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QUEENS CHRONICLE, Thursday, July 30, 2020 Page 6
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River Fund scales up to the pandemic by Max Parrott Associate Editor
While the food insecurity of the COVID crisis has spurred the creation of mutual aid groups and food distributions across the city, in Queens one provider stands out among the rest. The Richmond Hill-based River Fund, a nonprofit whose mission is to fight hunger, homelessness and poverty across New York City, distributed 5.2 million pounds of groceries in the first 16 weeks of its COVID operations. How did it accomplish this feat? Sheer logistics capacity. Most of t he orga n i z at ion s involved in emergency food distribution in the city are smaller. Some are attached to churches, or buildings that don’t have the kind of space to fit wholesaler-sized hauls of food. River Fund, on the other hand, which has been focused on food distribution for 28 years, corners a unique part of New York’s supply chain. It is as much a food warehouse as it is a pantry. The group’s capacity has helped it step up to fight the extreme spike in food instability during the crisis. Whereas it previously had one food distribution day per week when they would give about 1,000 residents groceries for the week, during the pandemic it expanded operations to four days per week. At its peak, it was giving out food to 3,800 families. “It has been an absolutely insane effort. You can’t imagine,” Chief Production Officer Otto Starzman said. R iver Fu nd fou nder Swa m i Durga Das, who grew up in Ozone Park, originally started the organization to combat HIV and AIDS after his partner died from the virus. He had moved from California back to Queens, and became a case manager for the AIDS Center
of Queens County. At first he began baking cookies for people with HIV, then making sandwiches to give out to folks in need, and just never stopped expanding. “And one thing led to another, and paying attention to what’s happening, we built this,” he said, gesturing to the queue of people lining the block around the house during a Saturday distribution on July 18. Durga Das lives and breathes the River Fund program. He resides in the attic of the navy Queen Annestyle cottage house that he converted into an office, food warehouse and reception area for New York’s needy over the years. During last Saturday’s food distribution, the nonprofit’s most popular day, pallets full of food boxes stacked 6 feet high lined the sidewalk, and a line of people waiting for groceries stretched for nearly a half m ile a rou nd t he su r rou nd i ng neighborhood. The organization would not have been able to scale up to its current capacity with just the house alone. Starzman said that its other location, a warehouse next to the Brooklyn Navy Yard, is the key to its ability to handle vast amounts of dry refrigerated and frozen foods. On average, River Fund receives around 250 pallets of groceries in its Brooklyn location every week. The Richmond Hill location brings in an additional 100 pallets, he estimated. “Just to put that in perspective, the average semi-truck takes about 20 pallets. So we’re talking about 13 tractor trailers of groceries per week, going through our site,” Starzman said. Starzman estimated that River Fund gets about 55 percent of its food free from companies up and down the supply chain, from manufacturers all the way down to retailers and everybody in between, including logistics companies,
warehouse storage facilities and airports. Wherever food accumulates, and needs to be vented out of the system, River Fund is able to collaborate with the businesses to take it off their hands. It gets the rest of its food from the government. “Unless you can accept vast quantities of food, certain types of donors can’t operate with you,” said Starzman. For example, the group works with dairies in upstate New York and Massachusetts, which can only donate to organizations that have the capacity to receive an entire truckload and refrigerated space to hold it. “Not everybody wants necessarily the jalapeño-flavored peanut butter, but the amount that’s needed to make it available in New York is less than what’s shipped, so they need to get rid of it somewhere,” Starzman said. New York City disposes of about 5 billion pounds of perfectly good, pre-consumer groceries per year, said Starzman. Over the years, River Fund figured out that it could pull in a large slice of that overflow if it committed to storage space. Why are manufacturers willing to give huge amounts of food away for free? It goes back to the tax code. If they throw away food because it’s not selling, they get to then write off that loss. But River Fund capitalizes on a specific section of the tax code that incentivizes food manufacturers to give to charitable causes. If the businesses give to River Fund, section 170(e)3 gives them an additional tax write-off of 50 percent of the profits they would have realized if they had sold the product. River Fund’s network allowed it to scale up during the crisis. Even though the government proportion of its supply shrank as demand skyrocketed during COVID, it was able to pull more from private businesses. Apart from what River Fund is
Pallets of food line the block around the River Fund’s Richmond Hill location PHOTOS BY MAX PARROTT on its food distribution days. distributing through its own sites, it’s also giving to other food distribution organizations in the community. To keep the nonprofit going, it staffs 22 people full-time, four people part-time, and enlists a large volunteer workforce to help on food distribution days. “It means the world to actually say that I am doing something to help provide for people out here,” said Brendon Boodho, a staff member who started off as a volunteer. Of the families the organization helps, about 60 percent come from different parts of Queens. Another 22 percent come from Brooklyn, but most of the rest are from the other boroughs, some even coming from as far as Staten Island, Nassau County or New Jersey. “We don’t exactly promote what we’re doing,” said Starzman, noting that most people hear about it
Left, Swami Durga Das hands out face masks during a food distribution. Right, volunteers pack baskets full of potatoes at the Richmond Hill location. The line for food stretched out over a half mile behind them.
through word of mouth. When people got laid off from their jobs at the outset of the pandemic and their unemployment benefits hadn’t started coming in yet, River Fund’s clientele began to spike. And it’s not over, according to Starz man. He expects another spike after July, when the federal benefits contained in the HEROES Act come to an end. Durga Das said that people stand in the pantry line for around an hour and a half to two hours to get their food. His goal is not strictly to feed those who do not have the money in their bank account for groceries at the end of the week but to help families that are generally struggling against poverty. “The people here before the pandemic were probably facing a challenge. After the pandemic, it’s a whole different challenge,” Durga Das said. Waiting in line for a week’s worth of groceries on Saturday, Amrita Singh said that she and her husband had both lost their jobs at the outset of the pandemic and were still looking for work. She had never needed or asked for assistance in her life, but she has three teenagers to feed, she said. “The food is helping a lot. This is my fourth week. I come once a week. Everybody is just cooped up. Bills are piling up but we try to pay as much as we can slowly. The main thing is shelter and food,” Singh said. “We just have to thank God we’re Q still alive.”
