Every week, staff members from Marblehead Community Charter School (MCCS) drive 20 miles south along the North Shore coast, passing through Boston, and then eventually arrive at Food For Free’s East Cambridge packing center. Depending on traffic, the drive takes 45-50 minutes one way. Once they arrive at our packing center, our Operations team helps them load up their cars with 50 of our Just Eats grocery boxes.
They then head back to Marblehead and about fifty minutes later, they unload the boxes in the school’s parking lot. Students and their families soon arrive by car and pop their trunks open. School staff place a Just Eats box filled with fresh produce and pantry staples like rice and beans in each car’s trunk. Families receiving these boxes live in Marblehead and other neighboring communities such as Lynn, Nahant, Salem, Beverly, and Peabody.
Food For Free has been based in Cambridge for 40 years since our founding in 1981. Up until this year, we have primarily served the immediate metro Boston area. The pandemic has put such a strain on the emergency food system that we’re now fielding requests from nearby communities that are typically outside of our metro Boston service area. One such request came from Marblehead via Danette Russo, the Food Services Director at Marblehead Community Charter School (MCCS).
During the pandemic, Chef Russo as she’s known to students and the staff at MCCS have worked hard to make sure that students and their families have regular access to healthy food. When the USDA’s Farmers To Families food box program was launched last year, MCCS was able to offer these weekly food boxes to students and their families.
However, everything changed in late October when the USDA changed distributors for the program which greatly impacted the program’s availability locally. Facing the loss of these boxes and knowing that students and families were depending on this food, Chef Russo searched for another solution. She found Food For Free’s Just Eats grocery box program and wrote to us asking for help offering to come pick up the boxes herself.
The result has been a new partnership between the school and Food For Free. Chef Russo is very pleased with its success, “This is wonderful what Food For Free has done. Stepping up and helping these communities with the Just Eats program when the current distributors that were awarded the USDA bids would not.”
“It’s very important for our students to have access to healthy foods so they can thrive in class and beyond. We are pleased to partner with Food For Free to help support our students and their families especially during the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Peter Cohen, Ed.D Head of School.
During April vacation week, Chef Russo and another MCCS staff member not only made their usual weekly drive down to our packing center but they also eagerly volunteered to pack Just Eats boxes while they were there!
We work closely with many schools and we know the many difficult challenges that they have faced during the pandemic. We’re so pleased to have partners like MCCS and all the schools we work with. Their commitment to ensuring that students facing food insecurity have access to healthy food continues to inspire us.
Read more:
https://www.itemlive.com/2021/04/19/marblehead-charter-school-partners-with-food-for-free/