AmpleHarvest.org

AmpleHarvest.org strives to eliminate the waste of fresh food that occurs in millions of home and community gardens nationwide by enabling these growers to share their excess harvest with a local food pantry on a sustainable and permanent basis. This is critical because the food bank/pantry network in the United States has, up to now, been unable to accept and distribute fresh food.

AmpleHarvest.org solved that.

It important to note that AmpleHarvest.org is not a feeding program - it is a program that gets people fed. We are the infrastructure between the growers across America and the food pantry in their own community.

COVID-19 update:
1. AmpleHarvest.org is a virtual organization already designed for all staff to work from home.
2. AmpleHarvest.org does not use teams of volunteers. Each gardener works on their own and donates the food without any engagement from anyone else.
3. AmpleHarvest.org facilitates the donation at the food pantry without the donor or the food pantry staff personally meeting - keeping them both safe.

Normal response the question:
The solution required two separate but parallel tracks:

1. Educate growers nationwide that they can, for the first time, donate food. Historically, any attempts to share their bounty was thwarted because they could not find a food pantry, and if/when they found one, the food was refused. The refusal was because the pantries thought they'd be unable to accept and handle the food. The just in time logic built into AmpleHarvest.org solved that.

2. Create a nationwide opt-in registry of local food pantries eager for the fresh food and make it freely available on the Internet. This ongoing effort involves a close working relationship with the nation's Feeding America food bank network. Today, more than 20% of these pantries are a part of AmpleHarvest.org.

AmpleHarvest.org both discovered and documented the problem of garden food waste, and it invented the most efficient solution possible. More importantly, it did so with a methodology that not only scales, but is now being replicated in other countries.

AmpleHarvest.org has demonstrated since 2009 the capacity to use technology to efficiently and simply solve what has historically been viewed as a costly and difficult problem to solve: food waste and hunger.

It was founded by a CNN Hero and World Food Prize nominee and has a staff and board dedicated to solving the issue of local garden produce food waste.

Because the grower him/her self is connected directly to the local food pantry, they deliver the food they are donating. AmpleHarvest.org has no logistics in the transaction.

As a result, our program scales immediately and efficiently as the opportunity growers. We are limited only by the reach of the Internet, the number of food pantries in the network and their distribution across the 50 states.

As of Jan 2020, AmpleHarvest.org's network includes more than 8,600 or 25% of the food pantries in the United States. As we continue to add more pantries to the network and reach more growers, an ever increasing amount of fresh food will be available to millions of hungry people receiving assistance from local food pantries.

80% of the opportunity lies ahead of us - along with 11 billion pounds of fresh food that growers have available to donate.