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PUBLIC TESTIMONY
Testimony by Greg Silverman, CEO of West Side Campaign Against Hunger
3:49:54
ยท
101 sec
Greg Silverman, CEO of West Side Campaign Against Hunger, testifies about the organization's work in providing food assistance and advocates for increased funding for food pantries. He emphasizes the importance of choice in food distribution and the need for more direct support to food pantries.
- Westside Campaign Against Hunger served 310,000 New Yorkers in need, distributing 3 million pounds of fresh produce
- Silverman supports increasing the Community Food Connection (CFC) program funding to $100 million
- He highlights the collaboration of frontline anti-hunger organizations through the Food Pantry Roundtable, which collectively provides over 69 million meals annually
Greg Silverman
3:49:54
Okay.
3:49:55
Thank you General Welfar, committee chair, aye, Ale, for having us here today and holding this hearing.
3:50:01
My name's Greg Silverman.
3:50:02
I run the Westside Campaign Ants Hunger.
3:50:04
For forty six years we've been on the front lines handing out food all over the city.
3:50:08
This year a 10,000 New Yorkers in need.
3:50:11
We gave out about 3,000,000 pounds of that in the form of fresh produce.
3:50:15
It's what we're focused on.
3:50:16
We're focused on dignity and choice.
3:50:18
And choice was what we created long ago in the first pantry, a choice model pantry in the nation.
3:50:23
We believe choice is much larger than that now though.
3:50:25
It's not just apples or bananas but of the location of service, the delivery models and how you spend your time in getting food.
3:50:32
And food pantries as we all know need more direct support right now.
3:50:37
More culturally appropriate nutritious food with proper staffing and operations.
3:50:41
I also outside of Westside Campaign Ants Hunger run the have found the roundtable which is a network of nine other frontline anti hunger organizations that together give out over 69,000,000 meals a year.
3:50:55
And by working together we've been able to drive down costs to get more food to community members in need.
3:51:00
Not necessarily food through pantries but through any network possible where there's great community organizations.
3:51:06
That's why we think CFC one hundred percent agree it needs to be $100,000,000 We know that in the past year the levels as you said were like 60,100,000.0.
3:51:15
It dropped to 25.
3:51:16
And then we did a lot of advocacy.
3:51:18
We brought it back up.
3:51:19
And now are we really going to go through that same process again when we know the need is catastrophic.
3:51:25
And so we're going to do anything we can to help support that.
3:51:29
We're going to push that forward.
3:51:30
And we want to make sure that $100,000,000 goes for baseline of CFC.