Trinity Church Responds to Rising Local Hunger with Compassion Meals Program
Above: Trinity Church (located at Broadway and Wall Street) is one of nine food distribution sites in Lower Manhattan at which the Church provides meals to those in need, six days per week. Below: The Church has ramped up its food assistance in Lower Manhattan, from 15,000 meals in 2019 to more than 230,000 in 2021. While Trinity funds the purchase of all provisions required for these meals, volunteers are needed to help pack and distribute them.
Trinity Church has resurrected its Compassion Meals program, which provides breakfast, lunch, and dinner to those in need, on a rotating schedule, six days per week. The Church has always provided food help, reflects Lorelei Atalie Vargas, Trinity’s Chief Community Impact Officer. “But during the pandemic, when rates of food insecurity started to rise, we took a data-driven look at communities where food was a problem, particularly those where pantries had closed.” This translated into a huge jump in Trinity’s food assistance program, which distributed 15,000 meals through the Church’s Brown Bag Lunch program in 2019—a figure that jumped to 162,000 meals in 2020, and more than 230,000 last year.
In 2021, Trinity also launched its Neighborhood Support Initiative, which targets communities south of 14th Street. “Our goal is to focus on child, family, and community well-being,” says Ms. Vargas. “We are committed to co-designing everything alongside the communities we serve.” This emphasis has led Trinity to convene a Neighborhood Council, comprised of people who live, work, attend school, own businesses, or run not-for-profits in Lower Manhattan. Guided by the deliberations of this panel, Trinity’s food outreach program has partnered with six schools and two community-based organizations in Lower Manhattan, and now distributes meals through nine different sites south of 14th Street.
“We provide regular shipments of groceries to those nine places, where volunteers pack food and then distribute groceries,” Ms. Vargas notes, adding that Trinity Church itself (located at Broadway and Wall Street) is one of the distribution sites. “At Trinity, we are providing a combination of groceries and meals, as a continuation of the former Brown Bag program,” she says. Lunches are currently available at Trinity Church Monday through Saturday, while breakfasts are distributed Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. “We are also starting to pilot to-go dinners once per month on Fridays,” she explains. “This program provides groceries, as well as a to-go meals. Our goal is to offer this weekly by September.”
In addition to daily and weekly meals, Trinity also offers “holiday big packs,” which Ms. Vargas says are, “based on the need for joy, to allow people to bring friends and family together to break bread. For Easter, we partnered with seven additional sites in Lower Manhattan to provide Easter dinner with all the fixings to 1,800 recipients. We plan to do this again for Thanksgiving and Christmas.”
While Trinity fully funds the purchase of all provisions required for these meals, volunteers are needed to help pack and distribute them. “We welcome anyone who is willing to help,” Ms. Vargas says. “Volunteers do not have to be Trinity parishioners. We encourage anyone who wants to volunteer to visit the Trinity website, and learn more about how they can sign up to help. We need people who can pack lunches, and distribute breakfast and lunch on each day. We also need holiday volunteers, and people who are willing to help with grocery distribution.”
“The perception about hunger not being an issue as the economy recovers from the pandemic is mistaken,” Ms. Vargas observes, adding that a new report from City Harvest (New York’s largest food-rescue organization) recently found that local child hunger and food insecurity remains 55 percent higher than pre-pandemic levels. “In New York City, one in four children does not know where their next meal will come from. In 2020, families with incomes in the lowest quintile spent 27.1 percent of their income on food. When you consider that single moms of children under the age of five disproportionately comprise families in this quintile, and in the Lower East Side, single parents contribute 78 percent of their household income for childcare, it leaves you wondering—how do our families pay for housing, transportation, clothing and other basic necessities? The cost burden of basic living in New York City is overwhelming for our low-income neighbors.”
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