Last week the Warren Town Council unanimously voted to accept a proposal from Warren nonprofit Hope & Main for $150,000 in American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funding over three years to grow their Nourish Our Neighbors food assistance program, which began in March of 2020 at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“What we learned through COVID is that so many of our social problems and injustices were really laid bare by the pandemic, and food insecurity and hunger are no exception,” said Lisa Raiola, Founder and President of Hope & Main, during her presentation to the council.

Since the program began, Nourish Our Neighbors has distributed 45,500 meals to people in need throughout the community, and raised $380,000 through various efforts, including $215,000 from 757 local donors through online campaigns. By the end of 2020, Hope & Main was delivering 1,500 meals every week.

“Were it not for the generosity of the people of Warren this really would not have happened,” Raiola said, adding that the program has also raised more than $270,000 for 33 local food businesses.

“Many of these businesses would have closed were it not for this program,” she said.

Fulfilling great need
When Covid first began to take hold over communities throughout Rhode Island, Hope & Main was approached by the Town of Warren and the Bristol Warren Regional School District to serve as a distribution point for free meals to students in need while school buildings went into lockdown — serving as a crucial stop gap for food provider Chartwells, who were unable to perform that duty due to staffing shortages.

From March 16 through June 26 of 2020, Hope & Main distributed contact-less school breakfast and lunch, but Raiola noticed that there were needs going unmet by merely maintaining the status quo.

“When we started to see, every day, more and more families and people coming to pick up food on behalf of families on their block who maybe didn’t have transportation, it felt like a pretty dire situation,” she said. “Again, something that usually lives in the shadows really was laid bare by Covid. People did not have food.”

A fundraising effort began to pay Hope & Main’s member companies enough money to produce food for people in need, which quickly expanded to providing meals for senior citizens who could no longer access food assistance programs at shuttered senior centers or procure food on their own. Other advocacy groups also began to feel the pressure from the isolating nature of the pandemic cutting them off from those they served.

“What’s important to understand about hunger is that it travels with other social determinants of health,” Raiola said. “If people are victims of domestic violence, if people are in recovery or are drug addicted, it’s very likely that they’re also hungry. It’s very likely that people in their household are experiencing food insecurity.”

Therein lies the genesis for the Nourish Our Neighbors program, and the key to its success. The program strives to meet anybody in need of food assistance wherever they might be receiving help — whether in a shelter for homelessness or domestic violence, at a treatment facility for addiction, or elsewhere.

“The idea of getting these meals out to where people are seeking other services is important, because that means you’re getting them at the point of need versus what I'll call the point of sale,” explained Raiola.

Hope & Main provides Nourish Our Neighbors meals throughout the year, including off-school months through the Schoolyard Market, where anyone can request a meal. Free meal pickups are available year-round every Wednesday, from 4-7 p.m., and no pre-registration or eligibility questions are required.

Expanding the assistance
Currently, Hope & Main works with six community partners, delivering meals to them weekly so they can be distributed to each of their client bases.

These partners — the Head Start Program, the Hugh Cole School Food Pantry, St. Mary’s of the Bay Food Pantry, the Bristol and Warren Senior Centers, the Women’s Resource Center, and the East Bay Recovery Center — help deliver between 200-250 free meals each week.

With the infusion of ARPA funding, Hope & Main strives to expand to four additional partner sites, including Kickemuit Middle School, the Warren Health Equity Zone, the Warren Housing Authority, and the WIC Office.

Raiola spoke, specifically regarding Warren, about how crucial this type of assistance is. She reported that 23.7 percent of children in the Bristol Warren school district were eligible for free/reduced lunch, and how 31 percent of children of Pre-K age were from families of low income.

Warren’s 305-census tract, where Hope & Main is located and where a large amount of Warren’s businesses and its downtown is situated, has around 3,700 people making a median income of $37,000.

“That’s about 40 percent of the Town of Warren,” Raiola said.

Through the new allocation of funding, Hope & Main would also be able to support between 5-8 new businesses each year of the grant to participate in Nourish Our Neighbors and supplement their own revenue streams.

“It was so fulfilling to be able to provide meals to those in need,” wrote Lyslie Medeiros, co-founder of Warren-based vegan food truck Basil & Bunny, one of Hope & Main’s Nourish Our Neighbors food partners. “And personally, for us, it was a great way to reach new customers through a recipe such as our chimichurri cauliflower burrito bowl and gauge an excellent response from them. That bowl specifically became a consistent menu item…”

Through expansion, Hope & Main hopes to be able to be able to serve a total of 1,000 food-insecure families each year.

“I think the town should be very proud, too,” said Raiola. “It’s really a shining example of what we can do when we’re all mission aligned around something that is important.”