Help Swamp Dog Hobble Feed NYC Migrants

Swamp Dog Hobble Distro is organizing this fundraiser.

Donation protected

Hi! Here’s the short version: we cook tasty food for the city’s unhoused migrant population! Our mission is to raise some cash so we can keep on doing this. If you also think hungry people should have more food, please read on for details!

We’re a house of seven, in Brooklyn (there’s more about us at the bottom). For the last four months, we’ve been working with Tompkins Distro, a mutual-aid group which provides food and basic goods to the city’s asylum seekers. Two of us (Ben and Caleb) used to cook professionally; with our housemates’ support, we’ve been able to produce 10 – 12 gallons of delicious coconut chicken curry every other Saturday, along with 20 quarts of rice. That translates to about 200 bowls of hot food, every two weeks, for people who would very much like to eat.

All in, it costs us $150 to make these 200 bowls of soup (plus rice). So, $300 a month. Except, recently we’ve decided to cook every Saturday, which means now it’s $600 a month. And I’m sorry to say, but we’re all financial failures in this house. So far we’ve been covering costs by throwing concerts (most of us play music) and having dinner parties with stupid themes. But we want to make more food for more people—what we’d really like is to double our production, and feed 400 people a week, rather than 200. So then that’s $1200 a month. Ultimately, over the course of the next four months, our goal is to feed 6400 people. And if that’s gonna happen, we need a little help.

We’ve done some math. There’s details below, but basically, 20 gallons of curry (plus rice) should cost about $300 to produce, and feed about 400 people. We’d like to raise enough money to cook every week, all summer: May, June, July, August. That’s $4800 to feed approximately 6400 people. We’re asking for another $500 to help retroactively cover the cost of some crucial kitchen supplies, i.e. a second giant stockpot, some giant buckets, hotel pans, etc. Here are some pictures of receipts, and cost breakdowns, and also some pictures of us, so you know this isn't just some guy trying to buy a bunch of Playstations.

Pictured: Distro-specific Aldi receipt (though we've now started buying our ingredients from Baldor), Baldor receipt, Baldor groceries, Caleb and/or Ben looking goofy, some of the kitchen equipment we bought, tasty food, tasty food being handed out by nice people at Tompkins Distro, and finally the flyer for Tompkins Distro itself, should you wish to pop by and say hello.