The Doe Fund Partners with Google to Give Out Thanksgiving Meals
Participants in the organization’s Ready, Willing & Able reentry program joined local public officials to give out hundreds of free Thanksgiving salads in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn.
New York, NY— On Wednesday, November 23rd, participants of The Doe Fund’s Ready, Willing & Able reentry program — popularly known as the Men in Blue — distributed hundreds of free, locally-sourced Thanksgiving salads to residents of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn.
The giveaway was sponsored by Good Food Works, a social enterprise of The Doe Fund that uses innovative vending technologies and mission-driven hiring to increase access to affordable healthy food and quality jobs in communities throughout New York City. The program began as a food insecurity initiative in partnership with Google, which has continued to be a generous supporter. During the first few months of the pandemic, Good Food Works specialized in emergency deliveries to hospitals and other essential workers.
Noted guests included State Assembly Member Stefani Zinerman; State Senator Jabari Brisport; Kate MacKenzie, Executive Director of the Mayor’s Office of Food Policy; Dale Charles, Executive Director of the Bedford-Stuyvesant Business Improvement District; and Angela Pinsky, Head of Government Affairs and Public Policy at Google New York.
“We’ve worked for over a decade to test a wide range of programs that would foster better access to wholesome food and create good jobs for the formerly homeless and incarcerated New Yorkers The Doe Fund has served for over 30 years,” said Jason Finder, Director of Good Food Works. “We sell healthy prepared meals at an affordable price. We partner with chefs from the neighborhoods where we operate to come up with our recipes, our team makes everything fresh the night before it gets sold, and then we… offer salads at prices that compete with the many highly processed fast food options disproportionately available in the communities we serve.”
“I just want to thank The Doe Fund for doing incredible work here in our community, helping out some of our most marginalized neighbors get a good foot forward in getting their lives started again… What a great way to start our holidays,” said State Senator Brisport.
“Mayor Adams believes that we should be eating healthfully and it shouldn’t be hard,” said Ms. MacKenzie. “What is particularly exciting about this is not just the convenience and the healthiness of the food, but the way in which it’s done. The social enterprise of good food jobs is essential, and that is something that this administration takes very, very seriously.”
Ms. Pinsky, the Google Director, said, “I’m excited to be here with The Doe Fund’s Good Food Works team to celebrate a project they brought to fruition that was originally conceived within Google’s internal incubator, Area 120. At that time it was called Stand Foods, and it was designed to remove barriers to nutrition for New Yorkers — particularly the time, cost, and complexity associated with healthy eating.”
For more than 30 years, The Doe Fund has provided nearly 30,000 of NYC’s most vulnerable with the opportunity to overcome addiction, homelessness, and recidivism while giving back to their communities. The Men in Blue clean 115 miles of streets through The Doe Fund’s Community Improvement Project social enterprise. This paid work is the first step in a program that also provides housing, support services, and career training in living wage fields to homeless and formerly incarcerated men. The Thanksgiving Eve Giveaway was just another way the Men in Blue give back to the community where Ready, Willing & Able began.
The event also marked the beginning of The Doe Fund’s Firesouls campaign, which inspires individuals to address homelessness with practical tools and resources, including connecting volunteers to the Adams administration’s Street Homelessness Advocacy Project and by downloading Ready, Willing & Able cards to give to individuals experiencing street homelessness. More details are available at doe.org/firesoul.
