It’s 7:30 on a Thursday morning, and Gail Bradney flicks on the lights inside the kitchen of the Woodstock Reformed Church. The smell of coffee mixes with the steam of green beans as volunteers shuffle in, tying aprons and stacking foil trays. It’s become routine for the six retired core volunteers who gather here most mornings to keep Woodstock Meals going.
Now, as the federal government shutdown threatens to halt food assistance for thousands of New Yorkers, the volunteer-run kitchen finds itself part of a fragile local safety net working to keep people fed.
This week, Governor Kathy Hochul declared a state of emergency and announced $65 million in new state funds for emergency food assistance to reinforce New York’s food banks and pantries, estimating the money could provide roughly 40 million meals statewide. The move came after federal officials refused to release contingency funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which delivers about $650 million a month to nearly three million New Yorkers. More than one in five recipients are seniors living on fixed incomes who may struggle to replace lost benefits. Advocates warn that many older residents may not realize what’s coming, since the Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance doesn’t plan to mail notices about potential changes, relying instead on online updates that some seniors will not be able to access.
In Ulster County, Executive Jen Metzger has redirected $350,000 to local food pantries in anticipation of that lapse, a move that sent a shudder through the region’s food network, where demand is already high and resources thin.
Among the small, volunteer-driven programs bracing for a potential uptick in need is Woodstock Meals on Wheels, a nonprofit founded in 1975 and originally known as Woodstock Area Meals on Wheels, now marking its 50th year of delivering meals to residents who can’t cook or shop for themselves.
By eight o’clock, Leslie Siegel, 80, the kitchen manager in charge of overseeing inventory, setup, and coordination among cooks and drivers, begins to marshal the morning’s work. “I help with ordering the supplies. I set up the kitchen. I help keep it running,” she said. “Someone once compared me to a nurse in an operating room. You have everything set. We just have to go and get it done.”
Siegel has volunteered here for a decade, three mornings a week. “I’ve been retired for so many years, and my children are grown. It’s so nice to get up and have a purpose,” she said. “If you don’t have a purpose, you go into a downward spiral.”
Chopping boards clap. Pots hiss and clang. The air fills with the smell of the plat du jour: chicken paprikash with egg noodles, green beans, cucumber salad, and dinner rolls. Some days homemade desserts are donated by a 100-year old volunteer. On the counter, dozens of aluminum trays await their destinations—small homes tucked along Catskill backroads through Woodstock, West Hurley, and Shandaken, where about 70 clients wait each day for a meal. The organization has about 75 to 80 volunteers in total, including 40 drivers (six per day), eight main cooks, and four daily kitchen helpers, along with bakers and administrative volunteers. Adults with autism from The Anderson Center for Autism in Staatsburg help deliver meals as well.
Bradney, 68, a retired editor and freelance writer who moved to Woodstock three decades ago, now co-directs Woodstock Meals with Nancy Meyer, overseeing an entirely volunteer-run network that delivers around 50 meals a day, Monday through Friday. And yes that includes holidays.
“The only requirements,” she said, “are that you’re homebound and can’t cook or drive. You might be wealthy and homebound, or you might be incredibly impoverished in a trailer in Phoenicia. There are a lot of reasons why people have food insecurity, and we accommodate all of them. We don’t discriminate by age or income.”
Woodstock Meals is as local as it gets. It’s not a branch of the national nonprofit that shares its name, but an independent operation with no bureaucracy and no paid staff. “Someone calls me and says, ‘My mom is eating cereal, that’s all she eats. She lives alone, I live far away, I’m worried she’s not getting enough nutrition.’ The next day, we get meals to her. It’s that simple,” Bradney said.
The group runs on an annual budget of about $100,000, all raised locally through fundraising letters and small appeals. “We go down to zero at the end of every fiscal year,” Bradney said. “But people are generous. Last year, we received $60,000 from a single donor appeal.”
Each day’s menu balances comfort food with nutrition; salmon with couscous, slow-cooked pot roast with mashed potatoes, baked ziti, turkey meatloaf, fruit salad, and a dessert. Some clients contribute $8 a meal; others pay nothing.
A System Under Strain
The urgency of their work has only deepened as grocery prices are up 29% since 2020.
Ulster County is bracing for a potential hunger crisis, with federal food assistance set to lapse amid the ongoing government shutdown. Local officials and food advocates warn that the charitable food system cannot absorb the impact if funding stops for the SNAP.
“For every meal provided by a food bank or one of our partner agencies, SNAP provides twelve,” said Barry Lewis, senior public affairs officer for the Regional Food Bank of Northeastern New York. “Should SNAP benefits not be available in November, we will continue to assist in any way possible, but the charitable food system was not designed to sustain the scope of services SNAP provides.”
In Ulster County alone, more than 10,700 households—nearly 17,000 people—rely on SNAP. Across the Food Bank’s 23-county service area, the program injects roughly $59 million each month into local food budgets. Without it, the Food Bank estimates it would need to distribute 36 million pounds of food monthly to fill the gap, nearly two-thirds of what it distributed in all of 2024.
Inside the Kitchen
By 10 a.m., the morning crew at Woodstock Meals is passing the trays to the drivers.
Louis Arlt, 75, a retired actor, counts his bags and reviews his route. “Older people need food. They don’t know how else to get it,” he said. “Since COVID, everything has tripled. We were doing 30 meals a day, and now we’re doing 50 or more sometimes. I’m guessing things might go up again.”
Drivers like Arlt traverse dirt roads and wonky driveways, sometimes covering 55 miles round trip to reach clients in Phoenicia.
At the stove, Judy Willinger, 70, ladles chicken over noodles. “It’s very gratifying,” she said. “First of all, it’s fun. We come here and we have a good time. If the people weren’t so nice, I wouldn’t do it. And it’s a way to give back.”
She laughed softly. “When I’m making a meal, I’m thinking of the deadline. We have two hours. We have to have those meals out the door by then. I came close one day, and I never want that to happen again.”
Nearby, Steve Weinberg, a chiropractor who lives in Bearsville, packed containers into bags. “I believe in public service,” he said. “It’s one of the things I love most about living in Woodstock, that here are so many organizations like ours that all serve the community.”
Weinberg remembers the confusion earlier this year when rumors spread about national cuts to Meals on Wheels. “People started calling, worrying they weren’t going to get their food the next day,” he said. “We had to explain we’re not part of that national organization. We’re local and locally funded. But it showed how much panic there was. For many of our clients, this meal is the one thing they can depend on.”
At the Doorstep
Woodstock Meals is more than a food delivery service. On a few occasions, drivers dropping off meals have found clients incapacitated, fallen, faint, or unresponsive. Once, they discovered someone in cardiac arrest and called an ambulance just in time.
“Sometimes we’re the only people they see all day,” Bradney said. “If they don’t answer the door, we know something’s wrong.”
That quiet vigilance has saved lives. Volunteers notice when curtains stay drawn or when a voice sounds weaker than usual. “We get calls from adult children who live in the city saying, ‘Can you check on my mom? She’s stopped cooking for herself,’ ” Bradney said. “The next day, she’s on our route.”
One of those clients is Brigit O’Hara Refregier, 74, who lives in the Woodstock home her father, the renowned WPA-era artist Anton Refregier, bought in the 1930s. Anton Refregier, a Russian immigrant to the United States, was a painter and muralist active in the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project, a New Deal program launched in 1935 to employ artists during the Great Depression. Among his best-known works is “The History of San Francisco,” a 27-panel mural series in the Rincon Center that chronicles the city’s history from 1940 to 1948.
“My car is kaput,” Refregier said. “The program really helps me a lot. It makes a big difference in my meals.”
A former chef at a Route 28 resort, she finds comfort in familiar dishes. “I like everything,” she said. “I like the meatloaf, that’s one of my favorites with the mashed potatoes. The only ones I don’t like are the fish ones. But that’s okay. I give them to my dog.”
Her connection to Woodstock Meals, she added, “is about more than food. You live alone, and it’s nice to have someone knock on your door.”
The Bigger Picture
Across town, another Woodstock resident, who asked not to be named for privacy reasons, described how she stretches $1,800 a month in Social Security while food prices soar. “People are already starving and hungry because the prices are off the charts,” she said. “You sit here with a hungry stomach waiting until you absolutely no longer can handle it and then hit that top ramen.”
She lives at the Woodstock Meadows housing complex, behind the post office, where many older residents live on fixed incomes. Her rent is $290 a month. Inside her small apartment, she rations the pantry carefully, a few packets of ramen, a can of beans, and instant coffee.
Still, gratitude and generosity in-community keeps her going. On a recent afternoon, she baked three pans of ziti to share with her neighbors. “If I’ve got to share my big $100 with my neighbors, so be it,” she said. “We’ve got to look out for each other now.”
“There’s a long waiting list here,” she said of the Meadows. “It’s usually until someone dies, because once people are in here, they stay until they die.”
She shook her head. “It’s going backwards and it’s really scary, more extreme than ever before in our country. And it’s disgusting that this is going on at a time when we’re supposed to be giving thanks.”
For all its efficiency, Bradney knows her kitchen can’t fill the gap entirely left by federal programs. The operation’s entire annual budget equals less than a week of Ulster County’s SNAP benefits.
“People say, ‘Oh, there are food pantries,’” she said. “But if you get a turkey or a chicken and have no way to cook it, that’s not a help. Having access to food doesn’t mean you can eat it.”
She wiped her hands on a towel and scanned the delivery list, tracing her finger down the names to see where she’d be driving next.
Information is available on the state’s Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance website regarding how the federal government shutdown could impact SNAP benefits.
Noah Eckstein is the editor-in-chief of The Overlook. Send correspondence to noah@theoverlooknews.com.