Francesca Casciari complimented a woman’s bracelet. The woman offered to take it off and give it to her.
“I said, ‘Oh, no, it’s totally okay,'” Casciari recalls. She had been standing behind a folding table at a well-stocked food pantry on the Upper West Side in New York City. The people collecting produce and shelf-stable food from her had come in from all over the city. For Francesca Casciari, this was just another day on a volunteer shift, but she quickly realized how outsized the impact of her actions could be.
The compliment had not been incidental. Greeting people, asking how their day was going, noticing a jacket or a piece of jewelry and engaging in conversation: Casciari describes those small courtesies as the part of her service that seemed to matter most to the people on the other side of the table, even as their daily meals depended on the generous services of food pantries like the one she was staffing. “It was humbling, but also so fulfilling – just to see how polite and grateful everyone was,” she says.
A Pantry Built Around Choice
Casciari found the shift through New York Cares, which places volunteers with more than 400 schools and nonprofits and lists more than 1,000 volunteer opportunities across the city. The site was a church. The operation running inside it belonged to the West Side Campaign Against Hunger, and it works on a model the organization built itself.
WSCAH was founded in 1979, and in 1993 it opened what it calls the first customer-choice supermarket-style pantry in the United States. Dignity comes first in its mission statement, ahead of scale or volume: “access with dignity to a choice of healthy food.” More than half of what WSCAH distributes is fresh fruit and vegetables, which is why a shift there means moving as much produce as packaged food.
That share is unusual, and the reason is mechanical. Cold storage is what limits most pantries. In a 2023 study in BMC Public Health, pantry operators named inadequate refrigeration capacity as the most frequent barrier to handing out fresh food. Produce past its peak left them little time to distribute it before it spoiled. A pantry that hands a family fruit and vegetables has solved a problem most of the field is still working on.
The dignity Casciari observed at that table had been built in on purpose. Someone had decided, decades before she arrived, that people collecting groceries should get to pick them.
The Bubble Inside the City
Casciari was born and bred on Manhattan’s East Side and makes the case that a New York City childhood is an education in the American psyche and in societal diversity. “Growing up here, I think you are more accustomed to diversity than you are to homogeneity,” she says. Ride a subway, and you are immersed in a microcosm of people from a multitude of religions, cultures, family structures, and income brackets who, at day’s end, head home to their individual communities.
She also thinks that is precisely where the blind spot hides.
Despite that diversity on the train, or in the classroom or the workplace – or perhaps as a result of it – Casciari acknowledges the pull. “It can be really easy in New York City to gravitate toward living in a bubble, within your own community, with the people you are connected to and immediately surrounded by,” she says. “But here, you can move past that, which, I think, is a unique opportunity, one that can be really meaningful to a person’s understanding and respect for people of differing backgrounds and means.”
More than 1.2 million city residents lived in food-insecure households between 2020 and 2022, in a state where 11.3% of households, roughly 875,000 families, were in the same position, according to a report from State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli. A person can spend an entire life on the Upper West Side without once standing across a table from any of them.
Who Was Thanking Whom
Casciari’s account circles back to genuine manners rather than need. People thanked her for showing up. “Everyone would say, ‘God bless you.’ ‘Have a blessed day.’ ‘Thank you for being here,'” she notes.
The arithmetic of that struck her. “So much of where you are in life is determined by luck,” she says, and the people in front of her, most of whom had drawn worse luck than she had, were the ones handing out blessings. “To see these people … have so much generosity of spirit and kindness to share with other people was really heartwarming.”
“We were standing behind a table for two hours just handing out food,” she says, “and it really seemed to boost a lot of people’s moods and spirits … it certainly did mine.” Her conclusion is compact: “A shared action that is really small can go really far.”
Face to Face
Casciari is a Duke undergraduate who will return to New York for a job in finance once she graduates next year. She expects community service will be part of her daily life, not only because it fits into her plan to continue her “New York City” education, and not only because of the personal fulfillment it provides, but for something else too: her volunteerism has necessarily excluded screen time. “Having moments like that, in such a highly digitized world, where everything we do is over our phones and our screens, where you experience face-to-face contact with people who are so kind and appreciative of your time, is so personally impactful and deeply gratifying,” she says. “It’s something more people should be doing … for themselves.”
Homework
The location matters to her as much as the work does. Doing this in the city she calls home, the city she loves, rather than somewhere she happens to be passing through, increases the value and meaning for her. “Getting involved with New York’s communities is essential to my journey ahead, even as I plant future roots here,” she says.
The bracelet stayed on the woman’s wrist. Casciari kept the offer.
Francesca Casciari is a Duke University undergraduate from New York City. She writes about history, the classics, and the city she grew up in.