City College Community Celebrates Thanksgiving

The City College of New York 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.

Every year since 2020, the College and 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, and Living Redemption.

Eight hundred twenty-five meals were offered this year, including vegetarian options. The individually wrapped meals were also available at The Towers at CCNY and the CCNY Facilities Office.

The meals are provided by Benny’s Pantry, which got its start in a small office in the Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership in 2016. Support from the Foundation for City College and an additional $20,000 seed grant from the Carol and Milton Petrie Foundation in 2019 enabled a move to the North Academic Center quad. It has since expanded to three additional locations: The Towers, the CCNY Facilities Department and the and the Division of Interdisciplinary Studies at the Center for Worker Education, CCNY's downtown campus.

Since then, Benny’s Pantry has operated, full-time, with an all-volunteer team, throughout the pandemic, even opening its doors to all CUNY groups, including students, staff, and faculty. Benny’s recently entered into a partnership with the Migrant Kitchen Initiative, an organization dedicated to ending the hunger crisis in New York City by reducing food insecurity at the community level. Migrant Kitchen now prepares fresh meals and delivers them to Benny’s Pantry every Thursday for the CCNY community.

The volunteer staff serves a range of 25 to 100 people per week. Food is purchased from Amazon and Costco, with donations coming from the New York Food Bank and individuals.

Facilitated by CCNY Community Project Manager Tiffanie Burt, this partnership also enabled Migrant Kitchen to donate 100 turkeys to CCNY community partners during the Thanksgiving season.

“When we first opened Benny's Pantry, our goal was to become a home for students in need. What we did not anticipate was that we would be able to develop so many important partnerships that continue to allow us to grow our work in the area of providing meals to those in need,” said Vice President for Institutional Advancement and Communications Dee Dee Mozeleski, who is also the executive director of The Foundation for City College Inc. “We are grateful, in particular to all of our alumni, donors, and to Migrant Kitchen and Red Rabbit for their expanded support, which also allows us to share food with even more members of our campus and greater Harlem community.”

Another on-campus Thanksgiving event was held on Thursday, Nov. 17, when the LGBTQ+ Center, United Student Government and WCCR hosted their inaugural Thanksgiving Dinner in the Hoffman Lounge.

Center Director Jake Nill and USG Vice President of Student Affairs Tara Hernandez came together with the idea when each discovered that their respective organizations had community refrigerators to store food, such as leftovers from events or excess produce from the Market In The Heights, for students in need. They then took the idea to Benny’s Pantry.

“This transformed into, at least for this semester, a USG initiative for a Thanksgiving dinner,” said Nil. With more than 100 attendees, “it was a great night,” he added.

The two hope to make this an annual tradition.

“I think this should become a solid backbone of USG events to help the pantry and to help the food insecurity that many of our students face,” said Hernandez.

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 DegreeChoices ranks CCNY #3 nationally for social mobility. 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 Emsi puts at $1.9 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 15,000 students pursue undergraduate and graduate degrees in eight schools and divisions, driven by significant funded research, creativity and scholarship. This year, 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 mission. CCNY is as diverse, dynamic and visionary as New York City itself. View CCNY Media Kit