A message from Food Bank President & CEO Leslie Gordon

It is my immense pleasure to be reaching out to you today as Food Bank For New York City’s President & CEO. While I join Food Bank during an unprecedented time in our city’s history, I am so humbled to be stepping in to a talented, diverse and passionate organization with such a rich legacy of serving New Yorkers in need.

The COVID-19 pandemic is impacting the health of our loved ones, the businesses and jobs we rely upon, and the way we live our daily lives. Hundreds of thousands of our fellow New Yorkers are facing new needs, like hunger, for the very first time in addition to the 1.5 million New Yorkers that relied on Food Bank as part of their daily lives before the COVID-19 crisis. As we all continue to navigate through these evolving challenges, we want all our neighbors to know that Food Bank For New York City is here for you!

A City United to Serve in New Ways

While I joined Food Bank officially on Monday, I’ve been deeply embedded behind the scenes helping guide the strategies to keep our mission running. To date, over 5 million meals and counting have been delivered by our fleet of trucks since the start of our emergency response.

We’ve also implemented some unconventional strategies to ensure access to meals can continue in our neediest communities. This includes our strategic partnership with the New York City Housing Authority to coordinate pop-up food distributions at 15 housing developments citywide. We also identified 20 Community Response Partners who will serve as food and resource “hubs” within communities that have experienced closings of other emergency food providers. We’re fast-tracking deliveries of food and other essentials to these hubs, and collaborating with them to deploy new distribution methods, like Drive-Thru Pantry Bag Pick-ups, Seniors-Only Distribution Hours, and Home/Building Deliveries.

In the next few weeks, Food Bank will also be partnering with the NYC Health + Hospitals network to provide food and emergency grocery bags for more than 30,000 healthcare workers fighting on the frontlines of the COVID-19 crisis.

I am both grateful for and inspired by the untiring commitment to New Yorkers in need demonstrated by my fellow Food Bankers and our incredible network of supporters and friends like you. Your continued support is needed now more than ever as we innovate new solutions where existing ones no longer fit.

We’re in This Together

Making life better for people has been at the heart of my career. I’m excited to bring my fifteen-year tenure in Food Banking to this role, but I also look forward to activating new ideas to move our organization forward. Most of all, I can’t wait for all we will accomplish together for our neighbors who need us, now and beyond these present uncertainties.

In service,

Leslie Gordon
President and CEO