David Speciner’s time helping the Food Bank for NYC starts well before he gets to the nonprofit’s Harlem pantry.<\/p>\n
The first step is putting together a bag of bags at his home in Washington Heights.<\/p>\n
“They don’t realize how much food we’re giving them and they don’t have the means to carry it home,” he said. “So we provide that.”\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Speciner has been volunteering with the Food Bank for four years. The nonprofit supplied more than 90 million pounds of food to soup kitchens, schools and more just last year.<\/p>\n
“It’s not that there isn’t enough food to go around,” he said. “It’s a crisis of distribution.”\u00a0<\/p>\n
“I have the time. It’s not a heavy lift,” Speciner added.<\/p>\n
He credits his parents for his dedication to helping others. Speciner’s father was involved in democratic politics, and his mother was on the school board.<\/p>\n
“Service has always been a part of my, my, my DNA,” he said. “And now that I have the time, it’s only natural that that I do what I do.”\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Speciner was one of the first volunteers to sign up at the Food Bank when pandemic restrictions lifted.<\/p>\n
“I walked into this place and there were a group of people who were absolutely dedicated to their mission, who were welcoming, who were warm,” he said.<\/p>\n
Speciner was hooked and eager to make an even bigger impact.<\/p>\n
“When there was a small child who had a frown on his face because he’s been on line with his mother for two hours, a little stuffed animal would arrive for him and it would brighten the day,” he said.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
He assembled a group of neighbors and Girl Scouts to put together “kits for kindness,” with toiletries and other essentials. Speciner assists with lunch service and game time a couple times a month at the Food Bank’s older adult center.<\/p>\n
On paper, he has dedicated more than 750 hours to the organization.<\/p>\n
“He’s always kind of just going that extra mile to go be on that volunteer shift,” said Nicole Harrison, the director of volunteer engagement at the Food Bank for NYC.<\/p>\n
It’s an extra mile Speciner insists isn’t that complicated.<\/p>\n
“If you boil it down to one thing, it’s helping people feed their families,” he said.<\/p>\n
For cooking up new ways to help others, David Speciner is our New Yorker of the Week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"David Speciner’s time helping the Food Bank for NYC starts well before he gets to the nonprofit’s Harlem…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":364687,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[7914,25,7913,9,24,7911,12,56,63,65,64,7912,27,200],"class_list":["post-364686","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york-city","tag-app-new-yorker-of-the-week","tag-app-top-stories","tag-chelsea-katz","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-new-yorker-of-the-week","tag-news","tag-ny","tag-nyc","tag-nyc-headlines","tag-nyc-news","tag-pat-kiernan","tag-top-stories","tag-vod"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/364686","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=364686"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/364686\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/364687"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=364686"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=364686"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=364686"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}