By MELANIE GRAYCE WEST
As the recession takes a continued toll on food pantries and other emergency providers, one of the city’s top hunger charities is embarking on an ambitious fundraising drive to broaden its reach and double the amount of food it distributes.
City Harvest plans to announce the five-year, $30 million campaign on Tuesday. Already, the organization has quietly raised $9 million toward the effort.
Ken Maldonado for The Wall Street Journal
Volunteers at City Harvest unload cucumbers for distribution.
The 30-year-old charity collects excess food from restaurants, groceries, cafeterias and farms and distributes it to hundreds of groups throughout the city. The new campaign would allow it to increase the amount of food it handles every year to 60 million pounds from 28 million last year.
A popular charity in New York, City Harvest has support from some glamorous star chefs, including Eric Ripert of Le Bernardin and Geoffrey Zakarian of the Lamb’s Club. Last year’s “Evening of Practical Magic” gala raised $1.5 million. Its May luncheon raises some $240,000.
The new fundraising effort, however, plans to target the organization’s existing 70,000 donors by asking them to increase their average contribution.
Only 2% of the group’s funding comes from government sources. It has an annual budget of $19 million.
“We will never be in a position of having to say no to a client or agency because we’ve lost our funding,” said City Harvest Executive Director Jilly Stephens.
At the same time, however, City Harvest has undergone some growing pains as it expands its mission. It has trimmed 39 smaller groups from the 600 that receive its deliveries.
Ken Maldonado for The Wall Street Journal
A truck at the City Harvest distribution center in Long Island City.
Some of the 39 had been on delivery routes for many years. City Harvest declined to name any of the outlets—many of them are not open to the public, such as a residential drug-treatment program—but said they had been given notice and other options for food sources. The agencies took in a combined 13,000 pounds of food a year.
“They are not the best places for us when we think about moving much more food now,” Ms. Stephens said.
The move comes amid rising competition for donors who target their gifts to food charities. Some of New York’s other top hunger organizations also are looking to expand operations amid what backers call an increasing need for emergency food. In the fall, God’s Love We Deliver, which delivers meals to people living with HIV/AIDS and other serious illnesses, began a $25 million capital campaign to expand its facilities. That campaign has raised $15 million to date.
Similarly, the Food Bank for New York City will launch a strategic plan next month that will include plans for a major fundraising campaign. The Food Bank has seen cuts in government food and funds even as demand has grown. Last year, the organization received roughly 47% of its funding from government sources. This year, it expects that amount to be 38%.
As the primary agency for food distribution in the city, the Food Bank, with a budget of $75 million, dwarfs many other hunger charities and provides food to some 1,000 participants, including pantries, senior centers, soup kitchens and others. Margarette Purvis, president and chief executive of the Food Bank, said the charity plans to begin a major fundraising campaign in six months in an attempt to keep up with increased need.
“The budget is being developed with the plan. The messaging is being developed with the plan, because we got to pull the trigger immediately,” she said.
Ms. Stephens of City Harvest said that her organization is “well positioned” to expand, with a growth rate of about 10% over the past five years.
Key to expansion is the group’s new 45,400-square-foot distribution center in Long Island City. That center has improved the efficiency of deliveries and given the organization a place to accept large deliveries of fresh and frozen food, Ms. Stephens said.
In recent years City Harvest also has expanded its “Healthy Neighborhoods” program, which provides nutrition education, supermarket tours and mobile food markets with regular emergency food deliveries in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, the South Bronx and the north shore of Staten Island. The campaign would add Washington Heights and a Queens neighborhood to the program.
Write to Melanie Grayce West at [email protected]
A version of this article appeared April 24, 2012, on page A17 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Food Charity Packs A New Funding Drive.
