Throughout the year, our Delivery drivers take their vans to the streets of the five boroughs of New York City,Westchester and Nassau Counties, and Hudson County in New Jersey. Come rain or shine, August heat or January cold, our drivers ring over 245,000 doorbells each year. Behind those doors are single clients, clients living in the same home with other clients, clients living with their caregivers or dependent children or one of more than fifty distribution centers where volunteers take our food the final blocks to a client's door.

Starting at 6am every weekday morning, our drivers load their sixteen vans with the thousands of chilled and frozen components that make up our meals: entrees, soups, desserts, rolls, children's meals and specialty items. By 8:30am, all vans are away. For the rest of the morning and early afternoon, our drivers make their deliveries, often to the same neighborhoods and clients week in and week out.

Drivers are the eyes of our agency, reporting on the condition of our clients and working hard to accommodate the individual challenges of making deliveries to the broad spectrum of our clients. Clients often come to know their drivers by name. On more than a few occasions, drivers have heard clients in distress behind their front doors, have made the calls for emergency response and stayed at the client's door until help arrived.

Our delivery volunteers are a special group of individuals. They deliver our food from a network of Neighborhood Meal Distribution Centers (NMDC), spread throughout all the boroughs we serve. Many of them rarely, if ever, come through the front doors of our SoHo home. From this collection of houses of worship, adult day service sites, residential facilities, and community locations, our delivery volunteers donate thousands of hours of their time every month to help deliver our meals and touch the lives of their neighbors. Like our drivers, they are our eyes at our client's door, and like our drivers, bonds of compassion and friendship often develop between our clients and our long-time delivery volunteers.  Read a day-in-the-life blog post of one of our van assistants here.

The other volunteers that help us deliver our essential meals are van assistants. Signing up for a day-long shift as helpers to our drivers, these volunteers get to experience New York as few do, delivering in neighborhoods across the city that are often far removed from the bright lights and airy sights of Manhattan's tourist-centric areas. In addition to lessening the many steps drivers make from their vans to their clients' doors, these volunteers often come away with a deeper appreciation both for the needs of our clients and our response to those needs.