There's a new front opening up and we have to be there for people who need food. We will not let any New Yorker go hungry. We have been planning from the beginning of this crisis to address the hunger problem and because we understood that this would be a profound part of what we faced, but this is a whole different scale. I named a few weeks ago an extraordinary public servant, Commissioner Kathryn Garcia, as our Food Czar with the responsibility to come up with a system that we've never had to have in decades in this city, but a system to feed people on a mass scale if it came to that. She has been working closely with Department of Education, Department for the Aging, and Emergency Management to immediately put into action a food plan, but also build for anything bigger we may need to do.
Those efforts have provided 2.6 million meals to New Yorkers who needed food. 2.6 million meals in the last three weeks and that is just the beginning. There are 434 sites around the city where anyone can come get breakfast, lunch, dinner, all three if they need it for as many members of your family as they need. No one is turned away. No one has to pay anything. You get as many meals as you need.
Now there's a different initiative for the senior citizens who need help, for folks who are homebound, for folks who are vulnerable, and the only solution for them is a delivery. There's also a growing delivery system. This is something Lorraine Cortés-Vázquez has been working on from the beginning and it's building all the time. So, anybody who truly needs a home delivery can call 3-1-1 and we'll get them that delivery. Or they can go to nyc.gov/getfood to sign up. There's a lot of different things that we can get for people.
We've got these grab and go sites at the schools. There are a lot of food pantries. The home delivery, we can make sure people who do not get food stamps sign up if they're eligible. Lots of different things we can do to help people. Anyone who needs help can go 3-1-1, you can go to nyc.gov/getfood or text the word FOOD or in Spanish they can text the word COMIDA to 8-7-7-8-7-7 to find the site nearest to them.
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