Harlem’s Own Benny's Food Pantry Needs our Help...

NY’s future voters and workers are hungry. You have the opportunity to empower them.

As a student, I have experienced Benny's Food pantry once being the solution to CCNY's food insecurity epidemic. The food pantry has invariably been available to more than 500 thousand CUNY students who rely on its products to survive another academic day. 48% of which suffer from food insecurity at the hands of a flawed system. With tuition hikes & loan burdens, students from all walks of life have health-related barriers standing between them and their academic achievement.

Underfunding in addition to annual budget cuts are at the root cause for the poor quality of food and lack of staff to adequately keep the pantry's doors open. The heart of Harlem is at risk, choose to end Student Hunger today! with your donations, we can solve this inhumane problem. With proper funding, service can be provided with pride by its workers and dignity for students fighting hunger who seek this vital resource to survive. Proper nutrition is key to a healthy lifestyle, ensuring a proper education that guarantees millions of workers enter the force and enlarge our economy. Let's celebrate together $175 years of the largest minority-serving public college!

Will you be part of the solution or stand idle as many of our students battle with hunger every day? Allowing food insecurity is a choice we make.

MEET THE ORGANIZER: Hey! My name is Tara I am an Afro-Latina immigrant from the Bronx. In addition to beign a STEM student, I am the VP of Student Affairs for the Undergraduate Student Government and the organizer for Black Student Council at The City College of New York. As a student government representative, one of the many projects I took on this semester was working on our campuses’ food pantry, Benny’s Pantry. Through my collaboration between USG and the office of institutional advancement, we were able to promote and gather volunteers for the pantry as well as give out more than 300 free meals in less than 30 minutes through our collaboration with the migrant kitchen on multiple occasions, all in the name of addressing food insecurity. Through my efforts and all of USGs continuous support, I’ve strongly connected to our college community and have been exposed to many stories of struggle from our students. I have come across students doing remarkable, groundbreaking research of tomorrow who are food insecure. I have seen first hand college staff taking on the strenuous emotional calamity, outside of the jobs they were hired to do, triaging these emergencies with vocation and still not having the resources to do it. Across all campuses, we fall at a shortage of staff and money to manage the level of crisis that present themselves daily. My hope with this fundraiser is to help fund the hiring of new staff, who are students, to maintain the pantry's doors open. Throught this initiative, we can provide a student with the opportunity to earn money while also closing the food insecurity gap. The face of hunger doesn't have race, gender, ethnicity nor age. I believe we must show up for each other and be a part of pivotal change, especially for the best students NY has to offer.