Drive-through food pantry helps those in need

In response to the federal government’s stalemate in helping local residents and anticipating a need to offset the inaction, Warwick Town Supervisor, Jesse Dwyer, initiated a Zoom conference call two weeks ago with local food pantries and various other volunteer organizations to see if a collaborative effort could help mobilize something to support the community.

“We coordinated all the local food pantries with the Regional Food Bank, and we brought them together for a call basically to assess need and come up with ideas for how we can fill the short-term void in what the federal government had been providing,” Dwyer said. “This pickup, this food pantry drive-through idea, came out of the conference call and very quickly on, the coordinator of the Florida food pantry, Beth Maas, as well as the Regional Food Bank, put this on in just a couple of days.”

On Sunday Nov. 9, they put the plan into action.

But providing meals and not just surplus food, requires planning, logistics, and coordination among the key organizations. It turns out that the Regional Food Bank has been doing this all over the country and all over the northeast for a long time and has developed a system that works. It involves direct action from organizations that create and serve hot meals and/or prepared food packages to individuals experiencing homelessness or food insecurity.

The Regional Food Bank has mobile vans that distribute meals at various locations and times, ensuring a consistent source of food for those in need. This approach goes beyond donating rescued food as it also includes the effort of planning and coordinating the serving of nutritious meals, addressing immediate needs with ingredients that recipients can prepare themselves. Organizers have perfected a system to identify what a family would need over the course of three to four days, including carbohydrates, dairy, and protein. Milk, cheese, yogurt, and chicken were in the packages, plus cereal, onions, and apples, among other ingredients.

The Regional Food Bank was created by a group of food pantry coordinators and anti-hunger advocates in June 1982. The Food Bank operated for seven years in a commercial storage warehouse, and in 1989 moved into a newly constructed 21,000 square-foot warehouse. The Food Bank outgrew the facility in less than four years and moved its operation to a modern 42,000 square-foot warehouse in 1993. In 2017, the Food Bank completed a major renovation project to expand its warehouse storage space in an effort to meet the ever-growing requests for food assistance. In 1990, the Regional Food Bank opened a facility in the Hudson Valley to increase donations from food companies and improve services to agencies in this region. As of February 2025, its location is housed in a 50,000 square foot warehouse in Montgomery, which serves an area encompassing 41% of the landmass of New York State.

“There were roughly 100 volunteers out here today. We’ve already seen, I think, probably 60 cars drive through as of 9 a.m. — and we’re providing at least three to four days’ worth of meals and snacks per family, per car that drives through our spontaneous food pantry here in the Town Park,” Dwyer said.

At its heart, the effort to organize the food pantry drive-through was about more than distributing groceries — it was about neighbors coming together to care for one another in a time of uncertainty. Helping a community means recognizing shared responsibility, acting with compassion, and building partnerships that turn concern into action.

It shows that when people unite with purpose, even small towns can meet big challenges and ensure that no one is left behind.