Food Bank For NYC turns Pride food distribution into a community event
Hundreds lined up in the rain for groceries and left with Pride-colored roses, turning a Greenwich Village food pickup into something visibly welcoming.
At The Red Door Place in Greenwich Village on June 23, Food Bank For NYC handed out groceries and Pride-colored roses to neighbors lined up in the rain.
The event, hosted with The Red Door Place, served 300 people with fresh produce, meat and shelf-stable groceries in four hours. Food Bank served 200 people in one 30-minute window, and Scott’s Flowers donated 300 single stems in the colors of the Pride flag.
Louis Kang, who leads The Red Door Place, said the need has grown since COVID and has not stopped. Many of the Greenwich Village neighbors it serves are LGBTQIA+ seniors living on fixed incomes, and it delivers more than 10,000 pounds of food each week to the pantry through retail donations, warehouse resources and federally subsidized foods.
Alejandra Cleves, Food Bank For NYC’s SNAP specialist, was there when one older woman learned her SNAP benefit had increased by only $1, to the minimum monthly allotment of $24. Anna Herman, Food Bank’s manager of community nutrition, ran a fruit-infused seltzer bar for people waiting in line. “Food insecurity hits historically marginalized groups, including LGBTQ people, LGBTQ people of color and trans people,” she said, adding that showing up helps people feel safe coming there.
Leah Tsalis of Scott’s Flowers said, “A color for everyone,” and added, “It’s not always about necessity. People want things too - extra joy and beauty.” A participant named Dario, a gay man of color and a regular, said the organization never made him feel ashamed for needing help and that it made him feel good about coming back.
Its 2023 campaign theme was “Food is a Powerful Ally,” and that effort raised nearly 19,000 meals during the NYC Pride Parade. The organization works with nearly 800 community partners across nearly every ZIP code and distributed 103.5 million pounds of food in FY24, including 31.4 million pounds of culturally relevant food.
Pride Month is observed in June in honor of the 1969 Stonewall uprising in Greenwich Village, and NYC Pride’s PrideFest 2026 was set for June 28 in the same area.
This article was produced by Prism’s automated news system from verified source data, official records, and press releases, then run through automated quality and moderation checks before publishing. The system is built and supervised by the people who set the standards it runs under. Read our full AI policy.
Did this article answer your question?
