Program Employing Street Vendors to Meet Food Needs Expands with Support from SNF

A successful program from the Urban Justice Center’s Street Vendor Project got 26 New York City street vendors back to work preparing nearly 8,000 meals to distribute in their communities. Now, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF), which supported this program, has made a new grant to help expand it.

The expansion will engage 36 street food vendors to make 600 culturally sensitive meals a week for their neighbors in Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Queens from December 12, 2020 through mid-April 2021. To implement the food distributions, the Street Vendor Project is partnering with New York City Housing Developments in the Bronx and with local food programs that serve predominantly immigrant communities in Sunset Park in Brooklyn and Jackson Heights in Queens.

“At an incredibly difficult time for many New Yorkers, the Street Vendor Project is giving vendors who want to help out in their own communities the means to do so by putting their expertise to work,” said SNF Program Officer Alex Simon-Fox. “Their collaborative approach takes two ends of the same critical problem and ties them together to work toward solutions. SNF is proud to partner with the Street Vendor Project and very grateful for the work of its network of vendors and community partners.”

The new grant, as well as SNF’s original grant for the Street Vendor Project, are part of the Foundation’s $100 million global COVID-19 relief initiative, a major focus of which is helping meet food and nutritional needs in countries from Greece to Tanzania. These two SNF grants aim to help sustain street vendors, the smallest of small businesses, through a time when many are without work and without other means of support while also helping address the crushing levels of food insecurity the pandemic has triggered in New York City.