PSS Manhattanville Center was one of the CCNY partners that provided free, nutritious meals to the community during the 2025 holiday season.
The City College of New York's and the Foundation for City College's ongoing outreach initiatives to provide fresh, nutritious meals to those in need continues to expand, including a massive effort that resulted in hundreds of meals being distributed the week of Thanksgiving and again the last week of 2025.
Every year since 2020, the College and the Foundation have partnered with Black-owned school food management company Red Rabbit to deliver the meals to different community partners, including PSS Manhattanville Center, Wilson Major Morris Community Center, Greater File Chapel Baptist Church, Living Redemption, and Henry Brooks Senior Housing.
Seven hundred fifty meals were offered this year with more than 500 individually wrapped meals prepared by Red Rabbit and 240 supplied by the Migrant Kitchen Initiative, an organization dedicated to ending the hunger crisis in New York City by reducing food insecurity at the community level. The prepared meals were also available to members of our on-campus community.
The meals are provided by City's Benny's Food Pantry, which got its start in a small office in the Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership in 2016. Support from the Auxiliary Enterprise Corporation at City College, the Foundation for City College and an additional $20,000 seed grant from The Carroll and Milton Petrie Foundation in 2019 enabled a move to the North Academic Center quad. It has since expanded to four additional locations, including The Towers at CCNY (the College's residential hall) and the Division of Interdisciplinary Studies at the Center for Worker Education, CCNY's downtown campus.
Benny's Food Pantry operates full-time, with an all-volunteer team from the Office of Institutional Advancement, Communications, & External Relations (OIACER) and students from the Campus CUNY Edge team, opening its doors to all CUNY groups, including students, staff, and faculty. Migrant Kitchen also partners with Benny's Food Pantry to prepare and deliver fresh meals on the last Thursday of every month for the CCNY community.
The volunteer staff serves a range of 25 to 100 visitor families per week. Food purchases are sourced from a variety of collaborative organizations throughout the city.
"We are especially grateful to our partnership with the Food Bank of New York City and donations received from community members, and student and staff groups, including the CCNY Department of Public Safety, The Towers at CCNY, and the CCNY New York Public Interest Research Group team," said OIACER Senior Vice President Dee Dee Mozeleski, who is also the executive director of the Foundation for City College and senior advisor to the president.
"Being able to open the doors to Benny's each day means so much to so many of us," she said. "We never saw the pantry as 'adjacent' to the campus; we see it as a vital part of our community. We have never asked 'why' people visit the pantry; we have asked: 'How can we make sure Benny's feels like a home away from home when it is needed?' We know that anyone can face hunger and we want to be ready with support when someone needs us."
About The City College of New York
Since 1847, The City College of New York has provided a high-quality and affordable education to generations of New Yorkers in a wide variety of disciplines. CCNY embraces its position at the forefront of social change. It is ranked #1 by the Harvard-based Opportunity Insights out of 369 selective public colleges in the United States on the overall mobility index. This measure reflects both access and outcomes, representing the likelihood that a student at CCNY can move up two or more income quintiles. Education research organization Degree Choices ranks CCNY #1 nationally among universities for economic return on investment. In addition, the Center for World University Rankings places CCNY in the top 1.8% of universities worldwide in terms of academic excellence. Labor analytics firm Lightcast puts at $3.2 billion CCNY’s annual economic impact on the regional economy (5 boroughs and 5 adjacent counties) and quantifies the “for dollar” return on investment to students, taxpayers, and society. At City College, more than 16,500 students pursue undergraduate and graduate degrees in eight schools and divisions, driven by significant funded research, creativity, and scholarship. In 2023, CCNY launched its most expansive fundraising campaign ever. The campaign, titled “Doing Remarkable Things Together,” seeks to bring the College’s Foundation to more than $1 billion in total assets in support of the College's mission. CCNY is as diverse, dynamic, and visionary as New York City itself. View CCNY Media Kit.
Syd Steinhardt
212-650-7875
ssteinhardt@ccny.cuny.edu