Food is more than what’s on the plate. This is Equal Portions, a series by editor-at-large Shane Mitchell, investigating bigger issues and activism in the food world, and how a few good eggs are working to make it better for everyone. ​​  

Soon, these mutual aid groups huddle in a thankful circle, announce pronouns, astrological signs, or simply state why they show up, and then haul the food down Avenue B to Tompkins Square Park for a weekly community distribution that serves asylum seekers, unhoused neighbors, and anyone else in need of a hot meal. As volunteers scoop portions into paper bowls for those waiting patiently in the long line, a woman pulls up in a rideshare with a stack of pizza boxes. A separate table is piled with COVID-19 tests, toothbrush kits, hand warmers, and lip balm. (Among other indignities, living outdoors in winter means severely chapped lips.) E-bike delivery riders pull over for a cup of hot coffee, elders from neighboring Chinatown arrive with shopping carts. The mix of languages heard on the line includes French, Arabic, Spanish, Wolof, Cantonese, and Mandarin. 

Sometimes it takes a village, as the saying goes, but this is Manhattan’s East Village, which has long been a melting pot for generations of immigrants, a haven for social outcasts, and a rallying point for protesters. Directly across from the park is St. Brigid’s Roman Catholic Church, also known as Famine Church, so nicknamed for the Irish who fled mass starvation in their homeland, a crisis exacerbated by British laissez-faire policies during the Great Hunger of 1845–52. And the cruelty of withholding government assistance that forces people to go hungry isn’t relegated to the past. With a presidential executive order that has suspended the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, the erasure of USAID, and federal food programs also potentially targeted, the burden of helping others falls squarely on those who practice radical empathy at street level, especially in America’s sanctuary cities. 

Obviously, this grassroots effort is becoming more urgent than ever. “We’ve been so concerned that we’re less stable because we don’t have funding,” says Hefferon, who started in food service as a teenager. (His mother was a bartender, his grandmother waitressed in a diner for 50 years.) “But with all these agencies closing, food access is only getting busier, and a lot of focus is on smaller, more independent operations like EVLovesNYC.” He emphasizes that all donations are ad hoc; they’re constantly pitching through social channels and word of mouth. Hefferon’s byword: “Keep crowd-funding and be prepared.” 

EVLovesNYC began as a small circle of friends dedicated to feeding others during pandemic lockdown, but has since evolved into a formal nonprofit with citywide alliances. When a 2023 viral video showed cofounder Mammad Mahmoodi passing containers of chili and rice with stuffed grape leaves to refugees through a window at the parish school on Avenue B, where the city set up a reticketing office for thousands evicted from safe housing shelters, the community response was swift. Tompkins Distro formed shortly after, and recently celebrated a full year of giving back. 

“Monday through Saturday, we take care of the immediate neighborhood,” Hefferon says, helping unbox slices of pizza. “On Sunday, we focus on the outer boroughs. We’re cooking 3,700 meals a week.” (Some of that operation takes place in a separate commissary kitchen.) EVLovesNYC also operates a weekday lunch program at the church called Caféwal, a Fulani word meaning cafeteria, which provides nutrient-dense, culturally sensitive free meals as well as on-the-job restaurant training to asylum seekers hoping to gain employment in New York’s hospitality sector. “Our first cohort of kitchen trainees ended their course and are looking for jobs, most with the help of Caféwal,” says communications director Ann Shields, offering granola bars and fresh fruit to all comers on the street corner. “And the second one just began.” 

One of the regular volunteers, a Senegalese refugee named Alpha, gives her a big hug. When he was reassigned to a distressing shelter at an infamous former psychiatric institution way out in Queens, those who have gotten to know him in the kitchen and in Tompkins Square Park launched a crowd-funding campaign to help find him a permanent home. So far, they’ve raised enough for a temporary apartment so he doesn’t have to couch surf. Ironically, just as his friends have been able to transition Alpha into a safe space, the landlord of the commissary kitchen is terminating EVLovesNYC’s lease, effectively evicting the good samaritans.  

At a time when a new administration is cynically abandoning the most vulnerable to an uncertain future or, even worse, detaining them in secretive offshore prisons, friends and neighbors must step up to help each other. On their social feed about Alpha’s status, Tompkins Distro posted this comment: “It is very easy to feel helpless and ineffectual in the face of all that is terrifying and wrong in the world, but if we choose to focus on the problems and people right in front of us and the work directly at hand in our communities, we can build a better world, brick by brick.”