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.
Nourish Nantucket was launched by 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.
