The relief group Queens Together has fed thousands of people since launching in the pandemic — but a disagreement with its sponsoring organization could jeopardize the work, its founder warns.
Onetime chef Jonathan Forgash, who founded Queens Together in 2020 to pay distressed local restaurants to provide free food to hungry New Yorkers, told THE CITY that the Queens Economic Development Corporation (QEDC) ended its agreement with his group earlier this month.
QEDC executive director Seth Bornstein confirmed that the group has not reached an agreement with Forgash that would allow grants to continue to flow through the economic development corporation.
The standoff centers on a dispute over how the two organizations are connected — and who is entitled to three quarters of a million dollars in recent federal grants.
Forgash asserts he created Queens Together as a partner independent of QEDC.
“We are a small but mighty organization. The funding we get is essential to our organization,” said Forgash. “It feels like we’ve had the rug pulled out from under us. After three and a half years of cooperation and success, they terminated our agreement. It is upsetting to know that our work with the people of Queens might be at an end.”
Until now, Queens Together has operated under an agreement with QEDC as its sponsor, a deal that ended with the recent expiration of a New York Community Trust grant that paid for Forgash’s salary.
Funds now in limbo include a $500,000 federal Small Business Administration grant and a forthcoming $250,000 from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development for “business education, worker education, technical and marketing skills.”
QEDC maintains that Forgash can only be paid under that grant as an employee, while Forgash insists the funds can be used whether or not he is employed by the organization — and that he must be independent. While QEDC has offered him a job, Forgash has turned it down because it would require him to work on other projects in addition to Queens Together, he said.
While it started out as a sponsored QEDC project, Queens Together Inc is now registered with the IRS as its own nonprofit organization.
“They want me to become a regular employee of QEDC,” Forgash said. “That means the money is theirs, Queens Together is theirs.”
Bornstein said he and his board had agreed to help Queens Together back in the depths of the pandemic because it helped local businesses as well as people in need.
“We said, ‘We’ll help, it was an emergency. The world was a mess,” Bornstein said, adding that his organization had done administrative tasks including grant writing and bookkeeping on behalf of Queens Together for free.
But he acknowledged that Forgash follows his own path.
“We had a different idea about how to run things, and his idea and my idea didn’t align in him working with us,” Bornstein said. “And he surely wants to be his own show — and I got it, he’s an independent guy.”
‘Our Last Season’?
At the Baptist Church of Corona Sunday morning, about a dozen church staff, volunteers and partners readied themselves to distribute hundreds of meals, toys and coats for a holiday giveaway — in what Forgash said “may have been our last season of giving.”
Food giveaways happen here every Saturday, says the church’s pastor, Rev. Patrick Young. Five times a year, he said, Queens Together has shown up to offer support, bringing with them food from restaurants around the borough to supply meals for congregants and neighbors.
“We’re not a savior organization parachuting into Queens,” said Forgash, greeting restaurant partners who were beginning to trickle into the parking lot. “We are here, we are like boots on the ground.”
Elena Barcenes, who runs a restaurant called Rincon Salvadoreño in Jamaica, arrives with carts full of lunch boxes shortly after 11 — and says she has been up since 4 a.m. to prepare chicken and pasta.
She had met Forgash during the pandemic, she said, and teamed up with him because she needed to make ends meet when the city went into lockdown.
“I needed opportunities like this so that I can help the community — be involved in the community, and continue working,” said Barcenes.
She has also worked with Queens Together to provide meals to migrants in a shelter next door to her restaurant.
Some 300 people waited in line in the rain to get in. Rochelle Richards, a resident from a shelter nearby, waited in line with her 4-year-old daughter, whom she described as a picky eater.
She had immigrated from Jamaica three years ago to seek medical attention for her daughter, who had been diagnosed with autism.
It’s hard to sustain her and her daughter on just meals from the shelter, she said.
This is her first time at the Corona church, Richards says, but she had decided to finally check it out because a friend at the shelter was “always, always telling me about this.”
“When she come, when she get enough, she would just share with me, you know?” Richards said. “A lot of, a lot of stuff. I was just saying, ‘Where do they get so much food?’”