The Margaret Fuller Neighborhood House has joined Project Bread's 2023 Walk for Hunger to help reduce food insecurity for children and families across Massachusetts. After a hiatus of a few years, we are delighted to be participating once again!

 

The Margaret Fuller Neighborhood House food pantry is one of the highest-volume food pantries in Cambridge, serving residents of The Port neighborhood as well as the greater Boston area. We're open four days a week and serve 60-80 people per day. We have over 1,200 families currently registered and 400-500 regular users. We receive and distribute almost 40,000 pounds of food per month! We work with several food recovery programs in the area such as Food For Free and Lovin' Spoonfuls which facilitate donations of marked-out goods from grocery stores and farms. We are almost entirely volunteer-staffed and rely on support from the community and our partners to make it all happen.

We are so excited to have the opportunity to fundraise for our program as well as for Project Bread.  As part of The Commonwealth fundraising share program, 60% of the $$ our team raises will directly support our food pantry, with the other 40% funding statewide hunger relief. The funding we raise will support three concrete goals:
1) Improve the safety and accessibility of our pantry by installing new sturdy railings for the stairs down to the pantry
2) Enhance our storage capacity and ability to provide fresh food to our patrons by replacing one of our refrigerators with a larger model that will allow us to keep more perishable foods in stock
3) Replace at least one of our aging freezers to ensure the safety of our frozen stored foods

The Walk for Hunger is inspired by the mission that no one should go without a meal -- yet Project Bread estimates that 1 in 5 households with children across the Commonwealth are facing hunger right now.  With so many struggling during this challenging time, particularly given inflation and recent cuts to emergency SNAP programs, no one should worry about where their next meal will come from or if they'll able to feed their children. We created this fundraising team to provide much needed support to our neighbors facing food insecurity and hunger right now, and we are asking you to join us in our cause.