Community Solidarity is America’s largest all-vegetarian hunger relief food program. Our philosophy is that compassion for people, animals, and the environment goes hand in hand.
Every week Community Solidarity assists thousands of families by sharing free nutritious vegetarian groceries and hot gourmet vegan meals. These plant-based foods are healthier than anything offered by mainstream food banks. They're also more compassionate and more sustainable.
Our cruelty-free mission is simple. By promoting a vegan diet, and sharing vegetarian groceries, we save animals. By empowering communities, and ending hunger, we help people.
We'd love for you to learn more about us, our work and how we can help people, animals, and the earth together!
Community Solidarity is an organization that believes all suffering is wrong - human and animal. Alleviating hunger and animal suffering are not mutually exclusive; they're linked. The suffering of humans will not end if our society continues to justify the suffering of other living beings.
Here's our viewpoint. The blind indifference that makes it easy for some people to overlook the hungry and poor among us is the same indifference that makes it easy for many to overlook the suffering of animals in factory farms. Further, it blinds people to the environmental destruction created by those factory farms.
This blind indifference has us overlooking the suffering created by our economic system. An economic system that devalues those poor animals lives. An economic system that also devalues the poor and hungry people in our own communities. An economic system that exploits living beings while destroying our collective ecosystems.
We see human, animal and environmental oppressions as all being the same. In so, the only way to solve one of these problems is to address them all at once.
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Community Solidarity is the healthiest hunger relief organization in the country.
America has a health problem. In many areas of the country access to fresh produce can be very limited. These areas are often referred to as food deserts because of their lack of healthy food choices. In these parts of America, fast food is much easier, and cheaper, to attain than organic produce.
The effect this has on people living in these areas is an increase in health ailments. Increasing the risk of diabetes, heart disease, ADHD, obesity, and cancer - limited access to produce reduces a person's quality of life.
Food deserts are also areas where a greater percentage of people rely on food banks. This is an unfortunate reality. On average, fruits and vegetables make up only 10% of the foods available at food banks. Worse, the other 90% tend to be heavily processed foods.
Food banks collect cheap foods with long shelf lives and meat they can keep in their freezers. Compared to perishables like fresh produce, the shelf stable foods found at food banks have higher quantities of sugar, cholesterol and saturated fats.
In comparison, 48-70% of the foods distributed by Community Solidarity is organic produce. The range between 48-70% comes from seasonal adjustments between the winter when we don’t get food from local farms, and the summer, when we do. The other 30-52% of what we distribute consists of whole grain bread, vegetarian groceries, and hot vegan meals.
Plant-based foods are healthier, and that's why we share them for free. Community Solidarity also improves the people's health by advocating for a vegan diet. We make it easier for our struggling neighbors to improve their health. By sharing vegetarian groceries and hot vegan meals we make healthier choices easier.
Every day families thank us for sharing fresh produce. Every day someone is asking us how they can become vegetarian or vegan. Every day someone tells us how they've been feeling better, how they have more energy.
America's largest vegetarian hunger relief program, Community Solidarity, is also the healthiest. Yet, the meat-eating establishment, and the food banks they support challenge this. They claim people need meat for protein and have tried to discredit us whenever they can.
So Community Solidarity found a way to prove them wrong. We found a way to prove that a vegetarian food bank helping to spread veganism across Long Island and NYC is doing more than anyone can imagine. If you're interested in how we prove our plant-based hunger relief program is better, read on.
Well, where do you get your protein from anyway?
Simply put, beans, nuts, seeds and even vegetables have tons of protein. Not to mention that Community Solidarity shares tons of vegan meat substitutes like tofu, seitan, and tempeh. In 2019, we shared over 7.1 million pounds of vegetarian groceries which contained over 56,520,028.05 grams of protein, that's over 1,130,400.56 daily values! Put another way, in 2019 Community Solidarity shared more protein than 4,347,694.46 McDonald's hamburgers or 471,000.23 whole chickens! Needless to say, all through vegetarian sources. But that's not all, we shared more iron than 4,421,739.79 pounds of steaks, more thiamin than 3,841,348.84 pork chops and more folate than 20,943,277.85 20 pounds of turkeys!
Saving hundreds of thousands of animals lives, reducing environmental destruction caused by factory farming and decreasing health ailments caused by animal foods is what Community Solidarity is all about. Plus, we mentioned the free gourmet vegan meals, right? Well, the best way to try a bite is to get involved, help us build up the community by helping those in need and by promoting healthy compassionate vegetarian foods. You can also help us greatly by making a contribution as well! All funds go to help people and animals!