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Speaker Quinn and City Council Delegation Stir the Pot at Masbia
BROOKLYN, N.Y. --- November 21, 2011 -- Today at 11:30am, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn along with a large delegation of City Council members volunteered their time and energy at Masbia soup kitchen on Coney Island Avenue in Brooklyn in order to witness firsthand the plight of New York`s unfortunate and the effect that the current state of the economy has on real people. The site on Coney Island Avenue opened in November 2009 as part of the UJA, Met Council and MASBIA response to the economic crises. It is one of three soup kitchens they opened during the recession.
Among the City Council members who came to Masbia today were Councilmember Domenic Recchia, Councilmember David Greenfield, Councilmember Jumaane Williams, Councilmember Brad Lander, and Councilmember Mike Nelson. Others in attendance included Rabbi David Cohen and Ilene Marcus from Met Council, Joel Berg, executive director of New York City Coalition Against Hunger (NYCCAH), Bob Lewis from NYS Dept of Agriculture and Markets, Alyssa Herman, VP of Fund Development from FoodBank NYC, and Leslie Gordon, senior director of agency relations at City Harvest.
This high-profile volunteer event preceded a NYC Council joint oversight hearing on fighting hunger in New York City, scheduled for later in the afternoon. Masbia is a prime location for Speaker Quinn and the City Council`s delegation to visit and lend a helping hand, due to its mission of feeding as many people in need as possible with meals that are nutritious and complete. Masbia serves 500 hot dinners every day, five nights a week through its four sites across New York. Masbia also distributes several hundreds of take-home weekend packages a week through its food pantry program.
�I am proud to be here volunteering at a place like Masbia,� Speaker Quinn announced to the press present at the event. �Masbia works on the model of serving people with dignity, and more social services need to adopt this model as the best model.�
Masbia Soup Kitchens Network was the beneficiary of the City Council Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) for the past season. Every Thursday Masbia picked up the leftover shares of the Council`s CSA that was arranged by the Speaker and her staff. Mr. Zaid Kurdieh, the farmer and owner of NY`s Norwich Meadow Farms, the local organic farm supplying the City Council`s CSA, also volunteered at today�s event. Masbia makes use of all its possible resources for fresh and local produce, networking with New York City Food Bank, City Harvest, farmers` markets, youth markets and donations from CSAs. During this special volunteer event with the Speaker and City Council delegation, the United Food & Commercial Workers Union (UFCW) made a wonderful donation of 50 kosher turkeys to Masbia for its Thanksgiving food distribution, at Speaker Quinn�s request.
Not only did everyone help chop and peel vegetables, several Councilmembers, including the Speaker, afterwards sat down with our regular clients to share the same hot and delicious meal. �Only in New York do you have a Bangladeshi day laborer say that the best food he�s had was at a kosher soup kitchen!� laughed Speaker Quinn.
Masbia soup kitchen network started as a grassroots charity to feed the hungry. Masbia operates a total of 4 sites throughout Brooklyn and Queens. In the past fiscal year alone, Masbia served 165,817 meals made possible by our affiliate Met Council and our 15,000 unique private donors from all over New York, which means thousands of people (many of them children) have gone to bed with food in their stomachs, full and content. Although Masbia`s past $2.1 million budget was almost entirely made up for by private donations, several key City Council members and the Speaker had allocated $94,000 of city funding to Masbia. To make a greatly needed donation to feed the hungry, go to www.Masbia.org. Or to make a quick $10 donation, text: SOUP to the number, #20222.
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