St. Mary’s Food Bank Alliance, the world’s first food bank, was founded in Arizona in 1967. John van Hengel was volunteering at St. Vincent DePaul when a mother told him that soup kitchens and dumpsters were her only sources of food to feed her family. With a $3,000 grant from his church and an available building, the process of donors “depositing” surplus food and the hungry showing up to “withdraw” it was born.

Interested in reading more on hunger in the US? Visit this selection on Giving Compass.

Today, Feeding America is a nationwide network of 200 food banks and 60,000 food pantries and meal programs. As of 2014, Feeding America reported that 1 in 7 people in the U.S. relied on food banks, including 25 percent of military families (620,000 households). Feeding America provides many more facts about hunger in America here.

NPQ has written many hundreds of times about food banks through the years and not a few times about innovations made possible by the application of the latest technologies. In 2015, NPQ wrote “Food Banks Embrace the Power of Logistics Drawn from E-Commerce,” and again, “Apps and Maps Harnessed to Address Food Insecurity.”

The app from 1F1R lets restaurants create a sponsored meal, which then is paid for by donations from businesses or individuals. At that point, a local food bank is contacted and they then allocate the meal to a family. The family goes to the restaurant for a meal that is already paid for.

Writing for the Island Packet, one of the leading news outlets for the Lowcountry of South Carolina, Maggie Angst shares a new innovation in the fight to end hunger. The Fed40 app created by Feeding Children Everywhere is available for use on Apple iOS and Android devices through the App Store and Google Play. The app promises to connect residents to 40 nutritious meals (40 packets of Red Lentil Jambalaya) delivered in a box within a day to their front door. Recipients only need to submit a short form establishing their need.

Taking after a host of app-based takeout delivery services such as Seamless, GrubHub, Eat24, and DoorDash, as well as meal-kit subscription services like Blue Apron and Plated, the Fed40 app seeks to provide food delivery to those in need, only free of charge.

Read the source article at nonprofitquarterly.org