The Food Brigade has 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.