
It's an old problem: greasy, cheap, fast food makes healthy food hard to come by in low-income neighborhoods. This week, the West Harlem Community Center Healthy Food Hub offered a new solution: a one-stop health food shop.
"Instead of things being done all over the city, we're honing in and bringing all the services to one area, to really have more impact with the residents in West Harlem," said Colleen Flynn, director of Green and Healthy Neighborhoods Initiatives at the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC).
Flynn said it was a joint effort. West Harlem Group Assistance helped convert a cozy, vacant, commercial storefront into a healthy food pantry. Community members can pick their own fresh food there, thanks to the Food Bank for New York City and City Harvest. Folks can also sign up for food stamps with the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), obtain a week-to-week market share with Corbin Hill Food Project, and can take healthy cooking classes with local chefs.
The list of organizations offering long-term aid goes on, but out on the sidewalk, Marvin McKell, who's been homeless most of his life and lives in a housing development nearby with two roommates, just wants food. He said the food hub is "the same thing" as food pantries downtown. He's just glad they're closer.
But some residents see the value of the hub's extra services, like the cooking classes, like Leona F. Brown, 62, a retired home health aide and diabetic who's lived in Harlem since she was 16. "When my moms was living, she was a good cook," Brown said. "But she wasn't a healthy cook... Having this in the area is having someone to teach me how to live healthy and how to cook healthy.. I could live to be a hundred."
It has been a challenge for organizers to publicize the hub, which is why AmeriCorps volunteers are going door-to-door to help convince locals to try eating healthy. Organizers hope the hub will continue to help the community past 2015, when funding from the Laurie M. Tisch Foundation runs out. The foundation is funding three other initiatives — a hub that's already opened in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, and two healthy food projects in Cypress Hills in Brooklyn and Mt. Eden in the Bronx .
The NYC Food Policy Center at Hunter College plans to measure health effects of the Harlem hub in 2015.