A Decade of Generosity: The Story of Comfort Food Community

CFC Founding Members

Starting as a one-room pantry on the second floor of the town offices, Comfort Food Community (CFC) has grown substantially into the support system it provides today. Despite this, the journey to get there was one of great challenges for the founding members. 

When Susan Sanderson and Maryann McGeorge, CFC founding members, first moved to Greenwich, they made an effort to get involved in the community. As Susan spent time around the youth center and other community spaces, she began to notice a landscape of need for members of the community that was not being addressed. 

“The thing that really stuck out for us was the unseen communities,” McGeorge recounted. “Beginning to spend some time in that first year of getting to know the place where we were living, to see the unseen, to notice who wasn't being sort of engaged in the community. That became increasingly obvious to us.”

As a result, Maryann and Sue spent the year asking around about food insecurity resources that were available and came to the conclusion that “hunger and poverty, particularly in rural areas, was off the charts, and although people were trying to deal with it in individual ways, there really wasn’t a concerted effort to do anything about it,” said McGeorge. 

From that point forward, they decided to pull together long-standing members of the community to be the ones who did something about the hunger issue. This formed the group of founding members who set out on three original goals: create a weekend food program for students, create a pantry with regular hours, and create a list of organizations and resources for economic support. 

Despite the goals set forth, the organization faced the challenge of not being a registered 501(c)(3) organization or a member of the Regional Food Bank of Northeastern New York for months. This meant high food costs and limited donations. To survive, the organization thrived on the generosity of the community. McGeorge discussed the Council of Churches as one example, which became angel sponsors to the organization. Each month, a different church from the Council of Churches would donate $1,000 to the organization. 

“This community and the surrounding communities have been extraordinarily generous and extraordinarily supportive,” McGeorge said. “It’s just been quite amazing to see.” 

Throughout the last decade, the generosity has paid off as CFC has connected community members to resources that support them in many ways, as set forth by the founding members’ goals. 

Edie Brown, a volunteer with CFC since its inception, narrated a story exemplifying the support these resources provided. When a woman came into the pantry and told Brown that she had no heat, no electricity, and had to walk a far distance to get to the pantry, Brown connected her with the necessary resources to get help. As a result, the woman was able to relocate to a safe place in Glens Falls, exemplifying the impact beyond food.

This past decade of generosity that has made CFC so impactful will be commemorated at CFC’s Decade of Impact Celebration on July 24, 2025, at Prime, Saratoga National. Purchasing a ticket to the event not only celebrates the change created in the past but also supports CFC’s commitment to helping create change in the future. 

“Change is hard, and we didn’t do everything right,” McGeorge said. “But the change that we implemented and delivered really grew into what needed to happen to address a problem that I think really no one had addressed.” 

Buy Tickets