Access to safe and nutritious foods is an essential human right.
Sakhi’s Food Justice Program (FJP) seeks to make more nutritious, shelf-stable, easy-to-prepare, and culturally familiar food available to survivors who face housing, food, and income instability.
This program was born out of our understanding of how destabilizing it is to be without basic necessities, particularly while recovering from trauma. This program represents a crucial element of our trauma-informed programming.
As food offers a piece of home, we seek to ensure that survivors have access to the foods that they find nourishing and comforting.
Addressing the food insecurity of the pandemic, we began distributing food to clients at their home, increasing the food quantities for the delivery of each order, and creating a rotation so clients could receive food regularly and safely. Eventually, as restrictions eased, we began to offer food subsidies that enabled survivors to purchase their own groceries.
In 2023, Sakhi’s Food Justice Program provided 328 instances of food assistance for 94 families through our two pantries, grocery deliveries, and food cards.
Key services for survivors:
- The FJP Pantry operates in both Queens and Manhattan offices and is open and available to clients with appointments
- We offer survivors credit cards that are specific to grocery stores to purchase food and basic necessities of their choosing
- We have fresh food available to be delivered to the homes of vulnerable and homebound survivors, including elderly survivors and immunocompromised survivors