A pantry van didn't show up one rainy Friday. It revealed a crisis hiding in plain sight

by Simon Galperin

Almost every Friday afternoon for the first 18 months of the pandemic, I distributed food to dozens of families in Essex County out of the back of a food pantry van.

If you’ve never gotten food from a food pantry, it’s mostly canned or dried goods, fresh fruits and vegetables; occasionally hot or frozen meals. You’ll get fresh bread from the bakery one week and go home with Thomas’s Bagels the next. People schedule their whole week around these distributions.

Then one Friday in late December, as people gathered under a sheet of cold, wet rain — the van didn’t come. The pantry couldn’t make it that week. And a dozen families who had scheduled their time and meals around those two bags of groceries went home cold, wet, and hungry on New Year’s weekend.

What I saw that day was that our communities have no dedicated way to communicate. Whether it’s about the week’s food delivery, or where to get help with your utility bill, or about the new business down the street. There are no public pipes for the flow of civic news and information.

The local news crisis has only widened that gap. In the last 20 years, more than 3,500 newspapers have closed, with roughly two shutting down every week.

In New Jersey, that pain is felt across the political spectrum. Roughly two-thirds of the state’s Republicans, Democrats, and independents all want to see more local news about where they live, according to a recent Rutgers-Eagleton poll.

This growing gap is why I launched The Jersey Bee: to help get local news and information to people who need it. Every week, we read news, blogs, social media, government websites, and more to pull out what matters and deliver to the communities we serve in Essex County so people can actually use it.

Last year, we published 5,000 news briefs on everything from local government to schools, volunteering, mutual aid, recreation, arts and culture, and more. We delivered them through daily and weekly newsletters, a website, an events calendar, and other products. The Bee’s readers don’t need to scroll social media endlessly to find helpful news and resources. That’s what civic information infrastructure looks like.

I founded The Jersey Bee because I know how information and connection can change lives. In 1992, my family and I were Jewish refugees from the former Soviet Union. I can name every resource information unlocked in my life: the relatives who sponsored our visa, the community loan that became a down payment on a house, the guidance counselor who kept me in high school, the volunteer ambulance corps that gave me a sense of purpose — these are a few of the dozens of resources that reached me. But they reached me by chance.

Access to healthcare, education, jobs, housing, food — all of it runs through who you know and what information you can find. But it shouldn’t take luck to access a basic resource where you live.

That’s the gap New Jersey was filling by creating the New Jersey Civic Information Consortium in 2018. The independent nonprofit receives public funding and invests it in a network of community news providers whose collective audience rivals the largest news websites in the state.

Funding for community news is now in jeopardy as Gov. Mikie Sherrill, a Democrat, proposes zero state aid to the consortium after it received $2.5 million in 2025. The governor, who took office in January, has proposed cutting $2 billion in social services and other state spending to close a projected $3 billion budget gap while limiting tax increases.

The Jersey Bee has been a New Jersey Civic Information Consortium grantee since 2021. As a result of the state’s public investment, we’ve become a national leader in civic news and information, inventing patent-pending technology, developing award-winning community programming, and producing impactful, solutions journalism. We’ve served tens of thousands of the state’s residents and have raised two dollars for every public dollar invested in us.

In all, the New Jersey Civic Information Consortium has invested more than $12 million in the state, buoying small local news businesses and nonprofits in 19 of 21 counties by supporting everything from multi-lingual content to community media training, internships, investigative reporting, and more.

Electricity, water, schools, libraries, fire departments — we don’t argue about whether those are public goods that deserve public support. We decided that our communities can’t run without them. Civic information belongs on that list.

New Jersey was the first state to invest in this kind of civic information infrastructure. The New Jersey Civic Information Consortium is a bulwark against declining media literacy, a rising tide of misinformation, and a tumultuous AI future.

New Jersey’s continued investment in civic information makes it easier for its residents to work, own a business, care for family, participate in arts and culture, and do so much more of what this state has to offer. It also accelerates progress against the challenges we face as a community, from polarization to climate change.

The truth is that newspapers will keep closing. AI-generated content will continue to flood people’s feeds. The gap between what people need to know and what they can find will widen before it narrows. But, in New Jersey, that gap will narrow more quickly than anywhere else because of the state’s investment in civic information. In a rapidly evolving world, that’s one first-mover advantage the state’s policymakers should not pass up.