September 2020 

Social Issues and Nonprofit Solutions: Hunger in Westchester: Record-breaking need and record-breaking impact, Feeding Westchester

Six months into this global pandemic, need in Westchester County remains at unprecedented levels:  

• Our county’s unemployment rate is more than 14 percent—40 percent higher than the national level.
• Lines at pantries and distributions are more than twice as long as they were pre-COVID.
• As schools and colleges reopen, there is uncertainty about spread, safety, and parents’ ability to work if children are not physically in school. 
• How will children, who receive free or reduced-price lunch, eat if they are not in school?  

Feeding Westchester is the primary hunger relief agency in Westchester and helps feed our neighbors who are hungry across our community.

• Our food pantries, program partners, and direct distributions throughout the county are serving more than 300,000 of our neighbors who are hungry each month—more than twice as many as pre-COVID-19. 

• Our hard-working team more than doubled the amount of food provided to the community by streamlining our processes and sharing pre-packed “bulk pallets” of free food with our agency partners.
  
  
• We added new “emergency partners” to help distribute high need areas and distributed food in new ways like drive-through distributions. 
  
  
• And we are distributing more than 2 million pounds of food each month—equivalent to more than 1.6 million meals. 
  
  

For thirty years, Feeding Westchester has been at the forefront of hunger relief in our community. Pre-COVID, during this global pandemic and as long as we are needed, we will continue to provide as much food as possible to as many of our neighbors in need as possible, in alignment with our mission of alleviating hunger in Westchester County. Together we are Feeding Westchester.