The Greenpoint Interfaith Food Team

The Greenpoint Reformed Church’s resident Pastor Anne Kansfield sits amidst towers of recently-delivered cardboard boxes filled with preserved foods. It’s pouring rain outside, and nobody has shown up to her volunteer meeting to discuss the possibility of growing food in the church garden.
“It’s ok, you can’t control the weather,” she says. Though the volunteer presence was certainly lacking on that Monday evening, over one month ago, Kansfield insisted that, with the recession in full swing and the church food pantry and soup kitchen programs stretched thinner than ever before, there is no shortage of volunteer support—not only from neighbors, but also from other religious institutions. Earlier this month, the Greenpoint Reformed Church, along with Ahavas Israel Synogague and the Greenpoint Islamic Center, announced a new inter-faith partnership dedicated to pooling resources, sharing volunteers and working together towards relieving hunger in the neighborhood—a problem that has increased significantly in the past year.
The Greenpoint Reformed Church has two hunger relief programs, the soup kitchen and the food pantry. The soup kitchen offers hot prepared meals to anyone in need, while the food pantry distributes bags of groceries—each bag containing seven or eight various items including one bean, one starch and one protein.
“There are two different types of hungry people in this neighborhood,” Kansfield said. “there is the typical homeless population, and senior citizens, who come to the soup kitchen for a hot meal. Then there are the working poor, the retired and people who have recently lost their jobs. They come to the food pantry for groceries, and there are many more now than there used to be.”
The interfaith partnership—fittingly called the Greenpoint Interfaith Food Team, or GIFT—is an effort to equally share the burden of feeding the hungry among local religious institutions, as well as promote tolerance, build neighborhood character and sustain strong and caring communities.
“Right now, the people who use to be Wall Street traders, they are doing just fine. It’s their employees who are visiting the Food Pantry,” Kansfield said. “In a capitalist society, we tend to individualize profits and socialize losses, and so people assume that somehow, someone will take care of the hungry. 13 per cent of Americans go hungry each day, and we assume it’s the government’s fault but it’s our own. We have to figure out how to fix these problems for the good of our neighborhood, our community and our society.”
With GIFT well under way, Kansfield wants to take the next step in her quest for community stewardship: grow her own food. The Greenpoint Reformed Church hopes to employ its backyard garden as a makeshift farm space, cultivating seasonal fruits and vegetables to be distributed among the hungry in the Spring and Fall.
“We have a commitment to be green and good stewards of the earth in general,” Kansfield said. “It’s a great use of the space, and that way we can offer fresh fruits and vegetables to our patrons.”
In terms of how to go about creating a garden, it’s a good thing Kansfield and the Greenpoint Reformed Church have partnered up with the synogague and the mosque:
“How are we going to do it? I don’t know yet! I don’t know how to garden,” Kansfield said. “I can get the dirt though!”