Who We Are

The Astoria Food Pantry is a mutual aid project that provides high-quality fresh food to 200+ people per week. We share our space at 25-82 Steinway St with the Free Store Astoria,  Astoria Mutual Aid Network, the Connected Chef, the People's Bodega, the Rolling Library, and other local projects that use the space to engage in direct aid, activism, and community services.

We do this entirely through individual donations - we don’t receive support from the government, and we only receive very limited grants. We are also entirely volunteer run, so donations go entirely to paying the rent on our community center, and paying for food. This independence allows us to not require anyone to show an ID or answer questions about their household, allowing us to serve everyone in our community, even if we don’t speak their language or if they want to keep their information private. Coming to get food at the pantry is as simple as just showing up. 

Where We Came From

In March 2020, Macaela created the Astoria Food Pantry out of the back of her car. She set up a table outside of one of the city's public school meal sites, because she knew that people would need more than school lunches to get through this crisis.

A couple months later, a local candidate for office offered up his campaign office which was paid for until June but unused due to COVID - allowing us to expand, add cold storage, and buy food in bulk and repackage it into grocery bags. We grew a lot in that borrowed space, adding people and food until we had a team of 10+ regular volunteers giving 200+ bags of groceries and meals every week.

But eventually the lease on our borrowed space ran out. At the end of last year we successfully raised a year of rent to support our move into our own space and to keep us open for 2021. You can now find us at 25-82 Steinway Street.

Why We Do It

The number one reason we provide food to the community is because if we don’t, our neighbors could go hungry. We are facing unprecedented unemployment, and due to anti-worker and anti-immigrant policies many of our neighbors aren’t able to qualify for even basic government benefits like unemployment and food stamps. Meanwhile the city government’s food distributions were exactly what you’d expect from a school cafeteria - families were getting cold sandwiches to get through the week, when they really needed full bags of groceries. We looked around and saw countless neighbors who were falling through the cracks in a time when our safety net is needed the most. 
​
We started this project in Astoria because this is our home, and living here we saw the need around us. Astoria had food insecurity even before COVID-19, and much of it is related to other issues: gentrification that has pushed rents up, the defunding of NYCHA and the negligence in its upkeep, the lack of protections and benefits for contracted workers, negative health effects from our power plants and highways, the highest rates of stop-and-frisk of any NYC police precinct - the list of injustices goes on. We help with food every week because it’s what we are able to provide materially, but we don’t limit ourselves to the issue of food, because we know that our people have needs beyond it.