PSEG Long Island and Island Harvest Food Bank are giving back to the community with seven more ‘Power to Feed Long Island’ food collection events throughout the summer.
The first one, held at the Stop & Shop at the corner of Hicksville Road and Jerusalem Avenue in Massapequa, received more than 3,600 meals for the event. Dozens of community members provided cash, food, personal care items and pet supplies to their neighbors in need.
“This is our fifth year doing ‘Power to Feed Long Island,’ an event that actually started during Covid when we found out from Island Harvest that there’s a need, a specific need in the summer,” said Amy Di Leo, a senior communications generalist for PSEG Long Island.
Di Leo explained further as to why summer donations are so important.
“Year round, a lot of people do donation drives and the kids are getting free or reduced lunches and breakfast at school, and then in the summer, a lot of times donations drop off,” Di Leo said. “So, we created this event in order to restock shelves at Island Harvest and then Island Harvest distributes the food and the household items and different things donated, out to the communities.”
For their contributions, PSEG Long Island employee volunteers handed out environmentally and energy-supportive gifts such as reusable shopping bags and LED lightbulbs.
“We are the electric company,” Di Leo said. “We live in the communities that they live in, so it makes sense for us to support the various different organizations and issues that people in our community care about. This is just one thing that we do.”
Di Leo also spoke on their relationship with Stop & Shop and how they have made the ‘Power to Feed Long Island’ events come to fruition.
“Stop & Shop is a very philanthropic organization,” Di Leo said. “They already have a partnership with Island Harvest, so when we were looking for locations to have these about five years ago, Stop & Shop raised their hand right away and at the beginning we were doing a couple of different supermarkets, and now last year and this year we only have been working with Stop & Shop because they really have stores everywhere so it enables us to be in every community that we’d like to be in.”
The next “Power to Feed Island” event will be on Friday, June 27, at the Stop & Shop located at 3126 Jericho Turnpike in East Northport. Afterwards, events will be taking place in towns such as Levittown, Miller Place, Carle Place, Oceanside, Woodbury and West Babylon.
For more information on upcoming events, learning what to donate, or making an online monetary donation, you can visit psegliny.com/feedLI.
