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.…
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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…
When the Stamp Out Hunger food drive, usually held the second Saturday in May, was postponed because of Covid-19, it was the largest food drive in the country to be suspended, but far from the only. The shuttering of the Stamp Out Hunger drive, organized annually by the National Association…
Hotlines, text services and even navigation apps are among the tools food banks are using to better connect people to their neighborhood pantries during the pandemic. The tools go beyond the basic pantry locators typically found on many websites, and often take advantage of the accessibility mobile technology offers. In…