As the holidays approach and Kingston’s housing crisis worsens, a pandemic-era grassroots program is working overtime to battle food insecurity in the city.

“There’s a lot of people who are in need right now,” said County Legislator Abe Uchitelle, one of about 80 volunteers with the Kingston Emergency Food Collaborative. “I have gotten more constituent outreach over the past few weeks from people seeking emergency housing and it feels like the crisis is growing.”

The collaborative began operations on March 13, 2020, the day Kingston schools shut down for the pandemic. Since then, it has evolved into a key piece of the patchwork of public and private sector efforts to help people living in emergency housing at local motels or who otherwise struggle to put food on the table. The collaborative is a coalition of food providers and social service groups that covers the city and outlying areas in the Kingston City School District. It works closely with agencies like Family of Woodstock and Catholic Charities.

Each weekday, meals are prepared at the Everette Hodge Community Center, funded by Family of Woodstock. From there, five delivery routes bring the meals to area boarding houses, motels, and private residences. The program delivers about 180 meals per day. The collaborative also delivers weekly grocery baskets provided by Catholic Charities to 55 local households. On holidays when the Hodge Center is closed (the center operates on the Kingston City School District schedule), the collaborative relies on meals provided by local restaurants that are either donated outright or provided at cost. The group also doubles up on deliveries on holidays like Thanksgiving so clients don’t miss a meal. People can sign up for the meal deliveries via the collaborative’s hotline or online.

“Unlike a lot of organizations that provide services, people do not have to demonstrate or prove any need,” said Troy Ellen Dixon, a retired advertising executive and one of the collaborative’s founders. “All you need to do is sign up.”

The collaborative is an entirely grassroots effort and has not incorporated as a nonprofit. The collaborative operates on a non-hierarchial model, with decision-making spread out among volunteers, recipients, and providers. The group also runs “working groups” dedicated to outreach and education efforts to address the root causes of food insecurity like poverty, institutional racism and mental illness.

“This collaborative believes that unequal access to healthy food within Ulster County demands the attention of all members of the community and should be urgently addressed through direct service and systemic change,” reads a statement on the group’s website.

While the food program started off as an emergency response to the pandemic, Dixon said that the past few years have demonstrated that food insecurity in Kingston is an ongoing issue. To that end, the group recently received funding from the NoVo Foundation to hire three full-time employees to coordinate operations between food providers, volunteers, and clients.

“Food insecurity existed before the pandemic, it was just exacerbated by the pandemic,” said Dixon. “It’s still an issue that people in our community deal with every day.”

Information on how to volunteer, or to sign up for meal deliveries, is available on the collaborative’s website: kingstonemergencyfood.com. The group’s hotline can be reached at 888-316-0879. Donations can be sent via the following link.