Roubies
Our Food Program

Roubies serves families in Manhattan. To ask for groceries, email roubies@roubenmalianmemorial.org. Tell us your name, a phone number we can reach you on, your neighborhood, how many people are in your household, and which language you prefer. Si prefiere el español, escríbanos en español. That is all we need to get started.

If you live in another borough, ask anyway. We cannot bring groceries to you there, but we will point you to a pantry near you the same day.
We do not run a pantry with opening hours. Once we have heard from you, one of us will arrange a time and a place, usually within a week. Handovers happen at shops and community spaces whose owners have agreed to host us, chosen because they are easy to reach by subway or bus. If you cannot get to any of them, tell us. We can sometimes bring groceries to you instead. When we do, two volunteers always come together, both of whom have completed background checks, and we agree the details with you beforehand.

What you receive is about a week of groceries for your household: staples that keep, fresh food that does not, and things children will eat without an argument. We cannot promise particular items, because what we have depends on what came in that week.

Fresh and chilled food does not keep well in a car, so we pack it last and hand it over the same day it leaves our storage. Please try to be on time, and let us know if you are running late. If we cannot keep something safely cold until we see you, we will leave it out rather than hand it over.
If someone in your house has an allergy, a medical diet, or religious dietary needs, tell us and we will pack around it. That promise has limits. Much of our food is donated and is stored alongside everything else, so we cannot guarantee that anything we give you is free of a particular allergen or ingredient. Packaged food that arrives without a full ingredient label does not go to a household that has told us about an allergy. We will tell you what we were able to check and what we were not, and if the allergy is serious, please read every label yourself before anyone eats.
What you tell us stays with the few people who run Roubies. We do not share it with donors, we never use it for fundraising, and we delete it 6 months after we last hear from you. Our Privacy Policies page says the same in more detail.

A bad month is often more than one, and asking twice is not a problem. If you find you need food most weeks, we will still help, and we will also make sure you are signed up for SNAP and connected to a pantry near you, so there is more than one place to turn.

Hunger is rarely the only problem in a house, but it is the loudest one. It sets the order in which everything else gets dealt with. The overdue bill, the school form, the job listing that closes on Friday: all of it waits until there is food on the table, because nothing else can be thought about clearly until there is.

Roubies takes that one problem off the list. A family that leaves with a week of groceries has not been rescued, and we would not describe it that way. It has been given a week in which the loudest problem is quiet, and a quiet week is when people get things done. Homework gets finished. A phone call gets returned. A parent shows up somewhere on time and rested.

Most of the families who come to Roubies are not in permanent crisis. They are in a bad month. Someone's hours were cut, a car needed a repair that could not wait, the rent went up and the wages did not. The food budget is the only line in a household's spending that can be squeezed at short notice, so it is the one that gets squeezed, and the children notice before anyone else does.

Roubies works because it is small. It is run by people who know the families it feeds, and that is easy to keep true at a small scale and hard to keep true at a large one. We would rather do this properly for the families in front of us than do it thinly for a great many more.
That is the whole idea. Feed the family, then get out of the way of what they were already going to do.