,000 people, which has never been true before. So these are all time high numbers, and it’s a critical time for our city.” Donate here. Thanks to a matching grant, gifts will be doubled for Giving Tuesday.
Central Brooklyn is lucky to have Neighbors Together, a soup kitchen and community center that gets food to families in Ocean Hill, Brownsville, and Bedford-Stuyvesant and also helps people find housing, legal services and tax refunds. The group is always looking for volunteers and is currently trying to raise $100,000. All donations will be doubled through Giving Tuesday.
The Brooklyn Rescue Mission Urban Harvest Center tackles hunger by operating a food pantry and urban garden in Central Brooklyn and organizing advocacy work to push for healthy produce and government food aid. The group is in the middle of a modest $40,000 fundraising campaign. Help put them over the top.
An estimated 17 percents of recent migrants to New York hail from African countries and speak languages like Wolof, Bambara, and Fulani that make it hard to navigate life in New York. The Harlem-based African Services Committee is an all-purpose organization founded in 1981 that helps newcomers from the African diaspora with housing, education, legal services, and a food pantry that serves 5,000 clients a year with fruits, vegetables, and non-perishable goods. Donate here.
The Community Service Society has been battling poverty since its origins in the 19th century when it was known as the Association for the Improvement of the Condition of the Poor. The group excels by doing first-rate research, like its periodic Unheard Third survey that asks lower-income New Yorkers what would make their lives better, and then turns the findings into action. Talking directly with families led to CSS’s successful push to create the Fair Fares program, which lets lower-income passengers ride the subways and buses for half price. Donate here.
Samaritan Daytop Village boasts a 60-year track record of helping New Yorkers battling multiple problems: The organization built a sterling reputation helping chronic substance users who are also diagnosed with a mental-health disorder — the kinds of people many of us encounter every day, but don’t know how to help. I’ve met several of the inspiring success stories of people whose lives got turned around by this organization’s remarkable staff and volunteers. Give here.
Fountain House operates drop-in clubhouses for seriously mentally ill New Yorkers. The idea, which dates back to the 1940s, is to create a non-threatening, low-pressure environment where people can associate with peers and also talk with therapists and other staffers who are on hand to help with education, housing and daily meals. The approach is called community as therapy, and the organization has a matching-gift challenge for donations made up to midnight on Giving Tuesday.
Nearly all of the people in New York’s jails and prisons will come home someday, and two venerable organizations, the Fortune Society (founded in the 1960s) and the Osborne Association (with roots in 19th-century reform movements), work with men and women during and after incarceration to help them get skills training, education, jobs, housing, and treatment for substance abuse and/or mental illness. It is difficult, demanding necessary work that needs more funding. Our tax dollars have already been spent to arrest, prosecute, jail, and imprison people; it only makes sense to spend a little more to complete the process and help people complete the process of rehabilitation and put violence and wrongdoing behind them for good.
“We are employing individuals who are from these communities, have experienced incarceration themselves as well. And that brings an incredible amount of trust and credibility to the work that we do on the inside,” Jonathan Monsalve, the president of Osborne, told me. “I think we as a city are missing a huge opportunity,” says Stanley Richards, the president of Fortune. “We know the majority of the people who are incarcerated are going to come home to our community, and people don’t come home a blank. They [need to] come home with hope, connection to services, with some willingness and capacity to build a better life, get access to housing, substance-abuse treatment, mental-health treatment, job placement, job retention, job training, skills — all those things we know make a difference for people when they come home from prison.”
Give to the Osborne Association and the Fortune Society.
