For Immediate Release

In Response to the Huge Increase in the Cost of Food: 1,800 Food Pick-up Appointments will be Added to the Breadlines each Week at Masbia Soup Kitchen Network - All families will also get a Box of Masks

(Brooklyn/Queens NY) -- Effective immediately, Masbia Soup Kitchen Network will add 600 appointments to each of the 3 locations to help families with the increased cost of food. This means that there will be a total of 1,800 more families who will have food every week. This reverses the course of Masbia trying to reign in it’s breadline footprint for the past six months.

“Throughout the pandemic, we mobilized as we saw the increase in demand, but in the last six months, we started trying to reign in the breadline footprints, to give our neighbors’ back a sense of normalcy. But in the last few weeks we have been receiving dozens of messages from families trying to make appointments but couldn’t because they were all booked. We spoke to our staff about this and decided to add hours of operations as well as fill in more appointments into the existing hours.” said Alexander Rapaport, Executive Director of Masbia Soup Kitchen Network.

“We could not have undertaken this expansion without the strong support we have been getting from our donors and the astronomical support from NYC’s P-FRED (Pandemic Food Reserve Emergency Distribution) which under the leadership of Mayor De Blasio, HRA Administrator Gary Jenkins, and Kate MacKenzie of NYC Food Policy, has been providing large deliveries of fresh produce from the reserve to feed New Yorkers in need”, Rapaport added.

In addition to that, Masbia will include a box of disposable masks to distribute to every family who comes for food.

Going forward, the Masbia Soup Kitchen Network will have 7,500 appointments available weekly, which is 2,500 at each location.

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How: We will be adding appointments using the Plentiful app, which we currently have in use, making the breadline for our locations digital, instead of physical. Anyone who is in need of food can make an appointment by texting the word “FOOD” to 726879. If you have an android device, you can also make an appointment by downloading the Plentiful app.

Why: Masbia has been responding to a 500% increase in demand since the start of the pandemic and has made various changes to accommodate that historical rise. Since April 2021, while the demand was still high, we started to scale things back a bit as it was taxing on our neighbors, staff, and even the facilities themselves. Then came the variants - first Delta and now Omicron. Add the increasing costs of food, and the already high demand is intensifying even more, which is why Masbia is taking this latest initiative. Families will also be receiving a box of disposable face masks with their raw food packages. This is in response to the newest mask mandate made by NYS Gov. Hochul.
Where:
Masbia of Flatbush, 1372 Coney Island Avenue, Brooklyn NY 11230
Masbia of Boro Park, 5402 New Utrecht Avenue, Brooklyn NY 11219
Masbia of Queens, 105-47 64th Road, Forest Hills NY 11375