On September 19th, a group of family and friends joined me out in the Bronx to bag, load and drive fresh produce to communities in need.
For my ISP, I wanted to do a collaboration between HLF and Grassroots Grocery. Grassroots Grocery is an organization that helps people with food insecurity across all five boroughs get the food they need. Over the past three years, I have done a lot of fundraisers with Grassroots Grocery and I became a young ambassador two years ago. Grassroots Grocery is an organization that works with people who experience food insecurity in all 5 boroughs. I first was exposed to Grassroots Grocery in 5th grade at my school during a volunteering event, where we packaged food and delivered it to one of the Grassroots Grocery food fridges. I was very interested in helping more, so I started making sandwiches and brought them to some of the fridges they have around New York City. After doing this a couple times, I found out there was a whole organization and group of people behind it and decided to go to a Produce Party one Saturday. A Produce Party is an event GG throws every Saturday in the Bronx, where volunteers come together and help bag, and load fresh produce into cars from supermarkets that would have dumped it in a landfill. I really enjoyed it, so I reached out to the founder and made a plan to get more involved, and execute fundraisers for them.
Over my time with Grassroots Grocery, I have gone to over 15 Produce Parties and raised over $6,000 dollars. When I became a Young Ambassador for the Henrik Lundqvist Foundation, I knew what I wanted to do because I had already been doing all this work with GG and I wanted to expand my work and share their mission with a larger organization. I had a great time at the HLF x GG Produce Party and I hope I inspired lots of people to give back and help more in their communities!
Written by 2026 HLFYA Teddy Edgerton
