Island Harvest reaches last week of its annual summer program

On a hot summer morning, employees of the Island Harvest Food Bank pored over piles of thank-you notes written on construction paper by children who have been given food by the agency since the end of the school year.

“I hope people could get food like I do,” read one that was signed “Jordan,” written in pencil on red paper and accompanied by a drawing of bread and milk. It continued, “Be-cause of you, I am healthy and [full] during summer camp.”

Island Harvest provides meals to nearly 100,000 children across Long Island throughout the school year. Nine years ago, the agency created a Summer Food Service Program to fill the 10-week gap during which many families struggle without help, explained East Meadow resident Randi Shubin Dresner, the agency’s president and chief executive officer.

“Each year, we’re able to help more and more people,” she said, adding that the food bank delivered 212,000 meals to 86 different sites last summer, including parks, day camps, recreation centers and high school athletic programs. Now, entering the last week of this year’s program, Shubin Dresner said she expected to exceed 2016’s numbers.

“We’ve evolved the program a lot,” added Allison Puglia, Island Harvest’s vice president of programming and agency relations, who stepped into her role six years ago, when the program supplied 40,000 meals to 33 sites.

There are a lot of moving parts to the program, Puglia said, explaining that the agency must keep track of every meal that is ordered and delivered. The program is funded by a state government grant that reimburses the agency for the meals it serves, but Puglia must look to donations and help from other sources to account for food that doesn’t get delivered.

One of those responsible for keeping track of the program’s records is Noelle Roth, an incoming junior at Molloy College who is a monitor and intern at the food bank this summer. Roth’s other duties include delivering food to 10 of the program’s sites and leading nutrition-education lessons at several of them.

“It’s important to give kids food, but also important to give them the right foods to eat,” Puglia said, explaining that the nutrition lessons are offered at sites like parks and libraries, and include interactive exercises through which children learn about healthy foods and a balanced diet.

“It becomes a fun learning game for the kids,” Roth said, adding that the most rewarding part of her job is seeing children get excited to learn about food.

Despite the food bank’s efforts, Shubin Dresner said, it provides only a fraction of the meals for those in need of emergency food assistance. She is a strong advocate of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which gives food stamps to those in poverty, and recently met with state lawmakers to ensure that the program is protected in the 2018 federal farm bill.

The U.S. Senate and House of Representatives each drafted different versions of the bill this spring, with the latter proposing $19 billion in cuts to SNAP. A conference committee will meet on Sept. 5 to resolve the differences between the two versions.

If the House-proposed bill is passed, “as many as 675 million meals will be lost in New York state over the next decade, and the food bank network in our state cannot fill this additional need,” Shubin Dresner wrote in a letter sent to a number of lawmakers, including U.S. Rep. Peter King, a Republican from Seaford who serves the 2nd Congressional District.

After the House proposed its bill, King publicly voiced his opposition to it, saying that it could only hurt Long Islanders. Shubin Dresner said she was hopeful that lawmakers would reach a bipartisan agreement that would maintain SNAP as a source of food security for those who need it.