Day: May 23, 2025

Thirty NYC Health + Hospitals police officers were celebrated at their first medal ceremony on May 20 at South Brooklyn Health.

The post Hospital cops honored in Brooklyn ceremony appeared first on Brooklyn Eagle.

Goose Property Management obtained an $80 million refinancing loan from Affinius Capital LLC for 570 Fulton St.

The post Goose Property secures $80M for Downtown Brooklyn project appeared first on Brooklyn Eagle.

Responding to federal cuts in anti-hunger programs, Council Member Shahana Hanif will allocate $20,000 in discretionary funding from her FY26 budget to Gotham Food Pantry and Community Help in Park Slope. 

Each organization will receive $10,000 to help meet the surging demand for food assistance in Brooklyn and to help cover costs previously covered by federal funding. 

At a press conference outside Gowanus Houses, Hanif explained that the funding allocation was a direct response to fill the gaps left by Trump’s “cruel and regressive federal policies.”

In March, the U.S. Department of Agriculture cut vital federal food assistance programs to the tune of $1 billion, including the Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP) and Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement programs — programs that support food banks and other feeding organizations. On Thursday morning, House Republicans passed President Donald Trump’s massive domestic policy bill, which includes $290 billion in cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which supports over 42 million low-income Americans. If passed by the Senate, advocates say, the cuts will exacerbate the hunger crisis in America. 

“President Trump and Elon Musk are dismantling anti-hunger programs, ripping away millions in funding under the false pretense of efficiency,” Hanif said. “And now, congressional Republicans have doubled down on this approach, passing legislation to slash Medicaid and SNAP in order to hand out tax breaks to the ultra-wealthy.”

Hanif also urged local businesses, nonprofits, and residents to step up and join the fight against food insecurity by sharing their resources and coordinating food rescue efforts — almost half of still edible-food goes to waste — to prevent hunger and reduce landfill waste. 

“This funding isn’t just about food. It’s about dignity. It’s about equity. It’s about saying that in this city, in our city, no one should go hungry, not while 40% of food in this country is wasted. Hunger exists not because we lack food but because we fail to share it,” Hanif said.

Feeding organizations like CHiPS and Gotham Food Pantry provide a lifeline to food-insecure New Yorkers but face significant challenges due to the sudden disruptions in federal support, inflation, tariffs, and rising food costs.

According to a report by City Harvest, more than 1.4 million New Yorkers are experiencing food insecurity, and one in four New York City children does not always know where their next meal will come from. Due to rising food costs and inflation, visits to food pantries and soup kitchens have increased by 85% compared to 2019. Food pantries, soup kitchens, and food programs have already reported over 1 million monthly visits in 2025, and 67% of those seeking help are employed.

Gotham Food Pantry, a food justice nonprofit founded in 2020 in response to the increase in food insecurity during the COVID-19 pandemic, rescues food from local retailers that would otherwise land in the dumpster. Since its founding, Gotham has saved and distributed over 10 million pounds of food to over 300,000 food-insecure New Yorkers in low-income public housing complexes across the five boroughs.

Gotham ran into delivery challenges after one of its transportation partners had funding frozen due to the USDA cuts, preventing them from transporting food designated for Gotham Food Pantry’s distributions, including Gowanus Houses. Gotham delivers up to 12,000 pounds of food to Gowanus Houses biweekly, assisting between 150 and 500 residents.

Douglas Silver, founder and executive director of Gotham Food Pantry, said Hanif’s contribution of $10,000 would go a “long way” in helping deliver needed food resources to Gowanus Houses and other Brooklyn partners.

“Hunger is not just an unconscionable problem — it is an unnecessary one. We produce more than enough nutritious food to feed every New Yorker — and every American — many times over,” Silver said. “Yet, that food often goes to waste while our neighbors go hungry. This disparity is not merely a matter of scarcity; it is a reflection of systemic issues within our food system. It’s about how food is grown, subsidized, and distributed. It’s about who has access to it and who benefits from the current structures in place.”

Silver also pointed out that slashing federal programs like SNAP benefits would not only deepen the hunger crisis but push more families into poverty, emphasizing that SNAP wasn’t a “handout” but “one of the most effective economic tools in the federal arsenal -besides providing essential nutrition, every dollar invested in SNAP generates $1.50 in local economic activity and is strongly linked to improved public health and reduced healthcare costs.

“Food is not a luxury; it’s a basic human right,” Silver said.

Peter Endriss, executive director of CHiPS, a food pantry and soup kitchen established in 1971, said the funding came at a crucial time.

“The current federal funding and programming cuts occurring contemporaneously with threats to supplemental nutrition benefits and looming inflation and possible recession caused by tariffs and unpredictable economic conditions has made it nearly impossible for organizations such as CHiPS, who are on the ground, day in and day out, trying to feed everyone who comes to our doors, to succeed in their missions,” Endriss said. “State and city government funding has now become even more essential in helping us continue to rise to the moment and meet the ever-increasing need.”

CHiPS’s soup kitchen serves over 600 warm meals daily, six days a week. In addition to its food pantry program, CHiPS launched a mobile pantry in 2023, delivering fresh fruits, vegetables, and groceries to neighborhoods throughout Brooklyn, including Gowanus Houses.

Endriss told Brooklyn Paper that since COVID-19, the number of people using the soup kitchen had quadrupled, and the number of New Yorkers using the in-house pantry and the mobile pantry program had also increased.

Because of the USDA cuts, CHiPS has lost critical funding sources.

“We get a lot of food support through the TEFAP program, which is the big federal program that cut $500 million. That’s where we’re going to start to see the problems because we get a lot of food through that [program] for our pantry and food service. Now that they’re cutting SNAP and Medicaid, that will trickle down. I fully expect our lines to double,” Endriss predicted.

William Reid, president of the Gowanus Houses Tenant Association, has worked alongside neighbors, Gotham Food Pantry, CHiPs, and Hanif’s office to operate food distributions.

“For many residents, these distributions are the difference between just getting by and having basic needs met. It is a grassroots effort where neighbors are stepping up for each other as systems continue to fail us, keeping our communities trapped in cycles of poverty, need, and hunger,” Reid said.

Two leading candidates in the 2025 NYC mayor’s race — former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and city Comptroller Brad Lander — both say they have reached the city’s $8.3 million spending cap when including public matching funds with a little over four weeks until the Democratic primary.

Cuomo’s campaign says it raked in nearly $4 million in private donations since launching on March 1, according to numbers his campaign released ahead of Friday’s CFB disclosure deadline for the latest filing period.

The former governor, who resigned in 2021 amid nearly a dozen accusations of sexual harassment that he denies, is the front-runner in the polls and has won the backing of many institutional Democrats and influential groups. The current mayor, Eric Adams, is a non-factor in the Democratic primary after opting to run as an independent in the November general election instead.

Cuomo’s campaign says that with $1.5 million in public matching funds it already received from the CFB earlier this month combined with another $2.8 million it expects to be awarded on May 30, it will hit the board’s $8.3 million fundraising limit.

“We are truly overwhelmed by the outpouring of support,” said Bill Mulrow, Cuomo’s campaign chairman, in a statement. “In just 80 days, New Yorkers from every borough have come together to help us build a campaign with the broadest and most diverse coalition of support.”

While Cuomo’s campaign announced its own haul, its latest numbers, along with those of most other major candidates, had not been updated on the CFB website as of this posting. Candidates will be updating their filings with the CFB through Tuesday morning, according to a board spokesperson.

Queens Assembly Member Zohran Mamdani, who is polling in second place to Cuomo, was the first candidate to max out their fundraising earlier in the spring.

However, there is no guarantee that Cuomo’s campaign will unlock the full amount of public dollars that it anticipates, especially following previous missteps it made around the city’s matching funds system. In April, the CFB denied Cuomo any public funds due to widespread errors with the paperwork it submitted and earlier this month the board withheld over $600,000 in additional funds over a preliminary finding of illegal coordination between the campaign and a super PAC supporting it.

The super PAC backing Cuomo, known as “Fix the City,” has already raised over $8 million — the most of any outside expenditure backing a candidate in a city election.

Lander, who has been moving between third and fourth place in the polls, announced earlier this week that he has also reached the $8.3 million spending limit. However, Lander’s campaign did not immediately provide further details on how much he raised in the most recent filing period and the breakdown between private and public funds.

“We’ve raised the maximum that you’re allowed to spend under New York City’s best in the nation public finance system,” Lander told reporters during a Tuesday news conference. “It’s a sign of great grassroots support…This guarantees that we’ll have all the resources that we need to communicate my message of a safer, more affordable and better run city for all New Yorkers.”

Cuomo, Mamdani, Lander, and state Sen. Zellnor Myrie have already deployed their war chests to hit the airwaves with TV ads.

The campaign for City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, another candidate near the front of the pack, announced on Wednesday that it expects to for the first time unlock matching funds with its latest round of fundraising. The revelation came after Mamdani made the unprecedented move of encouraging his own supporters to donate to the speaker just a day before the fundraising deadline.

“This milestone is a testament to the grassroots energy behind Adrienne‘s campaign,” Adrienne Adams’ spokesperson Lupe Todd-Medina said in a statement. “It reflects what so many New Yorkers already know; she is a leader with the strength, vision, and values to meet this moment. Every dollar matched fuels a movement powered by people, not politics. She’s not in this race for herself – she’s in it for us.”

Myrie’s campaign says it raised over $900,000 in private donations since launching about a year ago, roughly $115,000 of which it brought in over the past two months. It has received $2.7 million in matching funds so far and expects to unlock another $800,000, bringing its total haul to $4.4 million.

City Comptroller Lander has challenged Brooklyn Congressmember Malliotakis to a debate, and demands she answer to her vote on a health care bill.

The post NYC Comptroller challenges Rep. Malliotakis to debate over her vote to slash Medicaid appeared first on Brooklyn Eagle.

TO MARK TEKSUPPORT’S tenth anniversary, the 10,500-square-foot Brooklyn Storehouse at the Brooklyn Navy Yard will feature artists.

The post Teksupport celebrates 10 years with series at Navy Yard, Sunset Park appeared first on Brooklyn Eagle.