Thursday, October 1, 2026
More than 100 local families received Thanksgiving meals at North Shore High School Sunday during the North Shore Hispanic Chamber of Commerce’s sixth annual Turkey Giveaway, an event that Chamber President Connie Pinilla says has grown out of both community need and community generosity.
According to her, the chamber managed to raise roughly 115 turkeys to distribute, along with hundreds of bags of fresh and non-perishable food and sanitary products like diapers.
The chamber first launched the program in 2020, at the height of the pandemic, when widespread job losses and shuttered businesses intensified food insecurity across the North Shore.
“We started this precisely because of covid and the food insecurity,” Pinilla said. “At the beginning, like May of 2020, I had my first food drive with the chamber because there was a lot of food insecurity, and a lot of the small businesses were not getting any income or money.”
Those early pandemic efforts quickly expanded. A nonprofit partner provided thousands of boxes of food that year, and the organization’s leader offered turkeys for distribution that November.
This year’s event included far more than turkeys. The chamber partnered with the North Shore High School Key Club, whose student volunteers held a food drive outside Holiday Farms three weeks before the giveaway. Shoppers donated pasta, cereal, canned vegetables, toiletries and diapers. The students also raised about 500 dollars, which went toward purchasing onions, garlic, potatoes and rice. Additional donations of organic bananas and potatoes came from the Glen Cove grocery store Rising Tide Natural Market.
On the day of the giveaway, about 10 Key Club students helped organize and distribute the bags.
“I can’t be more grateful to them,” Pinilla said, “because they were amazing and make my job, obviously, much easier.”
Families primarily came from Glen Cove, Sea Cliff and Glen Head, though some traveled from Queens and Hempstead, where pastors collected turkeys to distribute to residents who could not drive to the event. Leftover goods were also donated to local organizations. “These are people that have, people that do not drive, that don’t have cars, that cannot come to us,” Pinilla said.
Pinilla said rising food costs have increased demand again this year, with rising inflation and political issues causing strain on local families' ability to afford groceries.
Even so, she said the community’s response has remained strong.
“It is heartwarming for me,” Pinilla said. “There’s nothing better than giving and getting a smile back from these people.”
