Happy New Year!

JANUARY 10, 2025 UPDATE:

Hello friends & supporters!

Happy New Year!!!
2024 was a full year for Community Driven as we continue to grow every year!

In 2024 we rescued over $300,000 worth of surplus food from local businesses & redistributed it to over a dozen local food shelves & several soup kitchens! Most of this was healthy produce, the kind of healthy food that some of the food shelves we work with rarely have much of.

I’ve been personally doing this work for over two decades, & I have never before seen consistent & serious need like we have in our communities right now.

Our plan is to simply continue to grow our food rescue & distribution operation as fast as we can. Anyone who has worked in the service industry understands that we could grow our capacity to rescue food by ten-fold & we’ll still be barely scratching the surface of all the food that is being thrown away at the end of every day.

We need to keep building, & you can help!

In our last annual filing we raised & spent about $75,000. Over $60,000 of that was spent directly on our charitable program work. That’s about 80% of our budget, with 20% going to a combination of fundraising & general administrative costs.

This year we are hyper-focusing on lowering our fundraising cost so that even a higher percentage of our money can be spent on rescuing & distributing food.

We’ve come up with some great ways to do this, but we’re going to need help from our supporters. If enough of you do one or several of the following, then we can spend much less time raising funds and instead spend that time lifting more boxes & rescuing more food!

Please consider some of the following ideas:

- Sign up on our website for an automatically recurring donation.

Most of our funds are raised from annual door-to-door fundraising in our neighborhoods, but if we can get more of our supporters to sign up for recurring donations, then we don’t have to worry about whether or not you’re home on that random night each year when we get someone to doorknock your block…AND having recurring donations makes it so much easier for us to budget & plan based on money we know will be coming in.
You can go RIGHT HERE NOW & sign up for a recurring donation of any amount you feel comfortable & make it recurring at whatever frequency works for you!


-Host a FUNdraiser in your home!

How would you like to have a fun evening with friends invited over to your home for a nice wine & cheese style event & support our work! We’ll provide you with invitations to mail or just hand to your friends & neighbors. I will personally give a short & friendly presentation & answer questions & we can raise more money for the cause while spreading the word about our work to your friends & neighbors! Just hit ‘reply’ to this email & tell us that you’d like to chat about the idea & we can talk on the phone real quick!


-Start a neighborhood drop site!

Imagine having one porch in your neighborhood (yours!) where everyone knows that they can drop off food once a month & know that it is getting distributed to multiple local food shelves & never have to worry about lugging it to a food shelf yourself.
This tends to work best if you have one of the above-mentioned in-home fundraisers to kick it off. We’ll provide bins to place on your porch & flyers you can give to your neighbors every few months & we’ll coordinate a day once a month where we will drive by during a food rescue route & pick up whatever has been donated that month & deliver it to local food shelves!


If you ever have any questions (or you maybe work somewhere that has surplus food & want to figure out how to rescue that food & get it to local food shelves), don’t hesitate to reach out to me at communitydrivenmn@gmail.com & I hope you have a fantastic weekend!

Sincerely & in solidarity with helping our neighbors & making our corner of the world a little better,

-shugE Mississippi (AKA Christopher Allison)
Executive Director
www.community-driven.org





Community Driven will turn 6 years old in 2025 & some of us in the Community Driven team have been doing this food rescue work for over 25 years!

Currently we’re out rescuing food from Twin Cities businesses on schedules routes TWICE every week plus on-call & special pick-ups…
delivering food to food shelves & soup kitchens in Minneapolis & Saint Paul every week!

We only post major updates on this website a couple times per year. To see much more regular updates including pictures from food rescue routes, posts about new partnerships, & events we’re a part of that YOU can attend please scroll to the bottom of this page & follow our social media accounts linked to the little symbols for each platform. Facebook is the most regular one for updates & news, followed by Instagram.

If you see something that is glaringly out of date on this website, please feel free to email us at communitydrivenmn(at)gmail(dot)com & we’ll fix it.

Our mission:

“To help ensure that all people deserve and have all of their basic needs met from education, housing, food, and long-term stability through public education and direct charitable support.”

You can now make one-time or RECURRING tax-deductible donations here on our website:

This is a fresh start to organizing solutions to the age-old problems in our society of inequality & quality of life for all of us.

Our flagship Foodshare Program has been rescuing large amounts of surplus food from local groceries & restaurants and delivering that food to local food shelves & soup kitchens since May 1, 2019. Feel free to read more about our Foodshare Program by clicking “foodshare” on the website menu. This work is funded 100% by caring community members like you, so please consider donating to help with this work!

Feel free to read more about our ideas, organizing, and vision on this website & don’t hesitate to contact us with any questions or to get involved.