Many Americans faced losing their SNAP benefits in November. Though the government shutdown has ended and SNAP will be funded, this change would have directly impacted about 1.8 million New Yorkers, including working adults, children, seniors, veterans, and people with disabilities. Soup kitchens and food banks would have also felt the effects.
“No charitable organization can replace the critical support SNAP provides,” said Leslie Gordon, President and CEO of the Food Bank For NYC. Even so, she and the Food Bank for NYC team work tirelessly to keep New Yorkers fed.
Food Bank for NYC has teamed up with Charlamagne Tha God (CTG) of the Breakfast Club on Power 105.1, who has partnered with FBFNYC for many years, to fight food insecurity. CTG has personally funded up to 25,000 meals for those directly affected and has pledged to match another 25,000 in donations from others.
“New York showed up and showed out,” he says. As of today, people have donated about 404,100 meals!
“People gotta eat, it’s that simple for me,” CTG exclaimed. “When this situation came about, and even before the SNAP benefits, I knew a lot of the funding for the food banks and pantries were gonna be cut off, so I knew I had to step up what I was already doing.” Gordon says working with individuals like CTG is truly a humbling experience, “he is willing to leverage his network… It’s each one reach one, and he understands that… we consider him a friend and a genuine partner in the work that we do here.”
“People are the collateral damage in your political games,” CTG said. He holds both political parties responsible, noting that “it takes a bipartisan effort to reopen the government.” He calls the weaponization of hunger cruel, but not unusual: “They’ve always weaponized poverty and the disenfranchised.” CTG encourages people to support these facilities financially by donating or, if possible, volunteering their time.
Gordon and the Food Bank for NYC strive to help people who desperately need food, like Brittany Torres, a schoolteacher and single mother who teaches in the Bronx, where her son also attends school. She receives SNAP benefits to make ends meet, but even with this assistance, she often goes without to ensure her son has what he needs. She says losing SNAP would be terrifying. Torres, like many others, lives this reality every day, but the Food Bank for NYC works to alleviate some of that burden, one belly at a time.
For more information, please visit https://www.foodbanknyc.org.
