Our Story
We’re neighbors helping neighbors.
More than 40 years ago, City Harvest helped to start the food rescue movement. Today, in response to the persistently high need for food assistance in New York City and our commitment to sustainability, City Harvest continues to provide fresh, nutritious food to our neighbors experiencing food insecurity.
This year, we will rescue more than 86 million pounds of high-quality food from local and national sources that would otherwise go to waste and deliver it, free of charge, to hundreds of food pantries and soup kitchens across the five boroughs so that New Yorkers have the food they need to thrive. By rescuing this perfectly good food—more than 70% of which is fresh produce—we are preventing more than 25 million kilograms of CO2 from entering the atmosphere this year alone.
But that’s not all we do. With deep connections to the communities where we work and with a focus on localized investment, City Harvest is dedicated to strengthening our network of agency partners and the local food system through capacity building, advocacy, volunteering, and nutrition and culinary education.
Together, we are feeding our city—one day, one meal, one New Yorker at a time.
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We Are City Harvest
Mission Statement
City Harvest exists to end hunger in communities throughout New York City. We do this through food rescue and distribution, education, and other practical, innovative solutions.
How It All Began
Our first executive director Helen verDuin Palit, who volunteered regularly at a soup kitchen, was eating potato skins while out at dinner with friends over forty years ago when she learned the restaurant threw out the insides of the potatoes. She was struck with an idea: What if the excess food from the restaurant could help feed people in the neighborhood who were experiencing hunger?
The next day, the restaurant donated 30 gallons of cooked potatoes that Helen and other volunteers delivered to a nearby soup kitchen. Thanks to Helen, Jason Kliot, and several other New Yorkers, the food rescue movement was born, and with it, City Harvest.
Since 1982, City Harvest has grown from a small group of volunteers collecting food donations in borrowed cars to New York City’s largest food rescue organization. Today, our trucks are on the road seven days a week, rescuing millions of pounds of high-quality, nutritious food from our network of 1,600 food donors and delivering it to hundreds of food pantries, soup kitchens, Mobile Markets®, and Community Partner Distributions across the city to help feed New Yorkers who are struggling to put meals on their tables. Over the past four decades, we have provided more than one billion pounds of nutritious food for free to New Yorkers in need.
