City Harvest Programs » Emergency Food Programs

Agency Capacity Expansion

The Problem

Agencies often encounter fundamental business challenges that can prevent growth, hinder ability to serve clients effectively, limit innovative approaches, and prevent them from functioning at full capacity. Some challenges facing our partner agencies include data management, fundraising, customer service, resource allocation, and financial management. Without expertise in these areas, agencies often find it difficult to address these challenges alone.

City Harvest’s Response

Through Agency Capacity Expansion, City Harvest works with selected emergency food programs to strengthen their overall ability to serve their communities. These efforts enable them to offer enhanced food services and, potentially, other social services that can help clients transition out of emergency food programs. An effective coalition committed to providing expertise and resources can make it possible for providers of emergency food to overcome these challenges and enhance their ability to provide food and other services to people in need.

In June 2009, City Harvest hosted our 1st Annual Agency Conference to help address many of the new challenges agencies faced as well as ongoing ones. The conference, made possible by The New York Community Trust, included a full day of workshops led by experts from Community Resource Exchange. Over 200 agency directors learned practical strategies to engage volunteers, budget in hard times, build strategic alliances, and plan for succession. In many workshops, directors were asked to share challenges they have faced as well as their solutions, creating a dialogue among agencies. Agencies also spoke about the increasing need for emergency food in their communities. View videos from the conference.

Our primary focus is on providing resources to agencies located in City Harvest’s Healthy Neighborhoods. For instance:

• This year in Bedford Stuyvesant, City Harvest will engage public, private, and nonprofit partners to create a cross-sector network connecting agencies directly to the support and resources they need in order to tackle fundamental business challenges and enhance their service capacity.

Funds for this program have been provided by:

The Clark Foundation
Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Foundation
New York City Council
New York Times Neediest Cases Fund