The Bug+NY event and the Holiday season got us in the spirit to participate in a local community event. A group of us got together for the day at the Yorkville Common Pantry (YCP).  The YCP is dedicated to reducing hunger and promoting dignity and self-sufficiency.  As the largest nonsectarian neighborhood-based provider of emergency food in New York City, YCP provides 1,250,000 meals annually.  It’s an amazing, welcoming place.   In addition to hot meals and 24/7 emergency family food bank, they also have an on-site barber and other services for all their clients living in the Upper East Side and East Harlem.  This Holiday season they plan to distribute more than 3,900 gifts to children in the community.

I saw that distributing gifts is much more difficult than reaching in a pile of donated gifts and passing them out.  Each gift is sorted by gender and age and matched to the profile of clients – so each family gets a bag of appropriate gifts for their family.  In addition, to donating, sorting, distributing, etc…. the YCP must record the price of each of these gifts for IRS purposes (yuck).

The Bug Lab’s group, armed with laptops, was very welcome and deemed perfect for the job.   A group of us, for the day, only made a tiny dent in what needs to get done in the next couple months – but it was a fun time.  It was great to see all the gifts waiting to go out to eager little kids – and to be part of it even in a small way.

Posted in Uncategorized by Matthew Cholerton | on Monday, December 24th, 2007 at 2:25 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.