New York City must eliminate a bad policy and double standard that makes the poor jump through hoops to access—of all things—food.
The Bloomberg administration requires all recipients of federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits (SNAP)—what used to be known as food stamps— to provide a fingerprint. This places an unfair burden on families trying to access food, families who are legally entitled to nutrition assistance. And it is an unnecessary practice. While New York State mandates a finger image for cash assistance, it leaves it up to local governments when it comes to food stamps.
States and counties like New Jersey and Yonkers do not finger print poor people trying to eat. Yet, New York City sees it fit to do so. New York City is one of only four places in the United States that requir- es a finger image from individuals who receive SNAP benefits, according to the New York City Coalition Against Hunger. The Coalition also notes that states that do not require a finger image have a lower error rate and a higher rate of legal participation in SNAP than New York City.
All adults in a household applying for SNAP have to physically report to the city to be finger imaged, which means they are missing work for a layer of bureaucracy. And if the adult is homebound, the city will visit that person to get their finger image.
This policy has a discriminatory impact well beyond class: Contrast the disparate treatment that poor, white upstate residents are not subjected to with the hurdle imposed by downstate New York on people of largely color.
This policy becomes even more outrageous when the recklessness, theft and abuse on Wall Street are considered. As the city’s Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum has emphasized, “If New Yorkers from Wall Street don’t need to provide finger prints to benefit from the Mayor’s JumpStart program, why should hungry New Yorkers have to provide finger prints for food they need to survive?”
Mayor Bloomberg declined an invitation to participate in a forum on poverty this week, but he should get the message: stop fingerprinting and criminalizing the poor.
View the article here.
NYCCAH executive director Joel Berg met with Rachel Ray and city and state officials on Monday to promote healthy school foods and the Child Nutrition Reauthorization Act. The Yum-O! organization, Rachel Ray’s non-profit, has partnered with the Office of SchoolFood to create healthy lunches to serve in public schools across the city.
Rachael Ray, Yum-o! and NYC SchoolFood Promote Healthy Food Choices to New York City Students
(New York, NY) — In an effort to highlight the continuous strides that the NYC Department of Education’s Office of SchoolFood is making towards promoting healthy food choices to New York City students and to encourage students and their families to develop healthy relationships with food and cooking, daytime host and best-selling author Rachael Ray, the Office of SchoolFood and the Yum-o! organization, Rachael Ray’s nonprofit organization, have partnered to create an exciting, delicious and nutritious lunch menu to be served in more than 1,600 New York City public schools, across all five boroughs.
Continue reading here.
Attendees judged 13 different types of hummus in our first ever Hummus Cook-Off on Saturday night.
This past Saturday, the New York City Coalition Against Hunger joined with friends and family to commemorate the life of Craig Murphey, a strongly committed anti-hunger community organizer who, while working with NYCCAH and the West Harlem Action Network Against Poverty, died in a tragic bike accident in 2007. The event was held at the Hope Lounge in Williamsburg, Brooklyn and attracted more than 250 people. Through the generosity of Hope Lounge and local businesses who donated raffle items, the event raised just over $5,000, which will help fund the Craig Murphey Fellowship, a program focused on anti-hunger, community-based work aimed at continuing Craig’s legacy.
If you were unable to make it, but would like to help us support this year’s Craig Murphey fellow, please donate in memory of Craig Murphey.
To see photos of the event, please visit our flickr page here.
Minimalist steel artist Miya Ando has recently chosen to focus on creating public art pieces for spiritual or meditative spaces. Her most recent project is a grid of 144 steel squares in the nondenominational meditation space of St. John’s Bread and Life. “I believe that nourishing of the soul is also very important in the hunger issue,” said Ms. Ando. The piece, titled “Fiat Lux: Let There Be Light,” is “meant to serve as a visual representation of transcendence and hope, compassion and serenity in a non-denomination but spiritual space,” said Ms. Ando.
A descendent of Japanese Sword maker Ando Yoshiro Masakatsu, Ms. Ando was raised in two distinct cultures – a mountainous region of Northern California and a Buddhist temple in Japan, where she was raised by swordsmiths turned Buddhist priests. She has been working with steel canvases for more than a decade to create quiet, abstract and meditative environments.
To learn more about Miya Ando visit her website at www.miyaando.com.
St. John’s Bread and Life has served Bedford-Stuyvesant residents since 1982. Everyday they serve over 2,000 meals to hungry New Yorkers. For more information about St. John’s Bread and Life visit www.breadandlife.org.
Farm share grows cheap vegetables for low-income communities
By Kumasi Aaron
7:05 AM on 10/13/2009
It’s a Wednesday afternoon, and for Dominique and her son Dominick, that means one thing: fresh organic produce.
“Well my favorite vegetable is carrots,” said Dominick, “because they’re crunchy.”
They get those crunchy carrots and other organic vegetables every week at the Flatbush Farm Share, one of the newest Community Supported Agriculture groups – or CSAs – in New York City.
Dominique buys “shares” of vegetables from a local farm before it’s harvest season. Then the farm delivers a variety of fresh foods – like carrots, onions and squash – to her neighborhood.
“I’ve been eating more vegetables since I’ve been here. And I’ve been introducing my son to different varieties,” said Dominique.
That’s because now she can afford to buy them. This year the Flatbush Farm Share is the only new CSA in New York City that allows members to pay for shares based on their income, and even supplement the cost by using food stamps or farm share volunteer hours. Organizers say their produce is half the price of vegetables sold in chain grocery stores.
For many members, just finding organic vegetables like these in this community is hard enough, and in a tough economy, paying for them is even harder.
Flatbush resident Amy Seek wanted to make it a little easier. After attending a CSA meeting she decided to start one herself, for people who needed it most.
“There’s a lot of low-income communities that don’t have the luxury to choose the food that they eat, and so we wanted to provide an option for affordable organic fresh produce,” said Flatbush Farm Share founder, Amy Seek.
To make that happen, Amy teamed up with several non-profits including NYCCAH, The New York City Coalition Against Hunger. NYCCAH’s executive director Joel Berg says the partnership addresses a serious problem.
Berg said, “In 2007, even before the national economic downturn, there were more than 36.2 million Americans living in households that couldn’t afford enough food.”
“I’m glad you know, they chose my community, I’m very glad for that, very grateful,” Dominique said.
Grateful that she and little Dominick can eat a little healthier.
View the article here.
Wealth of 56 New York City Billionaires Still Dwarfs Earnings of 1.5 Million Low-Income New Yorkers
The Richest New Yorker’s Worth Equals 342,000 Average Families; Middle Class Becoming an “Endangered Species” in New York
Using data from the new “Forbes 400” report, the New York City Coalition Against Hunger (NYCCAH), has just calculated that that the 56 richest people in New York had 27 times the money of the 1.5 million poorest. The richest single New Yorker – who just happens to be Mayor Michael Bloomberg – has two and a half times the money of the 1.5 million poorest.
According to Forbes, New York City had 56 billionaires this year, slightly down from 64 last year, but the combined net worth of all 56 New York City billionaires this year was $183.5 billion. According to new data from the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2008 there were 1.5 million people in New York City living below the meager poverty line of $17,600. Many of the poor families made far less than that: fully 43 percent earned less than half of that and 26 percent earned less than three quarters of that. NYCCAH calculated the collective yearly earnings of all 1.5 million city residents in poverty to be $6.8 billion. Since people in poverty often have no net worth or negative net worth, that means the 1.5 million low-income New Yorkers have 1/27th the income of all 56 billionaires and less than half the income of Mayor Bloomberg.
In comparing the billionaires to average middle class New Yorkers, the difference was slightly less but still massive. The median family income in New York City in 2008 was $51,116, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Thus, the 56 billionaires had a net worth that equaled the annual earnings of 3.5 million average New York City families; Mayor Bloomberg had a net worth equal to the earnings of 342,000 average New York City families.
Said Joel Berg, Executive Director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, “Even in the horrid economy, the wealthy still have astounding sums of money, reinforcing the reality that they have created a ‘heads we win, tails you lose economy.’ This is further proof that the opportunity capitalism allowed many grandparents (and so many other New Yorkers) to build a better life for their children and grandchildren has been replaced by the crony capitalism of the present time in which the ultra, mega-rich barely get dented by the recession while lower and middle class are facing the greatest struggles in decades. I want to be clear that I am not blasting the wealthy for being personally wealthy, but rather pointing out that the State and City have implemented public policies – tax cuts and corporate welfare for the mega rich combined with fee hikes and service cuts for the middle class and the impoverished – that are directly responsible for this soaring inequality of wealth, which is now higher in New York than an Sri Lanka and Mexico. Middle class families are being driven out of New York so rapidly that they are becoming an endangered species. If we continue these failed policies, someday the only way that we’ll be able to see as middle class family in New York is at a fossil display at the American Museum of Natural History.”
The New York Daily News cited NYCCAH research in an article about NYC mayoral candidates’ campaign finances in an article published on Friday.
Today’s campaign finance filings in the mayor’s race came in mercifully early, as these things go, which gives us time to peruse Bloomberg’s spending for the fun stuff ($1,575.69 to Diehard Exterminating! $185 to the NYPD Queens tow pound!) and Thompson’s contributions for the sad stuff (just one max $4,950 contribution, from Charlie Rangel’s campaign fund!) before sundown.
On Tuesday, the Census Bureau released the 2008 federal poverty statistics. The New York City Coalition Against Hunger joined with advocates and elected officials to raise awareness of the continuing problem of poverty in New York City.
Check out these articles relaying executive director Joel Berg’s message that poverty continues to be a problem in New York City.
Gawker:
What is our billionaire Mayor-for-life up to, today? Oh, he has some great ideas for parking! He will make it so easy to park in New York, if you just give him one more term. Parking will be his legacy.
Continue reading here.
Epoch Times:
NEW YORK—There’s a discrepancy between the reality of the state of poverty in New York City and the statistics released Tuesday by the U.S. Census Bureau, according to poverty advocates.
Continue reading here.
NY1:
More and more individuals and families are headed to soup kitchens and food pantries in the Bronx because they just can’t make ends meet. The newly released American Community Survey for 2008 says more than 380,000 Bronx residents, which works out to be more than a quarter of the borough’s population, live below the federal poverty line.
Continue reading here.
New York Times:
In a departure from the national picture, family income rose slightly in New York City in 2008 from 2007, and the proportion of poor people was virtually unchanged, according to census figures released Tuesday.
Continue reading here.
New York Daily News:
Is New York the greatest city in the world? Without a doubt, it is for some. Although for hundreds of thousands of its residents, who seem to survive only by the grace of God in the most expensive city in the country, it may be difficult to give their hometown the thumbs up.
Bloomberg to Make it Easier to Park the Car You Live In Now
What is our billionaire Mayor-for-life up to, today? Oh, he has some great ideas for parking! He will make it so easy to park in New York, if you just give him one more term. Parking will be his legacy.
“How would you like to use your mobile device to see a map of available parking spaces in your neighborhood,” Mayor Bloomberg asks in a Daily News op-ed, “and also use it to pay your meter?” That would be amazing, if we had a car. (Though we don’t think people should be using their “mobile devices” while driving around our neighborhoods maybe?)
Then Bloomberg promises to get rid of the dreaded alternate-side parking in the nicer Brooklyn neighborhoods, and announces that “soon, we’ll begin a pilot program in the Riverdale section of the Bronx.”
Oh, good. A pilot cell-phone parking meter project will begin soon, in the Bronx.
Man, that reminds us, what were we just reading about the Bronx again? Oh, right, it remains America’s poorest urban county with more than a quarter of the population living below the poverty line. And that is not counting the homeless!
“Last year, according to the Coalition for the Homeless, there were more than 110,000 people who spent at least one night in a shelter,” said Joel Berg of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger.
The report also found 26 percent of Hispanics are at poverty level — the highest of any ethnic group in the city. The Bronx and Queens are the only boroughs that saw the overall number of poor go up between 2007 and 2008. The Bronx came in with nearly 22,000 people.
“One of the reasons that is, is poor people are being pushed out of places like Manhattan and forced to relocate to the Bronx,” Berg said.
Well, hopefully the 2009 numbers will show the effects of Mayor Bloomberg’s ambitious, poverty-fighting “mobile device parking meter pilot program.”
Working-Class Blog Highlights Berg’s Ideas on the Relationship Between Livable Wages & Hunger
The Center for Working-Class Studies’s Blog from Youngstown State University – the first interdisciplinary academic center in the country devoted to understanding and making visible working-class culture – posted a great article today about the relationship between living wages and hunger. Sherry Linkon, the author of the post, was inspired by Executive Director Joel Berg’s involvement with the working-class wing of the good food movement after she interviewed him in July.
Excerpts by Linkon from the post:
Until recently, I’ve been largely ignoring the movement to change how we eat. Too much of the movement focuses on upper-middle class denizens of big coastal cities, people sipping on soy lattes as they drive their Volvo stations wagons out to do a shift of sweat equity on a small community-supported farm and who pay twice what I’d be willing to spend for organically-raised free-range buffalo meat..In the past few months, I’ve had the opportunity to talk with two men who are part of the working-class wing of the good food movement, men whose work goes far beyond feeding people. They also foster cross-class coalitions in support of good wages, fighting crime, and improving the environment…Joel Berg is the executive director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger. When I interviewed him in July, he told me that more than 36 million Americans can’t afford to buy enough food, and about a third of them are children. Food banks help, but he says the real problem is low wages. Most of those who don’t have enough food live in families where at least one person works. The problem is that too many working-class jobs won’t support a family. His answer to hunger in America: livable wages…”
Read the full article here.
