May 22, 2018 New York Nonprofit Media, By Juan De La Cruz My daughter, like many nine-year-old kids, can be a bit dramatic. When she gets home from school she’ll often throw down her backpack and exclaim, “I’m starving!” I have to remind her that just outside our door and throughout the streets of the city, there are many people who are actually starving – people my team and I serve every single night of the year. In fact, the Coalition for the Homeless’ Grand Central Food Program – which I’ve run since 2006 – was founded the day after a homeless woman died of starvation in Grand Central Terminal in 1985. The coalition was rightly outraged that a human being could starve to death in the middle of one of the richest cities in the world, and started handing out sandwiches to homeless people in the station the very next day. Today, GCFP is the largest nightly mobile soup kitchen in the United States. Our three vans make 23 stops along three routes in upper Manhattan, lower Manhattan, and the Bronx, serving 1,000 hot, nutritious meals each night to our homeless and hungry neighbors.
