Introducing Nourish Nantucket
Nourish Nantucket launches to address food insecurity on the island.
Written by Brian Bushard
Photography by Kit Noble
As implausible as it seems, more than one in five year-round Nantucket residents go to bed hungry. These people work in the restaurants and schools, some working several jobs at island companies and nonprofits. Some are in the Coast Guard, some hold nursing positions at the hospital and some are school teachers. In another town, they should earn enough to get by. But on Nantucket, they struggle with high rents and rising costs of food.
“We met with several large employers on Nantucket, whose employees were showing up at the pantry in uniform, and they were shocked that their employees were using the food pantry,” said Brooke Mohr, the board president of Nourish Nantucket, a new organization that launched this year to fight food insecurity on the island. “For a parent with children who is struggling to feed those children, imagine the stress level of not knowing where your kid’s next meals are coming from, never mind the hunger alone.”
It might not be obvious, but Nantucket has a food insecurity problem. On an island known for its world-class restaurants, roughly 21 percent of the year-round population struggles to put food on the table. A stunning statistic is that 46 percent of students at the Nantucket Public Schools qualify for free or reduced lunch, according to data from the U.S. Census and Nantucket Public Schools officials.
While a dozen organizations on Nantucket have been working for years to address the issue, those groups have been working independently of one another, lacking the ability to coordinate and fundraise effectively, and leaving islanders who need the service confused on where to seek help. Nourish Nantucket launched this year to bridge that gap, raising awareness and offering financial support to address the food insecurity crisis.
The idea behind Nourish Nantucket came from N Magazine Publisher Bruce Percelay, who presented the idea of creating a single umbrella brand called Nourish Nantucket as a single fundraising vehicle for the 12 different agencies on the island. "The work done by Brooke Mohr, the Nantucket Resource Partnership, the Food Pantry and all the other food service organizations has been heroic over the years, but given the growing magnitude of the problem, it seemed that now is the time to expose the issue to the island’s summer and year-round residents in order to solve a problem which should not exist on Nantucket,” Percelay said.
“Bruce is the only one who could really make this happen,” said Robert Grinberg, a member of the advisory committee for Nantucket Food, Fuel and Rental Assistance, which oversees the Food Pantry. “He is the most qualified individual to do it because he has the ability to raise funds that are needed for this issue and he cares about Nantucket."
The backbone of the food support system on Nantucket is the Food Pantry, which provides meals to more than 3,000 islanders in need each year—but the demand for its services keeps growing. In addition, the Food Pantry’s temporary home in the old Greenhound building will be unavailable to them early next year, and they need to acquire a permanent location in order for them to continue to deliver their services.
One major factor at play behind the issue is the rising cost of living on Nantucket. With the median price of anew home topping $3.7 million, many new residents seek rentals. But with those rents averaging nearly $3,000 a month, the cost of living can easily eat up the majority of a monthly income, especially during the off-season months when steady work is harder to come by. When the summer season ends, service personnel on the island are faced with housing costs that can be more than 50% of their income, and leave them with choices between food or medicine. The high cost of living places additional challenges with a gallon of gas in excess of $4.50 or a slice of pizza goes for $5 or more.
"While Nantucket is known for its beautiful beaches, it’s also a growing year-round community with a tourism economy that needs intentional support to address food insecurity,” said Matt Haffenreffer, who leads consulting firm Process First. Nourish Nantucket has taken in several major grants, including $250,000 in 2023 from the Massachusetts Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs. It also received a $250,000 matching grant from the Nantucket Golf Club Foundation. So far, it’s made over 1,100 referrals to island food security programs, including the Pip & Anchor Send-It Box, a program that’s delivered over 310,000 pounds of local produce since 2022 to people who struggle to put food—and particularly nutritious food—on the table.
“Anyone who could be affected by the housing crisis can be affected by food insecurity,” Meg Browers, director of development and operations for Nourish Nantucket, said. “If you’re a teacher or a nurse, if you’re if you work for the DPW or the town of Nantucket, if you work for one of our larger employees, and your salary or hourly wage is such that it is your monthly rent or your mortgage, is up to 80% of your monthly income, you are going to find it challenging to afford the amount of healthy food that you need to feed yourself or your family.”
One program that has worked to address the issue is Fresh Connect, administered by Nantucket Food, Fuel and Rental Assistance. The program provides $100 prepaid debit cards each month to islanders who meet the criteria for the service (up to $500 per family), with those cards working at the two island Stop & Shops. But with limited funding, the program has run up against a wall. Today, over 400 people are on the waitlist for Fresh Connect.
The Pip & Anchor Send It service, on the other hand, provides food for 80 families (over 300 people) each week. But there are 120 more families on that waitlist for that program. “Any program that exists that is a part of our network is at capacity,” Browers said. “We need million of dollars more to accurately meet the needs of islanders in the food security arena.”
“On Nantucket, you can make six figures and still be food insecure,” Browers added. “The judgment that comes along with it, that if you’re working as a bartender or a landscaper or a house cleaner, you may very well be making more than $150,000 a year, and someone might think, how on Earth could you possibly need pantry services or any other food security program? But what people don’t understand is that you have to work five full-time jobs to be able to afford a home here. The cost of living on Nantucket is so extreme that a lot of seasonal residents cannot comprehend the budgeting magic that has to happen to make living here possible.”
There is also an irony to the situation. There’s plenty of food on the island, whether it’s at the Stop & Shops, Bartlett’s Farm, the Sustainable Nantucket Farmers and Artisans Market, or if it’s being served at a restaurant. At the same time, a good amount of food that’s delivered to those shops and restaurants is often discarded.
“There’s cooked food in restaurants that goes in the trash,” Mohr said. “We know restaurants throw away a ton of food. Is there a way to safely collect and process that into meals? We don’t want to be wagging fingers at people who love this place and make them feel guilty for being here. That’s not the point. The point is to help them understand what the problem is and invite them to help us solve it.”
“The person who’s eating a $100 steak may be served by someone who goes to the Food Pantry,” Browers added. “That’s wild, and that happens far more often than I think most people understand.”
One group that works with Nourish Nantucket is the Nantucket Family Resource Center, a referral partner that helps identify islanders in need. David Hayes, the group’s program manager, said addressing food insecurity is often about more than simply feeding people.
Once you no longer have to worry about how to put food on the table, there are down-stream effects on a person’s mental and physical health. “People come in and one of their basic needs is food,” Hayes said. “In one fell swoop, we can sign them up for food. We’re always trying to find ways to help families. You put food in people’s mouths and their mental health starts to improve.”
“When Nantucket as a whole rallies around an issue, it invariably gets solved,” Percelay said. “We are hopeful that Nantucketers will respond to the food insecurity crisis in the way it did for the hospital and other critical institutions with the goal of permanently eradicating hunger on Nantucket permanently.”
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