Isaacs Center Ramps Up UES Food Programs, Filling In City's Gaps

UPPER EAST SIDE, NY — The second wave of the coronavirus has brought with it a second wave of food insecurity for the city's most vulnerable residents, and one Upper East Side nonprofit is stepping up its efforts to keep neighbors well-fed.

For years, the Stanley M. Isaacs Neighborhood Center has run a community kitchen out of its 93rd Street headquarters, serving meals to seniors and young children. The work took on a new urgency last spring, when the coronavirus first hit.

Now, on March 1, the center is set to ramp up the kitchen to serve more people, as the pandemic drags on and changes to city programs create gaps in meal delivery services.

"Our first response was just drop everything and figure out how to support folks that are facing such tremendous food insecurity," said Damion Samuels, the center's director of youth services and community engagement. "This time, I think we're trying to be a little bit more strategic."

Starting Monday, the community kitchen's workforce of unemployed restaurant workers and young adults who graduated from a culinary program will help broaden the center's service to include a new demographic: adults between the ages of 25 and 59.

That move comes in the wake of a recent change in the city's home-delivered meals contract that would leave thousands of seniors, including about 200 on the Upper East Side, without access to Meals on Wheels, said Marin Rose Correa, the Isaacs Center's director of philanthropic gifts.

"There really isn't a solution from the city about how to address their needs," Correa said.

In recent weeks, the Isaacs Center has ensured that those 200 people keep getting meals, but the new kitchen will make that effort more sustainable, Correa said.

"Despite the City's best efforts to support those in need, it has not committed to maintaining all those who are currently enrolled in home delivered meals programs like ours," Gregory J. Morris, the center's executive director, said in a statement.

Above all, Correa said, what the Isaacs Center needs is volunteers to help get the word out and make deliveries: neighbors on the Upper East Side who may pass by the Isaacs Houses and Holmes Towers without knowing the work that goes on inside.

"A lot of people live in the neighborhood and kind of walk by those towers and don’t realize the Isaacs Center is there, but we’re doing a lot," Correa said.

To learn more, visit isaacscenter.org.