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Charity Pitch: Long Island Cares

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For my charity pitch, I am asking that you support Long Island Cares, a food bank located on--you guessed it--Long Island. The mission of Long Island Cares is to benefit the hungry on Long Island by providing them with the food they need, and providing for the humanitarian needs of the community. They envision a hunger-free Long Island, and work towards this by distributing more than six million pounds of food each year to 316,000 people (about 11% of the population of Nassau and Suffolk Counties). In 2017, they served over 500 food pantries, soup kitchens, day care centers, senior citizen centers, congregations, and veterans centers. While LI Cares is a food bank at its core, it actually does much more than that by supporting veterans’ needs, helping people enter/reenter the workforce, and promoting a healthy lifestyle for everyone. More specifically, they work to educate the public about the causes and consequences of hunger and how to eat healthier, and help those in need become self-sufficient. Thus, programs they support include hunger education, children’s nutrition, job training, a pet pantry, and veterans’ services. For example, in 2017, they conducted 109 “Hunger 101” workshops with over 2,500 people, and they provided meals for over 5,000 children in lower income school districts through their Mobile School Pantry.

I have some personal experience with this organization, as I have volunteered at LI Cares in the past. When I volunteered, I helped organize and sort the food in a warehouse so it could be distributed later on. While doing so, I realized how difficult and immense the entire operation of running a large food bank really is. I was also able to talk to some of the regular volunteers, and it was obvious the passion they had to stop anybody on Long Island from going hungry, or feeling food insecure. This organization is important to me because it addresses an issue that not many people from outside the area (especially at Binghamton University) would associate with Long Island--hunger. While it is true that Long Island has many affluent towns and neighborhoods, this is not the case everywhere, and there are many people struggling to make ends meet (especially because costs of living are so high). In doing so, LI Cares especially helps women, as they comprise 63% of the people that receive food. The food someone gets from this organization can allow them to not have to choose between paying for food or a mortgage, or food or healthcare, for at least one day (which can be life changing). Based on the necessary work that it does, Long Island Cares plays a very important role in the community, and it has a far-reaching impact. I hope that you will support it!


Comments

  1. UnknownFebruary 27, 2019 at 8:26 PM

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  2. T.J. McKiernanFebruary 28, 2019 at 1:03 AM

    This charity and its mission did happen to strike me due to my preconceived notions of Long Island living. As a none resident of the island that SO many of my Binghamton peers call home, I generally think of Long Island as a posh, densely populated reality of the American Dream. I am overly dramatizing my idea of Long Island a little bit, but I really did not realize that residents were food insecure, or food secure in numbers large enough for an organization to develop and provide for 316,000 people.

    Already experiencing this stark realization of the struggles of Long Islanders that I had assumed were negligible in numbers, I was not then surprised to connect it to, as you stated, the fact that the "...costs of living are so [too] high." It reminds me something my dad always says. He has worked in New York city for his whole adult life, and he has worked in all five boroughs, so he can really attest to the gentrification that is occurring. While gentrification is a great idea in theory, in practice it fails to live up to its expectations. It does accomplish the task of bringing life and economic vitality back to a defunct neighborhood, but the cost of living is raised and forced out are all the people who can no longer afford their housing. And, as my dad tells me, "They bring all this money back in, but in the process they ruin a perfectly good hood."

    In my personal opinion, I feel like all the social stratification and subsequent unequal distribution is causing many of the sociological issues that communities face. It is known that neighborhoods tend to pocket around a certain income class, or historically, a certain racial background, but mixed income housing could eliminate some of the issues of gentrification that are consuming neighborhoods that were once affordable. No person should be forced to move out of their home because they can no longer feed their family when rents and taxes soar. In the mean time, this organization seems like a great cause, but I am interested in seeing how people could campaign to develop a solution to this systemic, nationwide problem. I know it was only a small piece of this charity post, but I do feel that this issue of rising costs of living pushing out poor people to make way for the rich does have roots to many other problems, which, of course, includes food insecurity.

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  3. Julia DianaMarch 2, 2019 at 12:14 PM

    This blog post was interesting to me because it demonstrated that I am more affected by stereotypes than I previously believed myself to be. I live on Long Island and was aware of the existence of poverty in some towns, but I did not realize it was as bad as it actually is. The organization Long Island Cares appears to be doing great work for the people who need it most and I commend you for working with them in the past. I think it is great that you spent your time there helping those in need.

    I feel that it is incredible and sad that 11% of the populations of Suffolk County and Nassau County require the help of a food bank. That number is fairly high and shocking to me. After reading your post I researched more on the poverty line in Long Island and the impact of Long Island Cares. I found that the poverty line is placed at around $25,000 a year for Long Island residents, however the majority of people who use the resources of Long Island Cares sit in the range of an annual income of around $25,000 to $74,000. The price of living on Long Island is known to be high, but this amount of money should not lead to poverty for families.

    From your post and what I have read, I believe Long Island Cares to be a great organization. It targets problems that contribute to poverty like unemployment and the needs of veterans. I also appreciate that it works to educate people in regard to nutrition. I find it difficult however, to support the organization completely because of the literature we have been reading for class lately. In the past week I have read a lot about targeting the root of a problem instead of trying to fix the things that the root causes. I think that this organization sounds great, but I wish it was doing more to combat the reason that so many families in Long Island sit below the poverty line. There are so many people that are below the poverty line and even those who sit above it on paper are struggling on the island. Long Island Cares does a lot for its community, but I feel it would be more impactful if it worked to end the causes of such a high rate of poverty.

    These are the two articles I used to understand more about the necessity of the organization:

    http://www.longislandindex.org/data_posts/poverty/
    https://www.licares.org/article/paule-pachters-blog/not-surprised-long-islands-rise-poverty/

    - Julia Diana

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