God’s Love We Deliver opens distribution center in Sunset Park

The nonsectarian nonprofit God’s Love We Deliver (GLWD) celebrates 40 years of delivering medically tailored meals to New Yorkers living with chronic illness, and is expanding its operations to a new location in Sunset Park near Industry City, planned to open this month.

GLWD began in 1985 when hospice worker Ganga Stone began visiting New Yorkers with AIDS at the height of the pandemic, recognizing the difficulties they faced in preparing meals for themselves. Stone and her roommate, Jane Best, began working with volunteers to make meals and deliver them by bicycle. As both need and support grew, the organization set up its headquarters in SoHo, where meals were cooked, packed, frozen and then delivered by vans to clients. Since 2001, the organization has expanded its program to include clients with cancer and more than 200 other severe and chronic illnesses, regardless of citizenship, income, or insurance status, at no cost to the patient.

However, the SoHo location was reaching its limits. With about 80,000 meals delivered each week and 35 vans on the road across the five boroughs, GLWD began looking for more space.

The Sunset Park waterfront appealed to GLWD for its industrial character and utilitarian history. The Liberty BKLYN space at 850 Third Avenue was built before World War I as a naval site for arsenal and shirt production. The building later fell into disrepair in the 1970s and 1980s, and has been revived over the past 20 years, with Amazon as a recent tenant.

GLWD signed a 20-year lease for its 30,000-square-foot space to expand capacity and be closer to clients.

“This is going to be our fulfillment center for 80% of all of our deliveries throughout the city,” said Eric Ragone, major gifts officer for GLWD’s FORWARD capital campaign. “Everything gets cooked in SoHo, and then it gets essentially freighted over here. And from here, it's even greater access throughout Brooklyn where most of our clients live. Twenty-six percent of clients live in Brooklyn.”

Longtime Sunset Park resident Carmen Rivera welcomes GLWD to the neighborhood with great enthusiasm. She was thrilled to find out they had expanded to a space nearby and that they needed volunteers. As a retiree, she has been interested in finding volunteer opportunities in her community. This opportunity, however, is full of personal meaning.

In 2016, her husband was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, a shock to their lives together. It pushed her into deep emotional and pragmatic turmoil, worrying whether she would be able to juggle a full-time job and caring for her husband.

“There were numerous trips to Manhattan for doctor visits, chemotherapy visits, physical therapy visits, appointments with a nutritionist, a social worker, etc. Needless to say, neither he or I had time to devote to food shopping and meal preparation,” Rivera said. “GLWD was a literal godsend at this point in our lives. The delivery of nutritious, ready to reheat meals alleviated some of my caretaking stress. Moreover, the service’s ability to tailor his meals to his dietary needs—at one point all his food had to be puréed—assisted with his digestive issues.”

Her husband sadly passed in 2018.

With GLWD in her neighborhood now, Rivera has volunteered at the new location, packing meals for clients that she knows mean so much. It is a role reversal that touches her heart.

“Being forever grateful for the assistance the organization had provided to me and my husband during a very dark time, I thought what better way to pay them back and enlisted as a volunteer,” Rivera said. “I currently volunteer a half-day each week assisting with fulfillment, which entails packing client meal bags, organizing meals by delivery route, and labeling meal components.”

With more than 20,000 volunteers each year, GLWD is able to cook, pack and deliver meals to clients. The organization has a staff of 201, including Emmett Findley, its director of marketing and communications, who has been with GLWD for 17 years. His long tenure reflects how steady the need has been for the service.

“When I started, we were only doing 680,000 meals a year, and now we're doing 4 million. That was 7,000 volunteers a year. Now it's 20,000. So I've gotten to really see the expansion, which has been so exciting and moving,” Findley said. “The need has always been there, the need is ongoing and growing. And the response is people are ready and willing and eager to come and volunteer and serve in whatever capacity they have.”

Since signing the lease in December 2024, GLWD continued to successfully fundraise to get the new space up and running. The capital campaign, called 40 FORWARD, marks the organization’s 40th anniversary and the delivery of its 40 millionth meal. The goal is $40 million. So far, GLWD has raised about $24 million.

GLWD is also building relationships in Sunset Park with hospitals, senior centers, the Sunset Park BID and local elected officials. The goal is to reach residents who could benefit from the service and to recruit new volunteers, including neighbors like Rivera.

“Now that GLWD has opened a facility in Sunset Park, I hope that my neighbors can appreciate the invaluable service that GLWD provides and that they will consider volunteering there,” Rivera said. “It’s a win-win situation.”

GLWD will hold an official ribbon-cutting event at its Liberty BKLYN location Jan. 8 to celebrate delivering love the Brooklyn way.