About
City Harvest is New York City's largest food rescue organization. More than 40 years ago it helped start the food rescue movement, and today its trucks are on the road seven days a week, collecting high-quality food that would otherwise go to waste and delivering it, free of charge, to hundreds of food pantries, soup kitchens, Mobile Markets, and community distributions across the five boroughs.
Mission
City Harvest exists to end hunger in communities throughout New York City. It pursues this mission through food rescue and distribution, education, and other practical, innovative solutions.
What they do
- Food rescue: collects surplus food from a network of 1,600 food donors, rescuing and delivering more than 235,000 pounds of food each day
- Food distribution: delivers rescued food free of charge to hundreds of food pantries, soup kitchens, Mobile Markets, and Community Partner Distributions across New York City's five boroughs
- Nutrition and culinary education programs for New Yorkers
- Capacity building for its network of agency partners, advocacy, volunteering, and disaster response
History
City Harvest was born in 1982, when Helen verDuin Palit, who volunteered regularly at a soup kitchen, learned that a restaurant threw out the insides of the potatoes used for its potato skins. The next day the restaurant donated 30 gallons of cooked potatoes, which Helen and other volunteers delivered to a nearby soup kitchen. Thanks to Helen, Jason Kliot, and other New Yorkers, the food rescue movement was born, and with it City Harvest. Since then the organization has grown from a small group of volunteers collecting food donations in borrowed cars to New York City's largest food rescue organization. Palit served as its first executive director.
Scale and impact
City Harvest states that this year it will rescue more than 86 million pounds of high-quality food, more than 70% of which is fresh produce, and that by rescuing this food it is preventing more than 25 million kilograms of CO2 from entering the atmosphere this year alone. Over the past four decades, City Harvest has provided more than one billion pounds of nutritious food for free to New Yorkers in need. The organization is headquartered at 150 52nd Street in Brooklyn.
Financials
According to its IRS Form 990 available via ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer (EIN 13-3170676), for the fiscal year ending June 2024 City Harvest reported total revenue of 210,031,724 dollars, including 209,384,275 dollars in contributions and grants, and total functional expenses of 204,372,859 dollars, with end-of-year total assets of 243,272,216 dollars.