2021 Year in Review: By the Numbers

Our staff and volunteers cooked, packaged, and home-delivered 2,665,339 medically tailored meals. Delivering through rain, sleet, or snow, nothing could stop us!

In November and December, we cooked, packaged, and home-delivered 20,000 special holiday meals – a turkey feast for Thanksgiving, and a Winter Feast in December. These meals were delivered with gifts for clients and their families, and every client received a guest meal to safely share.

To ensure our clients have the right nutrition in the event we are unable to deliver, we delivered 218,000 emergency shelf-stable meals.

God’s Love was selected by the NYC Health & Hospitals Corporation to partner with Public Health Solutions and RiseBoro to serve patients of the public hospital system.

This year, we launched new programs to assist new populations in need of delicious, nutritious meals to address their illness and treatments:

1. We launched the Care Transitions service to provide recently discharged patients with home-delivered medically tailored meals through their insurers. You can read more about the Care Transitions program here.
2. We launched our veterans with PTSD program which is the of its kind at God’s Love, both in servicing a behavioral health diagnosis and designating it for veterans with PTSD. Hear from our client Raphael about how this program has supported his health this year by reading our blog post.
3. We also laid the groundwork for gestational diabetes program which we are launching this year!

We secured our expansion to the historic Northern Dispensary building in The Village! Read more about this move in The New York Times and in our blog post here.

Looking for new ways to give? We’ve launched a Crypto Currently Giving Program – turn your crypto in to caring support here!

Thanks to more than 70 artists, we brought back the CowParade to NYC after 20 years, as the sole beneficiary of this once-in-a-lifetime event. Learn more here.

We joined NYCWFF as their new charity partner! This year’s event was back in-person, welcoming 28,000 guests with 65+ live events across NYC, 400+ participating chefs, restaurants and wine and spirit producers, and generating 2B media impressions.

Our Senior Director of Policy and Planning, Alissa Wassung, was named to Food Transition Committee for Mayor-elect Eric Adams and our Policy & Planning Associate Danielle Christenson was named to NYC Food policy 40 under 40 list! Read about Alissa’s appointment on our blog and view the whole NYC Food Policy list here.

We were thrilled to see The Medically Tailored Home-Delivered Meal Demonstration Pilot Act of 2021 re-introduced to the House and we worked with our colleagues in the Food is Medicine Coalition across the country on #MTMActionDay, asking supporters to call their representatives to ask them to cosponsor the Bill and bring medically tailored meals to seniors and people with disabilities living with severe illness. Learn more about the Medically Tailored Home-Delivered Meals Demonstration Pilot Act of 2021 here.

We launched our Culinary Council – a team of food and culinary experts across professions, such as chefs, food writers, farmers, food activists, and food entrepreneurs committed to nourishing New Yorkers living with severe and chronic illness — to grow our footprint in and exposure to the food world across disciplines.

We continued to grow our sustainability efforts as we cook with upcycled vegetable broth from Matriark, usei herbs from Project EATS, and including grass-fed beef, antibiotic-free chicken, and wild-caught fish in our meals. We continue our partnership with City Harvest to include more local produce in our meals, and we are thrilled to partner with local butcher Hudson & Charles on other grass-fed beef items.