Meet Sophia and Eleanor
Food insecurity: Sophia and Eleanor and are doing something about it.
I am staring at my Zoom screen filled with faces of young people: sparkling eyes, practically radiating energy. Suddenly the Zoom participation count stops at exactly 100. Wait, what? It turns out the app was capped at that number… many more wanted in.
All these students are there for one purpose: to take on food insecurity in New York. They are committed; public and private high schoolers, middle schoolers, 8th graders! I am blown away. I knew this event, called the Student Food Recovery Task Force, had followers, but not like this.
Two young women appear on the screen, juniors at Nightingale-Bamford School on the Upper East Side. They speak, confidently, convincingly, beyond their years.
These are Sophia Simmons and Eleanor Karr, two young people who have been at the heart of the Task Force since its beginning. They are, as Dan Zauderer, of Grassroots Grocery, has called them, “stewards of the movement.”
Intrigued, I asked the two for a Zoom chat a couple of days later. I'm glad I did.
How did your journey begin?
‘See the impact, meet the people that you're giving it to, it's an awesome experience.’
Q. Sophia and Eleanor, thank you for talking with us.
Sophia: My gosh, thank you. It's not a problem. We're so excited.
Q I know you both are doing so much. Let’s start with the immediate: the Food Recovery Task Force.
Eleanor: Sure. It's a program where we and a group of other students at Nightingale collect food that is surplus at the school, and deliver it to a nearby community fridge. It’s deeply important to us.
We tell students it’s an opportunity within your community to help food insecurity by packaging and labeling leftover food that would otherwise be thrown away and giving it to people who need it.
I think it's a simple idea, with a huge impact and easy to get involved. See the impact, meet the people that you're giving it to, it's an awesome experience.
The first delivery
Sophia: The first time we did a food delivery it was just us, and two of our friends. We were kind of nervous because it was new… like what if the fridge is already full. We were just figuring it out.
And then there were folks who were living in the Holmes Towers public housing building behind the fridge. They kind of stood off while we were filling the fridge. Then they just turned to us and said, thank you, and I could see the thanks in their eyes.
Talking to the chef
Q. How did you start? I’m sure there weren’t the numbers who were around the other night!
Eleanor: No. (laughs) we actually started by talking to our chef because our chef is so open and kind, and you know, we couldn't get going without the food!. He was completely on board, and he's been extremely helpful all along.
Sophia: At first, we reached out to our immediate friends: “We're trying to get this program off the ground. We'd love to have you there just to help package and label for 20 minutes after school. I mean, you can spend the same 20 minutes with your phone, and never know it.”
Soon we had a small group who were passionate and ready and able to help. So by making that solid group of people, it actually was pretty smooth.
Brick Church volunteering
Q Let’s go back in time even before the program.
Sophia: OK yes. Ellie and I had created the Brick Church volunteering program at Nightingale. [Brick Church has sponsored many neighborhood social programs including with Grassroots Grocery–Editor]. We send Nightingale girls over to Brick Church to cook dinner for residents of the Neighborhood Coalition for Shelter, which is a homeless shelter.
We cook, serve them food, and we eat with them and we talk. We have great interactions with them.
Q Was this the point where Grassroots Grocery came into the picture?
Eleanor: Yes. Reverend Adam Gorman at Brick Church, he recommended Dan and Grassroots to us, and we took it up. We were super interested in having that hands on, the volunteering, talking to people who are out of shelter. It's just something that's really a passion for us and really important to us.
Sophia: Especially in New York City, like even going to school, you see people on the streets in need of food. So it's all in our community. It's just so present. And I feel like it stuck out to us.
Eleanor: I mean, I love what Grassroots is doing. I think it's awesome that they're providing this opportunity.
Student Food Recovery: How to get started
Q. When other students ask how you start a program like yours, how do you explain?
Eleanor: It's step by step and trial and error. We wanted to start by gradually expanding the program and be around people that could help us work through it. Like Sophia said, we did start with a smaller group of friends and we're slowly building it out to other grades.
But we really were thoughtful about it.
Once we realized what worked best, that's when we expanded it to the other grades. People saw how organized it was, and then they came back, because they saw how effective it was.
“Moms are awesome”
Q. OK, a personal question. Who do you feel has influenced you most in your lives in this direction of helping people?
Eleanor: It’s my mom. She showed me that it's all about the small interactions. I feel like parents, more so than kids, are always super friendly to strangers and really get them talking. And when you're younger, you don’t really understand. Sometimes in the grocery store, like I would step on her foot: “we need to go.”
But now I've realized, all those small interactions, like talking to people in the line at the grocery store. Small interactions and just being kind, it really makes a difference and puts a smile on people's faces.
Q. I’m really moved by that.
Eleanor: Moms are awesome.
Grassroots partners
Q. A final question about Grassroots.You see yourselves as partners?
Sophia: Yeah, definitely. I mean, Grassroots was the inspiration and it's what we're like too. We keep turning to each other. And I think it's really I would say it’s a partnership. We're doing this within our own school and Grassroots is making this happen in other schools.
Q. Is there anything more you wanted to say to other students who want to take the same path?
Sophia: I mean, it's not easy. This has taken so many hours of our time, so many meetings, so many Amazon last minute deliveries of extra food containers. But we want to be able to help other people get this started because we want the impact to be the greatest. It will be.