November 18, 2025
By Emmett Lindner
For decades, Lewanika Senghor worked at the Coop in different roles, pitching in with membership coordination, tech support and aiding members. But he and his family were also working tirelessly to help the communities beyond the Coop’s walls.
Mr. Senghor, his wife, their daughter and others run the Village House Pantry, which distributes food donations from restaurants, bakeries—and, yes, the Coop—to people in need. They stock fridges around the city for people who need to focus on rent or childcare and can then think less about where to get a meal.
The work can be grueling: Mr. Senghor and his family finance the program but are hoping for funding to strengthen their efforts. At times, they pull 17-hour days, driving to Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, Eataly, movie sets and restaurants to pick up leftover food and stock fridges so that New York residents dealing with disabilities, lapses in employment or other challenges can have a stocked kitchen.
Mr. Senghor and his family make sure that the food is quality and the fridges are clean and neatly organized. Residents who go to the Pantry’s main location, on Midwood and Rogers, come so often that the food is often gone within the hour it’s set out.
In an interview, Mr. Senghor discussed how he developed his passion for helping his neighbors, what goes into the wide network of food distribution and how he hopes to make an impact. This interview has been edited and condensed.
“I always wondered: Why are things the way they are? If we have more vacant apartments, why is anybody homeless? And if we had more food in one state, why was there anybody hungry in the world?”
How did all this start for you?
As we speak, I’m recalling all sorts of things—watching civil rights on television with Dr. King, and just wondering why the world wasn’t the way it could have been.
I remember in the ’70s and ’80s finding out that the state of Wisconsin alone produced enough food to feed the world four times over, and New York City in the ’70s and ’80s had more vacant apartments and homes than it had homeless people.
I always wondered: Why are things the way they are? If we have more vacant apartments, why is anybody homeless? And if we had more food in one state in a big country, why was there anybody hungry in the world? To me, those are contradictions that don’t make any sense.
You realize that if there was a desire and a will to do it, nobody should be hungry, nobody should be homeless.
What happened after that realization?
You start to look at the inequities or the things that were happening in this country. You juxtapose it against history: The great potato famine, when food was being exported out of Ireland to serve the British Empire and Americas, but people are starving inside of the country that the food is being taken from. That’s happening all over the world.
Back in the ’80s, I was very involved in the student movement and community movements. You figure, if you input yourself, you could actually help to make change, and you put yourself out there hoping that your input would help.
You have a sense that an individual can make an impact.
Yes. Back then we thought that our involvement would help make changes, and yes, I still think that people can make changes. I think that is definitely shown in the Coop.
You can have people come together and work for food, keep the overhead low, because using member labor is great. That’s something that can happen throughout the country. And at times it did.
What do you focus on now?
Most of my time is spent doing food rescue and reallocation with my family, but we’ve been doing that for quite some time. Since COVID, it took on a whole different thing. For a while, we were dealing with about 100 families. In the past, we’ve taken food to people who were finding themselves going through difficult time periods. It expanded, and we moved into picking up food and taking it to community fridges.
The fridges are all over. We have some people in Seattle and down in Baltimore. We have other friends that are involved in it as well. They call them to help start up fridges in different areas. It’s all Brooklyn, Manhattan and some places in Queens and the Bronx. There are fridges that are open to the public for people to come and take food.
We can put food in the fridge now and sometimes within five minutes, but usually within half an hour, a full fridge full of food is gone.
“A lot of this has been done on our own dime—paying the tolls, the gas, the repairs to the vehicle that wasn’t intended for this.”
How much of your time was that taking?
We were doing this probably about 17 hours a day. We were running around picking up food, because earlier on in the pandemic, we were getting calls for businesses that either their freezers were failing, their refrigeration was failing, or they were going out of business.
We were picking up a lot of food from places that knew about people who were rescuing food and reallocating it. And we would be filling the fridges up. We’d be picking up at 11 at night, filling the fridges up to 2 in the morning.
What does your work look like now?
We serve between 800 and 1,200 people a week. Combined, probably closer to 2,000 or more. We do a distribution every Thursday on the street, and about six to eight other groups pick up from us. They also do their distributions.
Sometimes we have people who take food to Prospect Park, and they’ll give it out to the homeless there. And sometimes we’ll have people who make the food, because we try to build out the organization as opposed to us doing everything ourselves.
What kinds of food do you distribute?
It varies from day to day. At one time we were getting so many bananas, and bananas are the type of fruit that you can’t put in the fridge. But we’ve gotten all sorts of things—you name it. We’ve gotten fresh fruit and vegetables, we’ve gotten eggs, we’ve gotten milk, canned goods as well as frozen. We’ve got ice creams and cakes.
We also do clothing. My wife gives out winter coats and shoes and gloves and hats and scarves. We’ve done medical supplies, like walkers and wheelchairs. We’ve been doing these types of things for years. This is just another phase of what we’ve been doing.
What’s the reaction from the community?
The overall response has been: “Thank you.” There are people who are working who still are not making enough to live comfortably. Some people have been able to utilize us to allow them to save so they can actually put a down payment on their home. Some people have been going through things where they didn’t have clothes for their children or food for their children, and it helped them keep things going.
Sometimes people have been released from work and they find that this has been beneficial. Some people are living in their cars. Some people have health problems, cancers and other issues, and they find that being able to come and pick up food has been helpful.
What do you see as the next step for this work?
We’re looking to get funding. A lot of this has been done on our own dime—paying the tolls, the gas, the repairs to the vehicle that wasn’t intended for this. We want to expand, get a vehicle specifically for this, get a place where we can continue doing distribution even during the harshest weather.
“I think there are basic life requirements that people need in order to survive. What we’ve been doing as a family is working toward building community.”
Right now we’re doing distribution from the street, other than what we do from the home. We’d like some place where we can have people actually come through. We have visions where we could get food and have people who can prepare it, maybe a $5 meal or $10 meal, something low-cost.
We’ve had chefs bring food to give out. I have the vision that we can get a storefront and do something like that.
Have you discussed the SNAP cancellation with anyone who uses the fridges?
People who use the fridges aren’t as concerned. What I find is people who have not been using the fridges have been contacting us. How do we set up a fridge? How do we get it stocked? I think people who use the fridges and who come to the distribution already understand that there are some resources out there. The question is, how do people change over from being used to going to a market and buying this stuff to now going to the various pantries that are out there?
One of the things that people would often say to us when we offer them food is, “I’m going to leave it for the people who are more in need,” and now, when they find themselves being those people, many times people have a social consciousness as to whether or not it’s right for them to take food, or whether or not it seems appropriate, or whether or not they want to be seen doing this.
When I hear people say that, I often tell them, we don’t necessarily provide food for the people who are “in need.” We provide food for people who eat, because we find that a lot of people may be just a few dollars above what they consider the cut off level for receiving benefits, and they find themselves struggling to just make it, or they may be a little behind. Something like this will throw a person, and they find that unless they’re far ahead, they can quickly be behind.
The fridges already run out of food quickly—do you expect that to increase?
Yes, and this is a challenge for people who do this type of work. Sometimes if we’re there, people take a small amount, and they’ll let the next people get a small amount. But we’ve gone to places where maybe 10 or 20 mangoes are in the fridge, and you’ll have somebody who will come and take 15 of them. When we’re there, we don’t allow that, but it’s not really something you want to do, policing how people receive food. We have found it necessary because some people are not necessarily considerate of other people, but at the same time you have to weigh it — this person came first, this person came second. This person is an older person. It varies.
The government has emergency funds to deal with these things. Hopefully, the bill that’s in Congress now will pass to provide people more services. But there’s more than enough food to feed everybody. It’s just that there has to be a mandate and an understanding that there is enough food, and it has to be made available.
What’s the larger goal for you in all of this?
I think there are basic life requirements that people need in order to survive. What we’ve been doing as a family is working toward building community. Community, I think, is what we need. We have neighborhoods, but we have very few communities.
The difference is that in a neighborhood, you’ll see people you recognize, but you don’t have any real common supportive mechanism in place. I think that’s what we need to build, not just here but all over the world.
That’s why we call it the Village House Pantry. We have gatherings with friends and family to build what I call personal communities.
We need to build communities that are thinking of our common goals and objectives in which everybody can benefit. If we can do that—not just here, but everywhere—we’re in a better position. We achieve more.
Emmett Lindner works on the breaking and trending news desk at The New York Times.