Meals for Poor & Homeless Women & their Children

The Dining Room is the heart of Rosie’s Place and welcomes any woman and her children in need of a meal, 365 days of the year. Over the past year, Rosie’s Place served 187,000 meals, a 23% increase from the previous year and an average of 500+ meals a day. We have seen 2,473 volunteers walk through our doors, giving 14,547 hours of time, preparing, cooking and serving meals, and cleaning in the Dining Room.

In the Food Pantry, we are providing a variety of nutritionally balanced groceries, including variations for those with dietary needs, for up to 350 women daily. We rotate proteins and provide foods from a variety of ethnic cuisines. Guests are welcome to visit the Pantry weekly, and we are open Monday through Friday from 9:00 a.m. until we are out of food or have served 350 women. In the past year, our Food Pantry provided groceries to 8,890 women, a 7% increase over the year prior. We served an average of more than 323 women a day, accommodating 78,256 visits in FY25, a 6% increase from FY24. Our farm partners—Brookwood, Hutchins, Lands Sake, and BMC Rooftop Farm—provided fresh produce for our pantry shoppers. We continue to receive additional support through Reverb, an organization that coordinates volunteer drives to pick up produce at farms and deliver it to non-profits.

Our staff work hard to enhance guests’ experience in the Food Program. We regularly celebrate holidays with special meals in the Dining Room, and last year Rosie’s Place hosted its first gingerbread cookie decoration contest. We bring in DJs for special occasions and celebrate guests’ birthdays once a month. This winter, staff started a book club that was inspired by the free library located in the Dining Room. In the Food Pantry, we periodically distribute non-food items—approximately 20,000 this past year—from holiday gifts of blankets, hats, gloves, scarves and gift cards, as well as recipes, resources guides, and announcements of upcoming events.

The Food Program does more than prevent hunger: at Rosie’s Place it helps us provide nourishment, love, and community for our guests, and we use the Dining Room space for all these things. From meeting our guests’ urgent, basic needs to pausing for laughter and connection, we could not do this work without friends like you. Thank you for choosing to support Rosie’s Place through the GlobalGiving Foundation. We are grateful for your generosity and commitment to our work.

Rosie’s Place continues to experience high demand in the Food Program. To meet the unprecedented need, we have expanded our capacity, making it possible for us serve more women than ever before. Providing healthy, well-balanced, ethnically varied meals and groceries is one of the most impactful ways Rosie’s Place is responding to the growing poverty and widespread food insecurity in Massachusetts—where more than one-third of households with children have experienced “child-level food insecurity,” meaning “a child was hungry, skipped a meal, or did not eat for a full day because there was not enough money for food.”

Our Food Programs are expected to exceed their goals for the year. Our Dining Room is the heart of Rosie’s Place and welcomes any woman and her children in need of a meal, 365 days of the year. Over the past six months, Rosie’s Place has already served a total of 90,065 nourishing, culturally relevant meals to thousands of poor and homeless women in the Dining Room—putting us on pace to surpass our goal of 140,000 meals. This is a 30% increase in meals compared to the first six months of the previous fiscal year (FY24) or 69,419, and an 87% increase from the first six months of FY23 or 48,255 meals. We believe that we will serve at least 180,000 meals this year. In addition to providing more meals, we have implemented more sustainable practices such as sourcing from local farms, using eco-friendly containers for our to-go options, and training all Dining Room staff in new composting procedures. We plan to continue expanding these sustainability measures over the next year.

In the Food Pantry, we are providing a variety of nutritionally balanced groceries, including variations for those with dietary needs, for up to 350 women daily. We rotate proteins and provide foods from a variety of ethnic cuisines. We serve guests every Monday through Friday, 9:00 a.m. until we are out of food or have served 350 women. Our guests are permitted to visit the Food Pantry for groceries once every week. In the last six months, Rosie’s Place hosted 39,700 visits to the Food Pantry—up 15% from 34,446 last year. The Food Pantry also provides Rosie’s Place with a unique opportunity to distribute non-food items. This year, we distributed approximately 20,000 non-food items alongside bags of groceries—from holiday gifts of blankets, hats, gloves, scarves and gift cards, as well as recipes, resources guides, and announcements of upcoming events.

We estimate that we serve approximately 1,000 children in the Dining Room and 4,000 children in our guests’ homes through the Food Pantry. Thanks to friends like you supporting Rosie’s Place through the GlobalGiving Foundation, we are able to make a difference for families struggling to make ends meet in the face of growing food insecurity in Boston.

(The Greater Boston Food Bank’s Fourth Annual Statewide Report Food Equity and Access in Massachusetts, 2024. https://www.gbfb.org/)

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