Feed People, Plant Seeds: Newhallville Fresh Starts Freshtaurant Born

NEW HAVEN, CT —Marcus Harvin was preparing to reach out to colleges and universities, schools and restaurants to find partners who would donate recovered food and meals. Food that would otherwise been put to waste. Harvin, who in 2022 was released after six years in prison, plans to set up a kitchen at the esteemed Pitts Chapel on Brewster Street where evening meals would be served several days a week. With enough volunteers on hand ready to serve, it’s the provisions that are needed.

But before the first missive went out seeking partners and donations for the effort, Harvin got a call that would help propel his idea from concept to reality.

After reading a New Haven Independent story about Newhallville Fresh Starts, Derek Faulkner, Southern Connecticut State University’s Office of Sustainability Resilience Academy’s University Assistant, envisioned a partnership with Harvin.

And so Faulkner gave him a call.

“I know Southern was at the forefront of this movement,” Harvin said, speaking about food recovery. “But I wasn’t expecting them to reach out to me …just as I was about to approach Yale, University of New Haven, Gateway, Southern, New Haven schools and restaurants.”

For Harvin, it was an out-of-the-blue reach-out, but a welcome one.

At Southern, Sustainability student intern Chris Kowalski is the Food Recovery Network Chapter Lead. Patch met with Faulkner and Kowalski at the office’s community garden, where hearty vegetables are nested under hard-packed, icy snow. In addition, to the vegetables and fruits grown in the garden and given to those in need in the community, the food recovery program feeds the hungry fully prepared meals that might otherwise have gone to waste.

Working with SCSU, Faulkner and Kowalski, Harvin and Newhallville Fresh Starts, will pick up where a former charity that shuttered post-pandemic, left off.

“I was excited when I saw the story about Marcus and Fresh Starts," Faulkner recalled. “We’d been working with St. Ann's, but they shut down during COVID-19, so I really was excited to connect with Marcus.”

The food recovery program has going to the campus dining halls five days a week to retrieve prepared foods or leftover foods including fruits and vegetables, and maybe an extra crate of milk. They inspect, weigh, package, and refrigerate those meals and foods for delivery to sites in the New Haven area.

Soon, one of those will be Pitts-Chapel.

“Traditionally, you hear about white Catholic churches getting stuff like this. Now, this will be a Black church, so it’s an opportunity for SCSU and other colleges and universities to partner with the forgotten,” Harvin said

Feeding the people, planting the seeds: The Newhallville Fresh Starts ‘Frestaurant’

Harvin explained that his ideas, with one built upon a coming-soon food pantry, a partnership between Pitts Chapel and New Haven Spanish Seventh Day Adventist Church with Harvin getting grant funding, that food and feeding folks is the perfect jumping-off point for Newhallville Fresh Starts plans and projects.

“If we can give you food, and food for thought, it’s like planting a seed. And provides dignity to someone in need,” he said. “That’s Newhallville Fresh Starts.”

Harvin said his idea is a kitchen that serves evening meals, but “not as a traditional soup kitchen.”
“This is a community kitchen …for all in the community.”

It's a Fresh-turant.

The kitchen and the food pantry are just some ideas and programs Harvin, a Newhallville native who earned a college degree through the Yale Prison Educational Initiative, has planned.

Working with UConn and Adam Rawlings of Neighborhood Housing Services, and utilizing plots of land set aside for their use by SCSU, the hope is that kids will learn how to farm.

“I had the idea about bringing a farm to the hood,” he said. “Teaching inner city kids about doing a rural activity, learning farming. That would be powerful.”

Harvin said he and community programming hope to “help people identify their dreams.”

“And even if they’ve forgotten those dreams, to awaken that, to help them remember, that’s providing a fresh start.”

Though much of the programming would be earmarked for those recently released from prison and formerly incarcerated like himself, Newhallville Fresh Starts would be open to any who are looking for that new beginning.

And young people will be a focus as some are among those most in need of that new start, Harvin said.

“Help them realize a dream they may not have even dreamt yet,” Harvin said.

Editor's Note: This is part of an occasional series on Harvin, Newhallville Fresh Starts and SCSU's Office of Sustainability and how their work impacts communities.