We have operated a small food pantry in our rural upstate New York community for the past 12 years. Like many of you, we have a volunteer staff and a small budget provided by government grants and community donations. Very close to 100% of our budget goes directly toward the…
Posts published in “Technology”
To achieve its goal of ending food insecurity in Maine, Good Shepherd Food Bank is enlisting the help of broccoli. The food bank, Maine’s largest, is starting a produce-processing company called Harvesting Good that will offer frozen produce year round to retail and institutional customers. The goal of the company…
A service that lets home gardeners donate their excess produce to hunger relief organizations has expanded from 23 zip codes in 2019, to 985 zip codes currently. A mobile version of the service, which was introduced last year and helps coordinate transportation of the donated produce, helped propel that expansion.…
Placer Food Bank, serving three counties in Northern California, expects its new virtual food drive platform will bring in at least triple the amount of food. Placer is going all in on virtual food donations, announcing earlier this month that it’s exclusively using an online platform to raise funds for…
A foundation based in Paraguay is seeking to work with food banks across the globe to help it spread its groundbreaking method of moving families out of poverty. The Poverty Stoplight seeks to empower individual families to better understand the exact nature of their poverty and the specific steps they…
When Michael Sammon was handed his first supermarket loyalty card more than 30 years ago, his first thought was: “What a great way to supply funds to various local charities, starting with food.” With his background in computer repair and programming, Sammon understood instantly that the cards were powered by…
As a relatively new organization — only ten years old — Feeding Children Everywhere has the benefit of not being tied to legacy notions of how things are done. So its embrace of a virtual food bank model in response to Covid-19 has been seamless. Under its virtual model, the…
There may be no better case study demonstrating the power of virtual food drives than what happened at Long Island Cares. When Covid-19 first hit, the Hauppauge, N.Y.-based food bank cancelled all of its spring food drives and quickly pivoted to its existing partnership with YouGiveGoods, a N.J.-based provider of…
Julie Yurko, the President and CEO of Northern Illinois Food Bank, was on vacation reading a book called “Delivering Happiness” about the online shoe seller Zappos when it occurred to her that the concept of online ordering with a focus on customer service did not exist in the charitable food…