Good Food Works

The Doe Fund’s Good Food Works program has an innovative plan to deliver quality food and quality jobs to New Yorkers in need. We’re asking for your help to make this vision a reality!

With early support from public and private partners already secured, we’ve raised the majority of funding necessary to launch our pilot. We need only $30,000 to close the gap, and we hope our extended community will come together to get us to the finish line.

For more than 30 years, The Doe Fund has helped break the devastating cycles of unemployment, homelessness, and incarceration. Through our Ready, Willing & Able transitional work program, affordable housing, and social enterprises, we’ve offered a pathway out of poverty to tens of thousands of homeless and formerly incarcerated men. 

Food has been central to the success of our work, from the nearly one million meals we serve each year to the men living in our transitional residences to the many trainees who enter careers in professional kitchens through our culinary arts job training programs.

The Doe Fund established Good Food Works to build on this foundation and create innovative new programs that provide both employment opportunities and access to wholesome food. 

To date, Good Food Works has grown over 3,000 pounds of fresh produce in our gardens, sold over $85,000 of affordable fresh baked goods, and delivered over 7,000 hours of paid transitional work to the homeless and formerly incarcerated men we serve.

Through trial and error, we’ve learned a lot along the way. Now, we’re working to integrate those learnings into a new holistic model for healthy food access and workforce development.  

Good Food Works will produce healthy packaged meals, eligible for purchase with SNAP benefits (“food stamps”), and sell them at affordable prices throughout New York City, starting in Brownsville.

We’ll integrate job training and employment opportunities into all aspects of the operation, from food preparation to customer service to business management, helping staff and trainees develop new skills and enhance their careers.

We’ve successfully tested logistics on a small scale, producing and distributing over 300 sample meals, and recently hired our first full time employee, a talented graduate of Ready, Willing & Able. 

Now, we’re asking our community to bring the project to life. Your support at this critical stage will ensure that all of our hard work to date pays off and countless New Yorkers can benefit from this unique program.

With your support, we can move from a very limited soft launch of the program to a full pilot, producing over 100 meals per week for sale at partner sites in neighborhoods throughout New York City, starting in Brownsville.

We’ll test multiple sales channels, including corner stores, vending machines, and our own mobile kiosks. Trainee interns will work alongside staff, learning valuable job skills and gaining exposure to the fundamentals of small business management. We’ll continuously monitor program performance and refine our approach based on real time feedback from customers, employees, and community stakeholders.

Thoughout this process, we will actively seek additional funding from private philanthropy, government, and community partners to expand the program past the pilot stage, bringing the model to as many New York City communities as possible.

***We are also actively exploring ways we may help meet the emergency food needs of our communities over the coming months, as the coronavirus crisis continues to displace workers and further constrain the ability of our neighbors to provide for their families.

We believe that everyone deserves a good meal, a good job, a chance at a good life. 

We believe that not just food and health, but also employment and health, are inextricably interdependent. We believe that one’s zip code ought not determine their income, their health outcomes, their life chances. We believe that the option to make the healthy choice, to invest in oneself, to live for the future, in food, work, and beyond, ought not be a luxury but a universal right.

We envision a day when every corner provides a path to employment, health, and wealth, and we believe in The Doe Fund’s proven ability to execute its vision, to turn bold ideas into powerful realities, to get the job done. Above all, we believe in the power of community; the power to solve problems collaboratively, to support and uplift one another, the power of a motivated group of caring individuals to each offer what they can and together create a brighter future.