Marcus Harvin Pivots To The Streets

“This was our vision in prison,” said Marcus Harvin, as he led his team with boxes of meals past a queue of people waiting for the doors of Dixwell’s Varick A.M.E. Zion Warming Center to open. 

He and his team weren’t in the basement of Newhallville’s Pitts Chapel, at the fREshtaurant—the food recovery initiative he created to provide restaurant-style, hot, nutritious meals for the community. Three days after it launched in early February, the city health department told Harvin to shut down the operation until he got a food service license.

Since then, Harvin and his team — among them, a retired corrections officer, two men he served with at McDougall Prison, and a University of New Haven history professor and his son — have been fanning out through New Haven delivering meals to those in warming centers, homeless shelters along Dixwell and on the Green. 

“We were told we can’t cook or serve in Pitts, but we were not told we cannot package what was prepared on a campus and give it to those who need it,” he said, referring to the plan to repurpose excess dining hall food from area campuses. 

“We can’t afford to wait until we secure the license to feed them indoors.”

As volunteers counted and stacked 37 boxes in the Varick Warming Center’s brightly lit kitchen, employee Eddie Gist looked on. ​“This really helps us out,” he said. ​“Some people stay here six, seven months because of how we treat them and feed them.” 

Program manager Shellina Toure agreed. ​“We have a few groups who help us with food, and this is our newest one, and with all the different ones pitching in, it ensures no one goes hungry.” 

By then, Harvin and his team were off to the Green. 

“We are people who look out for people who don’t get looked out for,” said Harvin; he reported that all 80 meals had been distributed around town that night. ​“We will continue to do this in a caring and dignified manner until we get the license, however long it takes.”