It Happens Here: Long-time friends saving good, unwanted meals with Brookline Food Rescue
Long-time friends Victoria Schnoes
By KATE MERRILL
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BROOKLINE, Massachusetts (WBZ) — Thirty years ago, Victoria Schnoes moved into public housing in Brookline. That’s when her mission started.
“There is a really big need for food support and food resources for a lot of the greater metropolitan Boston area,” she told WBZ-TV.
So she started the Brookline Food Rescue.
Victoria and her friend Tom Capizzi got to work finding ways to get good food that was being trashed by local stores and restaurants and get it to people in need in their community.
On the day we met with them, they went to Amtrak and picked up perfectly good food that wasn’t sold on the train.
“So there’s oatmeal, cheeseburgers, M & M’s, ham and cheese sandwiches,” Schnoes said.
It’s a full-time job for these two, minus the paycheck.
“We’ve never gotten paid,” Schnoes said.
They work every day, seven days a week, often fourteen hours a day for nothing. But what they do get is much harder to come by.
“One of the most rewarding things is no matter where we show up, people are happy to see us,” Schnoes said.
People like Paul Murray at a church in Allston, where they run free dinners every week for the community.
“It allows the program to happen because of the work that the food rescue does in bringing us food, we’re able to have the food to supply groceries to the people who come here for them,” he told WBZ.
Still living in public housing and working part time at a garden center to help fund the mission, Schnoes doesn’t have much. But what she does have is a real purpose.
“I stopped for three days and had a stroke and I got a very clear message – you’ve got a mission in life and that’s to do what I do,” she said.
They don’t have much overhead since they deliver the food as soon as they get it. What they do need is a van, so they can stop paying rental fees for trucks.
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