If there was one thing Laura Beth Comer learned from the pandemic, it was this: “Everybody wants to do good. Everybody has love in their heart and they want to share.”

As the pandemic began and needed attention, Comer noticed that there was only one food bank in her Greenpoint neighborhood.

“So we looked around at everything that was happening and we tried to choose a day that nobody was doing anything to give people more of an opportunity to receive food,” Comer said.

What You Need To Know

  • Laura Beth Comer wanted to give back during the height of the pandemic. With the help of her husband, she began delivering groceries to families who had lost loved ones

  • Knowing there was more they could be doing, the couple also opened a food pantry. With the help of neighborhood volunteers, they got to work distributing necessary items

  • Now years later, Comer is still opening her pantry doors to those in need. She says the pandemic only highlighted a need that was already there

After some advice from friends, who had also started a pantry in their neighborhood, Comer and her husband began making grocery deliveries to families in need.

“One family became two, and before long we were delivering groceries to more than 25 immigrant families who had all lost somebody to COVID,” Blake Comer, Laura Beth Comer's husband and right-hand man, said.

From there, the Comers started a food bank where 100 locals could come to them and pick up every necessity.

“When we first started, we just thought, we’ll just give out groceries for a few weeks, but then quickly realized that there was an actual need that was here before the pandemic started, but then the pandemic just highlighted that,” she said.

Through Instagram and word-of-mouth, donations and volunteers arrived.

“Everyone you see here are just neighbors from the neighborhood. It was really encouraging to know that they just wanted to help,” she said.

It’s a mission she says has brought a community together.

“We’ve just gotten to know so many people in the neighborhood, and it just does make the neighborhood seem that much smaller, like we’re family,” she said. “So it’s just really special.”

For being everyone’s good neighbor, Laura Beth Comer is our New Yorker of the Week.