ZARA Charitable Foundation Opens Queens School Pantry as Food Costs Bite Harder This Winter

As food insecurity quietly rises in America’s largest city, a new school-based pantry in Queens may presage how local partnerships can patch the social safety net’s growing holes.

At P.S. 182Q in Jackson Heights, the week before Thanksgiving does not simply mark the onset of festive cheer. Instead, it spells for many a sharpening anxiety about budgets stretched to the breaking point. Grocery prices, stubbornly buoyant in the aftermath of pandemic disruptions, remain roughly 25% higher than just two years ago, with the latest government figures suggesting a year-on-year climb of 2.7%. That arithmetic, for a growing number of families in Queens, translates not into abundance but into worry over the simplest of dinners.

Into this inflationary pinch steps an experiment in social intervention: a new monthly food pantry, announced by the ZARA Charitable Foundation, now operating from the corridors of P.S. 182Q—the Magnet School of Discovery and Applied Learning. The initiative, orchestrated in partnership with The Child Center of New York and supplied by Mannan Supermarket (a halal grocer with deep neighborhood roots), aims to serve over 80 families—around 250 individuals—in its inaugural month. Crucially, its design is meant to scale, ready to accommodate the not-unlikely prospect of rising need.

For Principal Andrew Topol, the equation is as direct as it is old-fashioned: hunger impedes learning. The hope is that a dignified, no-cost grocery basket—stuffed with familiar staples such as roti, chickpeas, produce, and eggs—will quash that distraction before it ripples into the classroom. Tony Subraj and Amir Sobhraj of the ZARA Charitable Foundation, who have steered their organization toward food relief for nearly three years, argue that their approach offers immediacy and reliability amid a puny public response.

The numbers justify their urgency. According to New York State data, nearly 31% of adults in Queens experience food insecurity, a figure that dwarfs the national average of 13.5% as reported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Even as federal SNAP benefits resumed this autumn after a budget hiatus, the resumption looks paltry compared to the relentless upward march of grocery receipts—a kitchen-table nightmare, as Subraj calls it, with no end yet in sight.

The logic behind a school-based pantry is no conjuring trick. When support is stitched directly into a trusted local institution, uptake increases and stigma—often a silent deterrent—begins to wane. Parents retrieve groceries quietly at pick-up time; children are spared rumbling stomachs and the psychic toll of household instability. Simone Clarke-John of The Child Center of New York contends that such arrangements foster resilient families, not just sated children.

The ZARA Foundation’s involvement is not new but rather an evolution. Since 2021, its support for The Gaton Foundation’s Give&Go Project has seen over 1 million meals distributed to low-income New Yorkers. These monthly grocery drops, quietly shielding over 1,300 individuals from the edge of deprivation, illustrate the scale achievable when philanthropy meets logistical nous. The quality control extends beyond calorie count: Mannan Supermarket’s culturally attuned offerings ensure clients receive rice, bread, and lentils that actually find welcome on the dinner table.

Whether this sort of ad hoc provisioning is panacea or patch is, of course, another matter. While the initiative will likely salve distress for dozens of families at P.S. 182Q and the ripple effect may bolster school performance, it can hardly stand as a substitute for a robust social contract. Private charity, however well-meaning, is inherently ephemeral—its future hostage to donor mood and economic whims quite outside the control of its recipients.

All too local fix for a widespread ailment

The broader portents are mixed. New York, home to an annual city budget pushing $110 billion, is still dependent on an archipelago of non-profits to head off the worst effects of inequality. In that context, a school-based pantry—run by volunteers and funded by a private foundation—marks both a triumph of self-help and an indictment of government patchiness. Granted, City Hall has recently trundled out new resources and summer expansion grants for school kitchens, but municipal figures still show more than 1.2 million New Yorkers classified as “food insecure”, a number unlikely to recede without more structural intervention.

At the national level, the contrast with other advanced economies borders on the uncomfortable. Britain, often chided for its own “holiday hunger” problem, has extended free school meals well beyond the lunch hour. France and Germany, meanwhile, lean on mandatory canteens and universal benefit supplements—all measures that reckon with food support as a right, not a patchwork act of charity.

The political stakes in New York are not merely rhetorical, either. Food inflation, stubbornly resistant to policymakers’ entreaties, carries electoral weight—especially with working- and middle-class voters for whom every uptick at the checkout bodes ill for trust in institutions. The risk is not only malnutrition but a slow erosion of faith in the ability of city and federal government to manage the basics—public health, education, and family security.

Still, for all their limits, such micro-level partnerships embody a distinctly American improvisational spirit. Neighbours, grocers, and non-profits do what they must to paper over cracks. The collaboration at P.S. 182Q is notably practical, its clientele diverse, and its structure nimble. Even so, its existence at all should prod city and state budget-planners to reconsider whether food relief is a matter best left to goodwill and seasonal largesse.

Queens is often cited as the city’s “world borough,” a magnet for strivers and a bellwether for metropolitan trends. If food insecurity now looms over nearly a third of adults here, that surely signals not a passing spasm but a chronic ailment—one stretching from the outer boroughs to the corridors of power in Albany and Washington.

The ZARA Foundation’s pantry is a welcome salve, but palliatives do not replace durable infrastructure. As inflation continues its tepid retreat but wages lag and rents soar, New York’s poor—and its working poor—will need more than neatly packed grocery bags to thrive. For now, pantry shelves fill a gap left inconveniently wide by government, a reality the city would do well not to ignore. ■