Broadway Community

Dedicated to serving New Yorkers experiencing homelessness, hunger, and poverty, Broadway Community sets an abundant table, believing that everyone deserves justice, dignity, health, and wholeness. We empower one another with nourishing food, a welcoming environment, shelter, medical care, life skills practice, and faithful accompaniment through challenging times. We serve one another - breaking down barriers of poverty, inequity, and privilege - until all are fed, in body and spirit. We serve.

Our neighbors flourishing. As a small organization, we are not seeking to end world hunger. However,

Goal One: We serve nutritious and delicious meals in a welcoming environment. But we are not sufficiently helping our guests to sustainability - where they no longer need free meals. This is our current focus.

Goal Two: With mostly volunteers, we have not had the capacity (skills or time) to invest in working with our guests to assess their needs and help meet them. We are increasing our staff in order to do this.

Goal Three: Strategic work on governance and increased fundraising is enabling us to hire a full time Executive Director. Their task is to coordinate programming, and develop agency and donor partnerships.

Successfully recruited four new Board Members, three of whom are BIPOC and the fourth with extensive experience in the field. Board Members have attended the past two Anti-Hunger Policy Conferences, and one works extensively with City Harvest in the area of advocacy, which earned Broadway Community a 2021 Award for Advocacy. One core volunteer participated in our Food Service training program and was sent to the New York City Department of Health Food Service Safety Certification program. She is now our part-time Food Service Coordinator.

The past year (19 months actually) has been one of constant adaptation. Early in the pandemic, our main priorities were continuing to provide healthy meals and food and maintaining a safe environment for both the shelter and the medical clinic. This meant increased sanitation protocols, screening of guests and volunteers, and a system for contact tracing. We developed a plan to reopen for congregate meals with multiple seatings to allow distancing, plexiglass dividers, air filtration equipment, and traffic guidelines. We carefully watched regulations related to indoor dining. As the danger of infection from aerosols emerged, we realized that indoor service would be unsafe in our facility. Volunteer groups ceased (both corporate and mission groups) and new volunteers had to be found. Board members and friends (younger people with more flexibility due to remote work) from our host facility (Broadway Presbyterian Church) filled those gaps. We hired a part time Food Service Coordinator to guide the constantly changing pool of volunteers. In July, 2021, we were happily anticipating reopening for congregate meals in September, then had to hold those plans as the virus surged again. Fundraising was a major concern, as we lost many food donations that normally come from restaurants, and the cost of providing take-out meals is much greater than congregate ones due to packaging and the need for individual portions of items like yogurt, peanut butter and drinks. It became clear that the lack of full-time staff leadership is making it difficult to serve our guests life changing ways. A Board member took on the development tasks of grant writing and reporting, donor outreach, and raising a capacity building fund. The search for that person is almost complete and we are poised to make that hire very soon.