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Over the past 40 years the Holy Trinity Neighborhood Center (HTNC) has been serving freshly prepared meals to those in need on the Upper East Side of New York. Our club has been partnering with HTNC for the past 3 years, where our members have prepared, cooked, and served over 4000 meals to vulnerable members of our community, including the elderly, the lonely, and those experiencing homelessness. We keep coming back to this service project for 3 main reasons:
1. The meals are prepared fresh, with high quality and nutritious ingredients. Whether it is chicken parmigiana with mash potatoes and an Italian style salad, meatloaf with garlic and honey vegetables, or Thanksgiving roast Turkey with sweet potato mash and collard greens, every meal our members prepare at this service project is design to help meet the nutrient needs of our guests.
2. The meals are served in a restaurant style setting. This means that the guest have a place where they can sit down and not only eat their meal but also catch up with their friends and interact closely with our members. This helps foster great community connections and enables other social services to be provided to the guests.
3. Much of the food used at this event is donated by local supermarkets, bakers, and butchers, which not only reduces costs, but also reduces food waste.
Unfortunately, the freezer which HTNC uses to store all of their expensive protein items (beef, chicken, etc.) has been failing over the past year. This freezer is over 20 years old and has failed multiple times, resulting in the loss of hundreds of dollars' worth of food. Maintenance on such an old freezer is also expensive, and as such there is a desperate need to replace this item to enable HTNC to continue to serve those most vulnerable in our community.
To this end, we have worked with HTNC to identify a replacement freezer which will suit their needs. Purchase, delivery and installation of this freezer (Traulsen G12010 30" G Series Solid Door Reach in Freezer with Right Hinged Door) has a total estimated cost of $6,279. The useful life of this freezer is 15-20 years and will allow the program to continue running without interruption or loss of food inventory. Purchasing this new freezer will also reduce equipment repair costs, allowing for more money to be spend on feeding the guests of the program.
By hosting a fundraising gala, our club has raised over $2000 which we intend to donate in the form of a grant to HTNC to purchase this freezer. These funds, in combination with the additional $2000 from this district grant application will be supplemented by $2,279 in already committed funds from the World Gold Council.
Should this grant application be successful, we aim to have the freezer purchased and installed in HTNC's kitchen by Thanksgiving 2025.
Our member will also continue to volunteer at the HTNC on a monthly basis, where on every 3rd Saturday of the month, 10-20 of our members have prepare, cook and serve these meals to approximately 100-120 guests. More information about this project can be found in the promotional video recorded by our club on our club's Instagram page.
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