Island Harvest Helps Seniors Struggling to Make Ends Meet

Long Island’s high cost of living is forcing many senior citizens to make such unenviable choices like choosing to pay for food and medicine, or food and their electric bill according to Randi Shubin Dresner, president, and CEO of Island Harvest Food Bank, a leading Long Island hunger-relief organization.

“Senior citizens living on affixed income on Long Island face several challenges, including finding ways to help stretch limited incomes,” explains Ms. Dresner. “We’ve seen older adults who may use coping strategies like diluting medicine, or only taking prescriptions every other day to make them go further just to help save some money for other essential things like paying for food.”

There are nearly 300,000 Long Islanders who are identified as being food insecure, or lacking the access to a reliable, sufficient source of affordable, nutritious food, with 29.8% of that total being adults over the age of 50, according to a hunger study by Island Harvest Food Bank and Feeding America, the nation’s largest anti-hunger organization.

To help the region’s older adults struggling with not having enough to eat, Island Harvest Food Bank’s Senior Mobile Food Pantry delivers food directly to people in need and enables the organization to increase the availability of nutritious perishable and non-perishable items for that population living in low-income and senior citizen housing complexes. The mobile pantry arrives stocked with a variety of food items such as rice, canned protein, pasta, and breakfast items, as well as fresh vegetables, fruits, bread, meat, and poultry.

“Island Harvest Food Bank understands that the root causes of hunger may vary so in addition to food, the mobile food pantry partners with other agencies to bring additional resources directly to our constituents,” says Ms. Dresner. “Among those specialized resources may include benefits information and application assistance, streamlined referrals to community organizations, nutritious cooking demonstrations, healthy living workshops, elder law assistance, and access to financial and estate planners.”

For more information on Island Harvest Food Bank’s Senior Mobile Food Pantry, and it's other programs aimed at ending hunger and reducing food waste on Long Island, visit www.islandharvest.org or call 631-873-4775.