The Food Brigade

While on vacation, Food Brigade president Karen DeMarco stopped by to visit colleagues at the Human Concerns Food Pantry at St. Francis of Assisi Church on Long Beach Island. A partner agency of the Fulfill food bank, St. Francis is the largest food pantry serving southern Ocean County. In addition to providing walk-in service four days a week to their neighbors in need, they also offer home delivery meal service. Kudos to the St. Francis food pantry for their work in helping New Jersey residents dealing with food insecurity! (Pictured, left to right: Karen DeMarco, Food Brigade President; Breanne LaMarco, St. Francis Family Support Director.)

The Community FoodBank of New Jersey New Jersey Office of the Food Security Advocate St. Francis Community Center

Please read:

Please see the New Jersey Department of Agriculture's statement regarding Cyclosporiasis.

As a Local Distribution Agency for USDA food through TEFAP, The Food Brigade has 3 qualification criteria, for which an applicant must meet at least one to be eligible for assistance. The first criterion is "low income". New income guidelines took effect as of July 1; if you or someone you know falls within these income guidelines, you/they qualify for assistance from The Food Brigade.

☀️School may be out soon, but your child’s access to nutritious meals doesn’t have to be.

As parents, you’re constantly working to provide for your family and make sure your children have what they need to learn, grow, and thrive. This summer, free meal programs in Clifton can help support those efforts by ensuring children continue to have access to healthy meals while school is out.

Every child deserves the opportunity to have a healthy, active, and successful summer.

📍 Free summer meals are available for children throughout Clifton.

👉 Save this post for later.
👉 Share it with another parent who may find it helpful.

Because when children are nourished, they can focus on what matters most—learning, growing, and enjoying being kids.

The Food Brigade would like to share some EXCITING NEWS about a new partnership that will work to tackle the problem of access to food pantries which many of our neighbors in need experience.

We recently submitted a project proposal to the NYU Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, titled “Enhancing Food Access Through Innovative Transportation Solutions”. We were just informed that our project has been accepted. The goal of our project, which will be undertaken by Masters and Doctoral students at NYU Wagner for the 2026-2027 academic year, is to formulate a solution to the problem of access to food assistance resources, in particular food pantries, with the concluding Milestone to “Develop a proposed transportation solution and conduct a feasibility analysis to assess its practicality and potential impact.”

The desired Outcomes of the project include:
- Develop a comprehensive understanding of transportation barriers in accessing food pantries.
- Propose an innovative transportation solution to enhance food access.
- Produce a detailed project report with actionable recommendations.
- Provide The Food Brigade with a viable transportation model for pilot testing.
- Contribute to the broader efforts of improving food security in New Jersey.

This is very exciting news for The Food Brigade: we’ve been dealing lately with more and more potential new clients who unfortunately have no way to get to any of our facilities…and from existing clients who rely on others to drive them, but then those people cancel out so our clients end up having to go without food. Hopefully, these NYU graduate students will come up with some solutions to the transportation aspect of the access challenge, which is referenced in the Food Security 3-Year Strategic Plan (Focus Area 2, Strategy 1) recently issued by the New Jersey Office of the Food Security Advocate and is one of the Six Dimensions of Food Security framework.

The Community FoodBank of New Jersey New Jersey Office of the Food Security Advocate Bergen County Office of Food Security