Wednesday nights are busy for Lisa Greenwald.

Each week, she cooks for 30 women and children at the Ellington, a shelter across the street from her Morningside Heights home.

What You Need To Know

  • Lisa Greenwald started cooking dinners for a shelter across the street from her home a few weeks into the pandemic

  • It became a community effort, with a local supermarket, a block association and neighbors all chipping in

  • The community also sends donations like toiletries, clothing, strollers and sometimes even computers with the hot, weekly meals

"Nobody is immune from having bad things happen to them," Greenwald said. "And it's great to have the community around you to say, 'We're here to support you.'"

Tonight it's collard greens, chicken in a white wine and lemon sauce and roasted rosemary potatoes.

Greenwald is a history teacher at Stuyvesant High School.


She got the idea to cook for the Ellington a couple of weeks into the pandemic. Greenwald was inspired by her cousin who was a health care worker.

"There are other people out there in the world, in my community on my block who can use a little help and a little embrace," she said.

Greenwald started fronting $70 a week to bring hot, homemade food to the Ellington. And soon, the local resident block association, a nearby supermarket and her neighbors started chipping in too.

"I think there are a lot of people in the community  who want to give that embrace and want to be generous and make the community a more vital place," Greenwald said.

Greenwald also organized a holiday gift drive for families at the shelter. At other times people have given her clothing, toiletries, sometimes even computers to donate.

"Things that people have and they don't need and they would love to see live another life," Greenwald said. "And then, and then they do."

Greenwald sorts through it all each week and then she and her husband haul two luggage carts to the Ellington.


"Some of the people here don't have clothes or anything to eat sometimes," said Mariah, an 11-year-old who lives at the Ellington.

"They bypass everything and treat everybody, have them feel like a human, like human being, with a lot of love," Albie, another resident, said. "It's no looking down that it's a shelter."

It's a charge Greenwald hopes her students and people across the city take on.

"We have to look for the good in people. We have to look for what we can do to make things better," Greenwald said.

For making things better and helping her community to do the same, Lisa Greenwald is our New Yorker of the Week.