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Mostly Cloudy Island Harvest reaches a milestone
Distributes 8 millionth pound of food for the year
On Dec. 28, Nassau Coliseum was being used for something other than sports games and concerts: Island Harvest, Long Island’s largest hunger relief organization, was shipping out its record-high 8 millionth pound of donated food, as well as unveiling a new heavy-duty truck donated by the Walmart Foundation.
“There’s been an increased need for food this past year, certainly these past two years,” said Randi Shubin Dresner, president and CEO of Island Harvest. “With the way the economy has changed, there are many, many more people who are looking for food.”
Dresner explained that the new truck, which is refrigerated, can hold up to 33,000 pounds of food — 8,000 pounds more than the other trucks in Island Harvest’s fleet. Which means it can be used to transport more and heavier food. “And that’s good, because a lot of healthy, nutritious food is heavy,” Dresner said. “Like frozen turkeys, for example.”
But even more exciting than the new truck was the fact that Island Harvest collected and distributed its 8 millionth pound of food this year. Through an aggressive campaign to raise awareness of hunger on Long Island and to seek more donations, Island Harvest collected 1.5 million more pounds of food this year than it did last year.
Dresner said that Island Harvest is looking to increase its collected food even more in the upcoming year. The organizations real focus for next year, she said, would be firming up the foundation of Island Harvest’s collection practices and insuring new programs do as well as they should, including Island Harvest’s new mobile food pantry, which will go into low-income, high-poverty senior housing developments.
“The need is greater, so we have no choice,” Dresner said of the huge increase. “We have to get more food because people need it.
“In regular business, if we stayed the same in a recessionary period, we’d be doing pretty darn good,” she continued. “But in our business, if we stayed the same, it would mean that hundreds of thousands of people wouldn’t be getting fed. So there’s no option.”
