CUMAC feeds people and changes lives. It works to alleviate hunger and its root causes for those in need in Paterson, Passaic County and northern New Jersey.
CUMAC Past to Present
CUMAC has been serving the community for over 30 years. It began in the late 1970s when then Paterson school teacher, Hugh Dunlop recruited his church congregation to collect food for his obviously ailing students. As they met that need, a greater need in the city of Paterson became obvious, and a small pantry was born to provide emergency food to the local community. In 1985, CUMAC was incorporated as the Center of United Methodist Aid to the Community Ecumenically Concerned Helping Others (CUMAC/ECHO) – a name meant to show that, while we are an urban mission of the United Methodist Church, we serve all people in need without discrimination.
Though we recently shortened our public name to just CUMAC–the name the community knows us by–we have grown physically, financially and organizationally in our 30-plus years of operation. Physically, we began in a borrowed church closet and now own our 28,000 square foot facility in downtown Paterson; financially, we expanded our meager start-up budget thirty-fold; and organizationally we developed from a single-purpose, volunteer run group into a multi-service agency with a staff of 13 and hundreds of volunteers donating thousands of hours of work annually.
Unfortunately, working wages simply have not kept up with cost of living in northern New Jersey, forcing increasingly more people to seek emergency food assistance. As the largest food distribution program in Passaic County, we regularly feed close to 2000 low-income people a month. The large majority of our client families have at least one full-time working adult. One-third of our clients are children, one-fourth are senior citizens, and many suffer from chronic illness. Our work relies heavily on donations from individuals & groups, and is also made possible by state, county & agency grants, income from our thrift shop and proceeds from fundraising events.
