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From our 4/27/2026 newsletter
Now we are six
In April 2020 when the city was in lockdown, a group of friends began making trays of food for people in Elmhurst, the neighborhood hit hardest by COVID. Back then, we all assumed that the pandemic would be quashed in a couple of weeks, so we assumed that we’d be done helping out as soon as it was over. That was the beginning of EVLovesNYC.
Stats + thanks from Tyler, our executive director
Hi, Everyone — April 27 is EVLovesNYC’s official sixth year anniversary 
In that time, we have served a total of 791,175 hot meals across the city. This means that, on average, we’ve delivered one meal every four minutes, 24/7 since 4/27/2020, to a New Yorker who needs it! This took us borrowing, negotiating, and building our operations into seven different commercial kitchens.
This also took approximately 1,088,000 pounds of food. That’s an incalculable amount of receiving, chopping, packing, baking, and scrubbing. Not to mention, coordinating pickups and deliveries with over 100 distribution partners across NYC.
This was accomplished by the hard work of over 5,000 volunteers (probably approaching 6k but this number is difficult to nail down). This totals to roughly 80,500 volunteer hours, an in-kind value of $3,098,000 in donated labor based on the official 2026 NYC volunteer valuation.
We’ve taken a Venmo account from our founder’s iPhone and grown into a full-fledged 501(c)(3) with a six-month operating contingency, crowdfunding approximately $2,232,000 from nearly 6,000 individual donors. None of this money has ever come from government grants or contracts. Of this, approximately $160,000 in the past two years has been redirected as wages directly to asylum seekers we’ve met through our food distributions, all of which who have played a major part in helping our kitchen run behind the scenes, in many cases their first W2 employment in the United States.
Massive thanks to our donors, every single dollar you give contributes to getting food out to the people who need it.
Massive thanks, too, to our volunteers for showing up every day, every month, every year, or however often you’re able to lend a hand. Every minute counts and I’m personally so grateful for every time you’ve walked into our space. I say this in the most unbiased way possible, but I don’t think there is another community of volunteers in NYC that we can compare what we’ve built together. Hope to see you in or out of the kitchen soon and cheers to the next six years fighting food insecurity together. 
From our 3/31/2026 newsletter
In spite of recent freezing temperatures, the intense yellow of forsythia and daffodils are insisting that Spring is here. What a relief! It’s been a busy month.
Fast Forward
Because many of the people EVLovesNYC serves observe Ramadan, we pulled together more than 8,000 suhoor breakfast bags to set folks up for a day of fasting. The bags included walnuts + dates, a granola bar, water + electrolytes, and a piece of fresh fruit and we got them out to mosques, mutual aids, local officials, so the bags could get daily distribution.
Throughout the month, we also cooked for several iftar celebrations, the shared meal at the end of the daily fast. Breakfast is often eaten alone, but iftars are big, joyous community events and we love being there to hear music and prayer (and raves about the food).
Come to our Music Fundraiser
When: 6pm, April 18 (Earth Day!)
Where: Pianos (158 Ludlow St.)
How much: $15 now (plus $2 service fee), $20 at the door
Six bands, iconic performance space, early enough that you can double-book your evening and TAKE PART IN THE NYC NIGHTLIFE DREAM.
Best of all, the proceeds go to buying all the onions and boxes and rice that we go through every week.
Humble brag
At a community iftar we co-hosted with the (delightful) LES Girls Club, EVLovesNYC was honored with a proclamation from the office of New York state assembly member Keith Powers. The document was in recognition of the six years we’ve spent feeding hungry New Yorkers and speaking up for our neighbors.
In giving thanks for the proclamation, our executive director Tyler Hefferon said that while we are very grateful, this kind of honor doesn’t give us an excuse to rest on our laurels, but is rather a challenge to stretch further, cook more, engage in meaningful conversations with people in power, engage new distribution partners in underserved neighborhoods, and help build the world we want to see.
As our volunteers like to say, LFG.
Dream catchers
Two of our culinary trainees, Kareem and Tierno, have landed jobs! While this is exactly the point of our Cafewal workforce training program, it’s bittersweet because now we don’t get to work with them every day.
Cafewal is a six-week training program in which students are paid to learn the skills that restaurants and food service managers are looking for. The students come from lots of different backgrounds (the April 6 cohort includes New Yorkers who’ve come here from Kazakhstan, Ivory Coast, and Guatemala) but share a commitment to work hard and become independent.
If you want to be a part of helping them, you can sponsor a trainee’s tuition or email connect@evloves.nyc to become a buddy and help one of them with resume building, interview skills, and English practice.
From our 2/20/2026 newsletter
Dear Friends,
We can’t believe our luck. Since February 1, our big weekly Sunday cook-a-thon and our Monday-Friday Cafewal food-service training program are finally sharing ONE KITCHEN and, dang, it’s a beaut! Our friends at the Lower East Side Girls Club have a glorious facility.
Prepare yourself because I’m going to boast like a Real Housewife™ about the amenities in this modern industrial kitchen:
- a relatively roomy stovetop area with a griddle;
- a commercial pizza oven (!);
- a windowed dishwashing area overlooking a courtyard;
- a separate room with a big stainless-steel worktable and six-rack convection oven (just perfect for prepping and cooking thousands of servings of chicken);
- a windowed dining area, which we currently use to package meals;
- a spacious downstairs prep room with lots of storage as well as..
- a walk-in fridge and freezer; and
- a dumbwaiter to move heavy items between the floors. (I really love the dumbwaiter.)
This combined space affords us boatloads of opportunities. With added storage, we don’t need to shuttle food and equipment between separate locations so we can boost our meal output. Our rather ambitious 2026 goal is to supply 250,000 meals to New Yorkers. That means we can take on new distribution partners and get food out to more underserved neighborhoods.
We also finally have the space and budget for a five-day-a week instructor for the Cafewal food service trainees. Our first cohort in the new kitchen is being taught by Albert Nguyen, not just a veteran of Michelin-starred restaurants but also a dedicated great guy who is adding his special sauce to the trainee program.
Another boon: We’re now able to partner with more high-need sites in our own neighborhood. During the week, we supply free daily lunch to residents of Meltzer Towers, a building that houses low-income seniors and to a local residence for recovering addicts. And twice a week a group of resident-volunteers from the Jacob Riis Houses, a Section 8 complex right across Avenue D, arrive with carts to take our meals to homebound neighbors.
Because the LES Girls Club shares our mission of uplifting and empowering the community, we are discussing how to collaborate on a pretty exciting variety of projects.
This is exactly the win/win situation we need to continue and expand our work. Your ongoing support is what makes this big move possible. THANK YOU. Together we can continue the fight against food-insecurity in our city,
Share breakfast with a new neighbor
For the third year in a row, we’re assembling suhoor breakfast kits for people currently living in shelters. We share these bags of nutritious food with Muslims who fast during Ramadan.
The bags are packed — by volunteers — with bottled water, electrolytes, fresh fruit, granola bars, as well as dates + walnuts. They cost $2.48 each to make, so you can buy someone breakfast for less than a subway swipe.
New merch drop!
Our BIG supporter 7th St. Burger and all-time favorite soccer team NY International Football Club are collaborating with EVLovesNYC on THE COOLEST WARMUP JACKET EVER. Get one!