City Harvest’s approach to food drives is to cast a wide net.
The New York City-based food bank – one of the largest in the country – sees food drives as an effective way for everyday New Yorkers to get engaged with its mission to end hunger in NYC. So it gives New Yorkers a multitude of ways to participate.
At the center of its efforts are four large traditional food drives that City Harvest runs every year. In addition, it works with corporate partners so their employees can make cash contributions that go toward food. And always available is the ability to contribute fresh and healthy produce using the #GiveHealthy platform.
“We want to offer all the options,” said Ellen Granger, Senior Manager, Donor Relations and Supply Chain. All of those pathways have helped it acquire close to one million pounds of food per year through food drives in recent years.
At the moment, City Harvest is gearing up for the biggest of its traditional food drives, which is conducted in partnership with The Daily News, one of the city’s largest-circulation newspapers. “This one takes place during the holiday season, which is when people really are looking for ways to get involved,” Granger said. “We devote a lot of resources toward being able to say yes to New Yorkers who are reaching out to us.”
City Harvest hires a temporary staff person to help field all the inquiries coming in during this time, and also staffs up in terms of drivers so it can make additional pickups. (People need only to collect 100 pounds of food to be able to get a pickup.)
The drive celebrates community, with The Daily News kicking it off with full-page ads, and entities like fire departments, police precincts and NYC-based Apple Bank getting into the act by serving as drop-off points for food collection. City Harvest also seeks out sponsors, such as food manufacturers, able to commit to a 40,000-pound food donation. The majority of participants tend to be schools, with some having participated for decades. “We love finding ways to engage our young New Yorkers,” Granger noted.
In the spring, from Mother’s Day to Father’s Day, City Harvest runs its Feed Our Kids Food Drive, which helps replenish food-pantry shelves during the summer, when access to free school meals is limited. Its two other annual food drives focus on collecting kosher food, with one occurring in the fall during the Jewish High Holidays and the other in the spring during Passover.
Always available through the City Harvest website is access to the #GiveHealthy platform, which lets any school, business or individual organize a food drive that steers donors exclusively toward fresh produce and healthy food. The platform addresses one of the pitfalls of traditional food drives, which is a lack of control over exactly what gets donated.
#GiveHealthy operates like a wedding registry, allowing donors to poke around on the website to choose and purchase fresh and healthy foods — say a five-pound bag of apples — from a curated list based on the needs of the recipient food bank. “It’s nice for people to actually pick specific items and make those decisions and know exactly what they’re contributing,” Granger said.
City Harvest enjoys various benefits as well. All of the food chosen by donors gets delivered free of charge directly to City Harvest’s warehouse. “It’s as easy as could be for the food bank,” Granger noted. The automatic deliveries are especially noticeable during the busy holiday season, when City Harvest is already committing a lot of resources to food drives. “The food just shows up,” Granger said. “You don’t have to think about it. It’s like magic.”
City Harvest also has the opportunity to direct donations to specific locations. For example, kosher food donated through #GiveHealthy can get sent directly to a kosher agency partner, rather than come into the main warehouse.
In addition, the food is guaranteed to be nutritious and of high quality. #GiveHealthy “brings fresh produce and other healthy items into the food drive landscape, which has typically been focused on canned goods and other non-perishables,” Granger said. “It’s all really high quality, beautiful produce.”
In doing an analysis of donors, Granger identified a “substantial number” of donors who contributed to City Harvest for the first time through #GiveHealthy, Granger said. In a plus, City Harvest receives the contact information for all the online #GiveHealthy donors, allowing it to move them along toward other forms of giving.
While many people still like to contribute through traditional food drives, City Harvest is keen to keep including #GiveHealthy as an option for its annual campaigns, as well as for anyone who wants to run a drive at any time throughout the year. “It’s great supplemental food,” Granger said, noting that it’s free, nutritious, high quality, and shows up hassle-free at optimal distribution points. “So why would we say no?”
PHOTO, TOP: Engaging school kids during The Daily News food drive. Photo credit to Lori Cannava.
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