On Wednesday, December 2nd 2015, our group traveled to 116th St., in West Harlem. We volunteered with an organization called, “Food Bank for NYC.” This organization is a food pantry and a soup kitchen that provides over 40,000 hot meals a month. They also have special feeding programs for senior citizens, including the “Shop and Stock” program, in which our group participated in. The “Shop and Stock” program is a program where senior citizens who are registered with Food Bank for NYC’s pantry, can come and shop for grocery items once a month. These senior citizens receive a certain amount of “points” that they are allowed to spend in the pantry. The number of “points” that they receive depends on the number of people in their family. From around 9:45 am to around 11:00 am, our group helped senior citizens select items from the pantry. We helped them by directing them to certain sections of the pantry and we helped them keep track of how many points they had used and spent. The pantry contained many different types of food including cereal, canned and boxed foods, protein (such as turkey and chicken) and juice. It was set up sort of like a supermarket. This fieldwork was extremely enjoyable because we were able to interact with and help people who were actually being impacted by hunger, which is different from our past fieldworks. We hope that we can volunteer again with Food Bank for NYC’s “Shop and Stock” program because we felt that it was a very direct and beneficial way to help those who are hungry or food insecure in New York City. This volunteer work also inspired our group because we felt that it would be a good interactive activity to have a mini “Shop and Stock” for our Social Justice Teach-ins. Overall, our group thoroughly enjoyed and learned a lot from this fieldwork.

This is a picture of Tibeau, Layne and I right before we began helping customers select their food from the pantry.