Fred's Pantry In Peekskill Receives $100,000 Grant

PEEKSKILL, NY — A Peekskill organization has received a grant that will go toward food insecurity in northern Westchester County.

Caring for the Hungry and Homeless of Peekskill — CHHOP — has been awarded a $100,000 grant from the Mother Cabrini Health Foundation for Fred’s Pantry.

The funding from the grant will begin in January 2023 and allow CHHOP to continue its mission of serving the most vulnerable in the community, according to a spokesperson.

Fred’s Pantry has seen the demand for food reach record levels, the organization said.

For the first 11 months of 2022, the number of households that received food from Fred’s Pantry increased 27.1 percent year over year to 17,523. The number of household members who were provided food by the pantry increased 47.8 percent year over year to 82,293.

Cynthia Knox, the CEO of CHHOP, said those are record numbers for the organization, and the grant will help immensely.

“This grant will allow us to continue serving our clients at Fred’s Pantry who are facing food insecurity at record numbers this year,” she said, “while also providing tools and resources to uplift our clients out of systemic poverty.”

Msgr. Gregory Mustaciuolo, CEO of the Mother Cabrini Health Foundation, said his organization’s goal is to support the range of service that make people and communities healthy.

“As we begin to recover from a pandemic that has hit vulnerable populations the hardest, we must continue to address the challenges communities across New York State are facing: food and housing insecurity; lack of access to basic health care including vaccines; workforce issues and educational, racial, economic and health disparities made worse during COVID-19,” he said.

The $100,000 grant will allow CHHOP to purchase healthy, nutritious food, provide food vouchers for participants with chronic medical conditions to enhance their nutritional food intake and hire a community coordinator, which would be a game-changer for the organization, officials said.

A community coordinator’s would be to coordinate with health, legal, employment and immigration services to assist Fred’s Pantry clients with the resources and tools to help them out of systemic poverty, according to a spokesperson.