From Caritas to Meals on Main Street: Nonprofit grows to feed those in need
November 27, 2024 at 1:05 a.m.
Meals on Main Street (MoMS) has seen many changes since it began serving the community 30 years ago.
Most noticeably, it’s no longer operating under its former name, Caritas.
“We operate as MoMS now, but Caritas of Port Chester is still our IRS name,” Executive Director Jon Haseltine said. “We’ve gone through something of a rebrand, but our mission is still the same: Find good food and get it to the people who need it.”
And in 2024, they got it.
Haseltine said the people of Port Chester and beyond have certainly been in the giving mood. The group is on track to serve one million meals by the end of the year, a record high for MoMS.
The nonprofit was renamed in 2020, when the group began the process of moving out of the basement of St. Peter’s Church off Westchester Avenue and constructing a building at 509 N. Main St.
It marked a shift in scale for the organization, moving from the tight space previously allocated to them to a two-story building capable of receiving, sorting and distributing food to people across Westchester and beyond.
A new home for MoMS
The need for a new space stemmed from the realization that to serve Port Chester to the extent that is needed, a church basement wasn’t ideal.
In September 2020, then-Executive Director Bill Cusano said the group was trying to move away from the traditional soup kitchen mode of operation.
“We know that people have this image from the 1920’s of what a soup kitchen looks like—people standing in breadlines and it really looks terrible. That’s not what we do,” he told the Westmore News at the time.
According to Anthony Tirone, the MoMS board vice president, discussions to move to the new address started in 2019, but the shift was hampered by the pandemic.
“It set us back substantially,” he said. “And there were the typical hurdles including utilities, contractors, materials, supply chain, design, direction. All those things come into play when you’re setting up a building with a nonprofit.”
The building’s Certificate of Occupancy was granted on Friday, Nov. 22, though the group started working there in August.
Now that the dust from construction has settled, Tirone sees the new space as an opportunity to create a hub for food distribution—something Haseltine has in mind while running the daily operations.
Food recovered from MoMS’s 50 partners is brought to a loading dock outside, where workers organize material based on how it needs to be stored.
“Our refrigeration unit is where we keep our fresh produce and things like dairy,” Haseltine explained during a tour of the facility on Nov. 6. “We’ve also got our freezer for our meats and prepared meals, and our pantry. Every morning, when the food comes in, everything gets sorted and placed where it needs to go.”
The food’s final destination depends on the programming scheduled for the coming days.
“It could go through the mobile food pantry, the home delivery service or get cooked into a prepared meal,” Haseltine said. “Generally, the goal is to have food on shelves for as little time as possible. I know it results in better quality meals for the people who need it.”
The ground floor of the building also features a kitchen, where three cooks prepare pre-made meals for distribution.
Regardless of the manner in which the food is packaged, or its destination, it goes out the other side of the building’s parking lot, where a small fleet of vehicles await.
Three mobile food pantries and two delivery trucks stay parked outside, operated by drivers who have a set route every week, with carefully selected stops throughout the Village.
“There are already other groups here who do this type of work and I want to be sure we aren’t delivering to areas where they are already serving,” he said. “We need to almost coordinate with those neighbors of ours to make sure we aren’t doubling down in an area while another area that really needs this doesn’t get food.”
The new building also features office spaces on the second floor, as well as an open space that Haseltine believes can be used for social events.
“We’ve got our standard space to do work, our conference spaces, but we’ve also got this wide-open space here,” he said. “It could be used for volunteers to gather and discuss things or have social events for donors. I think this building really gives us the opportunity to grow in a lot of different ways.”
What’s next for MoMS?
Haseltine was brought on as executive director after longtime MoMS partner Bill Cusano stepped down in August. “Bill was with us for a very long time, and he brought us up to a certain level,” Tirone said of the change. “Bill, Rosemary Tirone, Pat Hart and Father Steve (Schenk) were really instrumental in getting us to where we are. But Jon has already been pushing us to go even further.”
“I was found through a recruiter,” Haseltine said. “And it really just seemed like a great fit. I thought it was a great opportunity for me.”
Not only was it a chance to work closer to home, as the Croton-on-Hudson resident previously worked out of New York City, but he believed in the work MoMS had set out to do.
“There’s just so much promise with the mission here,” he said. “There are a lot of hungry people in the world, but there’s also a lot of high-quality food out there as well. Meals on Main Street is really focused on bringing those things together.”
On top of believing in the group’s fight against hunger, Haseltine saw great potential in MoMS.
“I think there’s a lot of promise in the mission here and I think we’ll be able to find opportunities to do that in other ways while staying true to what this is,” he said.
Haseltine lauded the adaptive nature of the group, pointing towards the creation of the mobile food pantry and delivery service.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, MoMS began to experiment with the idea of a mobile food pantry.
“It was a model we started seeing more often. There are so many services that just bring things to people’s homes. Why can’t people who have high need get that as well?” he posed.
Haseltine said the mobile food truck and at-home delivery service became crucial in the post COVID-19 world, and he hopes to build on it.
“We’re building an app that ties into this system. When my drivers are finished with a run, we’ll weigh everything and put that information into a database,” he said. “Then, we’ll be able to look at all of the places where we gather food and see whether we’re taking in too much of one thing or too little of another.”
From there, the executive director would like to use the collected data to create more nutritious packages and meals. But he was quick to point out that it won’t happen quickly.
“My philosophy is to test and learn,” he said. “I like to test things, look at cost, production, distribution and how to improve things. Once you get something to a good place, that’s when you start to replicate something and feed even more people.”
His next project is casting the group’s net out even farther than where it can reach today.
“We’ve been playing around with the idea of something I’m calling a food hub,” he said. “It’s basically a 20-foot shipping container that’s insulated and refrigerated. We could put that anywhere we want, like Stamford, where there is high need. We prepare our food, bring it there and our partners would be able to distribute it to whoever needs it.”
Tirone said the organization is currently searching for resources, like storage facilities, to make the food hubs a reality.
Additionally, Haseltine is looking to make volunteering with MoMS more streamlined, as he sees volunteers as one of the group’s most critical resources.
“I got a small grant to develop a self-service type of volunteer signup system,” he said. “Volunteering should be easy. Helping the people in your community should be easy and I want to ensure that it is.”
Though Haseltine has only been with MoMS for the latter half of the year, he’s already set a goal for 2025.
“This year, we’re on track to serving a million meals,” he said. “But I’m already thinking about how many more people we can feed by the end of next year.”
Comments:
You must login to comment.