TESTIMONY
Jerome Nathaniel on Addressing Hunger and Potential Improvements to the Mayor's Preliminary Budget
4:38:17
·
144 sec
Jerome Nathaniel details the efforts of City Harvest in rescuing food and distributing it to New Yorkers in need, and suggests improvements to the mayor's preliminary budget to better address hunger.
- City Harvest is set to rescue over 77 million pounds of food this year, but their efforts are not enough to meet the demand.
- Nathaniel advocates for increased staffing at the Human Resources Administration (HRA) and more support for the SNAP program.
- He proposes a modest increase in funding for the Community Food Connections to meet the rising operational costs and demand for emergency food.
- The testimony includes a call to leverage state and federal funding for assisting new arrivals and shelters.
- Additionally, Nathaniel supports the restoration of $60 million in funding for Office of Food and Nutrition Services (OFNS) school meals to combat child hunger.
Jerome Nathaniel
4:38:17
Good afternoon.
4:38:18
Thank you so much for having us here today to testify on the mayor's preliminary budget.
4:38:23
Name is Jordan Nathaniel.
4:38:24
I'm the director of Policy And Government Relations at City Harvest.
4:38:27
City Harvest is one of New York City's largest food rescue organizations.
4:38:31
This year, we're on pace to rescue over £77,000,000 of food, perfectly edible food, mostly fresh produce, and delivering that to a network of over 400 emergency food programs across the Five boroughs.
4:38:43
Unfortunately, even as we're ramping up our services to be 20% higher than it was before COVID, We know that's simply not enough.
4:38:50
It's not fair and or is it possible for emergency food providers and community based organizations to make up the gap in place of effective, efficient and equitable public policy.
4:39:00
And we think there are a number ways that the budget can't invest in the fight against hunger, so it's written in-depth in my testimony and you presented a lot of strong important questions to HRA about it earlier today, but I do want to go through some of them.
4:39:13
So first and foremost, we're very concerned about staffing at HRA.
4:39:17
We think that is critically important that they go above and beyond the backlog and really make sure that it's well staffed in their recruiting and retaining staff because the factor matter is for every meal that we provide.
4:39:28
Snap provides access to 9 meals.
4:39:29
So it's really important that the city is doing is part to really invest in rolling people into the SNAP program.
4:39:36
Secondly, this myself familiar, we're all in the same anti hunger community, but we're asking for community food connections to go up to $60,000,000.
4:39:44
Even while pantry visits have increased by 80%, We're not asking the city to increase CFC funding by 80%.
4:39:51
We're simply asking for a really modest $5,000,000 increase or so to to meet the increased cost of operating the program and also to the increased demand for emergency food across our city.
4:40:02
We're also asking for the city to really do its best to leverage state federal funding, any funding to really support the response to new arrivals Many of our program partners are seeing a huge increase in demand as ZIP codes that are near shelters and herd sites.
4:40:16
So it's really important that the city really reimburses or supports them in that response.
4:40:21
And then finally, I do also want to make it asking solidarity with no kids hungry.
4:40:28
We're asking for the city to restore $60,000,000 that was proposed to be cut from o f and s.
4:40:34
School meals are important.
4:40:36
Child hunger is up, and a lot of those same families are going to city Harvest pantry programs.
4:40:40
Thank you again for this time.
