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Fair Joining the fight against hunger on Long Island
Island Harvest brings businesses into discussion for first time
In its continuing effort to fight hunger on Long Island, Island Harvest held a first-of-its-kind summit on Sept. 21, bringing together business leaders, educators and nonprofit organizations to brainstorm new and innovative ways to combat hunger.
Held on Adelphi University’s Garden City campus, the summit attracted more than 100 participants from a variety of backgrounds. “We in the nonprofit sector hadn’t thought about having a summit like this where we could engage everybody in the discussion,” said Randi Shubin Dresner, president of Island Harvest. “It’s an innovative idea, it’s a new idea — it shouldn’t have been, but we’re glad it is.”
The summit consisted of panel discussions on hunger on Long Island and how to end it, as well as smaller brainstorming sessions designed to generate more ideas to address the problem. The summit also served as the kickoff of a study on food, nutrition and health being conducted by the Adelphi Center for Social Innovation.
“What’s going to go come out of this today is that it’s really going to help clarify different kinds of community ideas about hunger, look at what kinds of information exists about hunger on Long Island, and [provide] an opportunity to look at what information we don’t have about hunger on Long Island,” said Dr. Sarah Eichberg, director of community research at Adelphi and the head of the Center for Social Innovation. “So it’s a very good starting point to think about how to frame and approach the rest of the study.”
According to Dresner, lots of good ideas came out of the meeting — many of which were generated by people from the business world. “I’ve been hearing about how employers are now thinking that maybe they could give one of their employees some time in a week or a month to go work at a nonprofit organization for a couple of hours,” she said. “I’m hearing that some companies are acknowledging that they have skills and services that they could provide on an in-kind basis to nonprofit organizations and helping in hunger relief.”
