NYC Soccer Team Helps Mutual Aid Secure $15,000 Grant
A New York City soccer team has helped mutual aid organization EV Loves NYC secure $15,000 in local government funding for the next fiscal year.
The money will go towards helping EV Loves NYC prepare, cook, and distribute the thousands of meals it makes each week for New Yorkers suffering food insecurity.
The soccer club in question, New York International FC, is an amateur team that fields several teams in a local system of leagues on the East Coast – a pyramid that builds from local divisions such as those in the New York-based Cosmopolitan Soccer League, up to the American Premier Soccer League at a national level.
Since forming in 2019, the club has become ingrained in the communities in which it plays, which include the soccer fields of Astoria, Brooklyn, Roosevelt Island, and Randall's Island.
The work the club does in those communities has become heavily focused on its growing links with EV Loves NYC, a nonprofit mutual aid built around its provision of meals for New Yorkers experiencing food insecurity.
Though EV Loves NYC is built around its food kitchens, growing from a small operation set up during the Covid pandemic to a city-wide supplier and distributor of meals, it also supports other services through links with the neighborhoods in which it resides and the work of its army of volunteers.
Those volunteers include many of the players and staff at NYIFC, and the soccer club's Head of Community Engagement, Nicholas Alexandrakos, has built on these links to help push for local government funding for EV Loves NYC.
This has resulted in EV Loves NYC being awarded the grant of $15,000 for the next fiscal year.
Alexandrakos hopes this will help the club and EV Loves NYC further boost their links with the community and mutual aid network, much of which is built around the 7th Street Collective, and which NYIFC has become a genuine part of through its volunteering and fundraising efforts.
The EV Loves Logo is regularly seen on club merchandise, and vice versa, and several players have undertaken sponsored bike rides after Will Rawlings had the idea to support the soup kitchen when he took part in the historic Register's Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa in 2023.
Funds raised during the annual 5k for Davide event, which the club organises in the city, also go to EV Loves NYC.
"There are teams that have New York in their name, but not in their heart, and that’s the significant difference with New York International," says Alexandrakos.
"We are a Cosmopolitan club, a community club that lives and breathes New York City. On the field and off, NYC is our home.
"This means we are challenging for three points in every match, and we are uplifting the most vulnerable in our neighborhood every day.
"Some use New York as a marketing gimmick. For us, it’s a mentality. It’s our responsibility. It’s our citizenship."
On top of the many obstacles faced every day in the city, the cost of making one meal has risen from 70 cents to 4 dollars on the back of numerous issues affecting the price of produce and its transportation.
It's one of many reasons the $15,000 will be a huge help to a mutual aid network made up of community hubs, one of which is a soccer club, as they continue to tackle food insecurity in New York together.
