Food pantry lines are getting more populated in Ozone Park

 

 

Queens Chronicle

The weekly food pantry that began in a Rockaway Boulevard parking lot in Ozone Park last summer passed a sobering benchmark this week.

For the first time, more than 1,000 people showed up for food.

“There’s a need, that’s all I can tell you,” said Sam Esposito, founder of the upstart Ozone Park Residents Block Association, which, with the local Kiwanis Club and members of the civilian patrol group, started the Saturday-morning food pantry last July.

“Think about it — people don’t start lining up at 6 o’clock in the morning unless there is a need. There’s a lot of unemployment,” he said. “Everybody hits bottom.”

When the pantry first opened, barely 100 people showed up for food allotments, much of it bought from local supermarkets, according to Esposito.

Since the beginning of the pandemic last March, established food pantries across Queens have seen the numbers of the people they serve skyrocket.

Food operations sponsored by churches and civic groups were nearly overwhelmed by needy families who turned to them by the thousands following the layoffs and business shutdowns of May and June.

In some parts of Queens, new food operations sprang up to help meet the need.

The new pantries could not get certified by the city fast enough to tap into the established distribution system that helps supply the older operations.

Since August, larger, city-sanctioned pantries in Brooklyn and Queens have quietly been supplying the Ozone Park pantry with fresh produce, milk, packaged food, necessities like baby diapers and the like, said Mohammad Kahn, OZPKRBA’s executive director.

“All the pantries order extra for us,” said Esposito. “Every Tuesday and Wednesday, they call and say come and get it.

“Other than that, no one wants to help us.”

 Thought I put this out there too:

But on Sundays, volunteers organize pop-up pantries at different locations around Ozone Park to distribute hundreds of so-called “Trump boxes” — food boxes, each containing a letter signed by the president bought and distributed under a $4-billion U.S. Department of Agriculture program since last August.

This is what's messed up about the guy. Providing these services shows he's helping the poor get through this pandemic, there's absolutely no need for self-promotion. Be humble, Mr. President.

 

The new depression manifests itself in Flushing

NY Post

The line stretched a quarter-mile before the sun was barely up Saturday, snaking around corners like bread lines in the 1930s. But the hungry in Queens are today’s New Yorkers, left jobless by the coronavirus.

Until the pandemic struck the city, La Jornada food pantry used to hand out groceries to roughly 1,000 families a week. Now, the number tops 10,000. And volunteers serve lunch every day to 1,000 — many of them kids with growling stomachs. Across the five boroughs, the hungry is in the hundreds of thousands, the Food Bank of New York estimates.


“It reminds me of the picture from the Great Depression where a man in a suit and tie is giving another man in a suit and tie an apple. That’s all he had,” La Jornada’s Pedro Rodriguez told The Post. “We give all we have, but that’s not enough.”
 
Seniors, moms and kids, singles — many immigrants from China and Mexico — wait for hours. They turn out in droves wherever, and whenever, the food pantry’s truck shows up.


“We feel like we are underwater, drowning in a tsunami of people,” Rodriguez, a volunteer who acts as the food pantry’s executive director, told The Post. “This isn’t like a little rain coming down. The numbers are unbelievable.”

Senior citizens left to rot by your city

Dear Crappy,

In recent days we have been made aware of a large number of seniors in desperate need of food. As more and more local stores and delis shut down, seniors have to travel further and further to find a grocery store, and even when one is open, there is a long line waiting outside. My husband runs a food pantry in Queens, and in normal (non-covid) times, only opens once a month. His pantry is on the 311 Emergency Food Provider list for our area (Elmhurst), and this past week he has been inundated with calls from agencies/social workers trying to find help for their clients, as well as desperate ppl calling for themselves because they have nowhere else to turn. Today my husband walked a shopping cart full of food to a 94-yr-old homebound lady 30 blocks away. My question, what is the city doing to try to help people in need of food, especially vulnerable seniors? At this point, Senior Services workers are calling volunteer once-monthly food pantries looking for help. Attached is a photo from 311’s web site. Should the seniors start waiting outside public school cafeterias for their pb&j or cheese sandwich?