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Crystal Wolfe is founder and president of Catering for the Homeless, a nonprofit that connects the homeless with excess food from restaurants, caterers and other sources. She launched the nonprofit in New York City and is now trying to get it running in Cayuga County. Wolfe is pictured at the Friends Helping Friends of Cayuga County food pantry at Fingerlakes Mall, delivering food and serving at the food pantry on July 22.
Crystal Wolfe is founder and president of Catering for the Homeless, a nonprofit that connects the homeless with excess food from restaurants, caterers and other sources. She launched the nonprofit in New York City and is now trying to get it running in Cayuga County. Wolfe, right, is pictured at the Friends Helping Friends of Cayuga County food pantry at Fingerlakes Mall, delivering food and serving at the food pantry on July 22 with Friends Helping Friends organizer Meeghan Seastrom.
Crystal Wolfe was working a catering job in New York City when she made the connection.
Taken aback by the amount of food that went to waste on the job, she wondered. She wondered why that food couldn’t instead go to the scores of homeless people she saw in the city.
“It just broke my heart,” she told The Citizen on Wednesday. “And I’m not a person who can ignore human suffering.”
Wolfe was told the food was thrown away because caterers could be sued by anyone who eats it, even those homeless people.
So Wolfe, an Indiana native who graduated from Cayuga Community College in 2011 and served as editor of its newspaper, The Cayuga Collegian, started researching. After learning that what she was told wasn’t true — The 1996 Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Food Donation Act offers legal protections to businesses that donate food, and tax write-offs incentivize it — she continued researching.
That research led Wolfe to launch a nonprofit, Catering for the Homeless, that seeks to connect sources of excess food with providers that can deliver it to people in need. More than 35 million people experienced hunger in 2019, according to the USDA, and that number has only risen due to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Wolfe, however, believes that number should be zero.