Massive amounts of healthy food is going to waste every day in our communities. Most Groceries, Restaurants, and Bakeries throw away large amounts of perfectly good food every week. This food is often healthy food that is still fresh, the stores simply don’t have space for it & can’t sell it fast enough.

Statistics show that we currently throw away as much as 40% of our produce before it can even be sold, while countless people in the Twin Cities go to bed hungry every night. We can do better!

Our most immediate program (our Foodshare Program) began in May of 2019, and since then we have been picking up surplus food from local groceries & restaurants and making it available to people in need through food shelves & soup kitchens, or by giving the food away ourselves at community events or in public spaces. Our Foodshare Program has grown to where we are now distributing healthy surplus food to needy people in the Twin Cities at least 4 times every week using both our Foodshare van “Laura” & for smaller pickups we’re minimizing our carbon footprint by using our Foodshare bicycle cart “Gabby”.

Community Driven has recently been bringing food deliveries to Keystone Community Food shelf (multiple locations), Groveland Food Shelf, Joyce Food Shelf, Sabathani Food Shelf, Mary’s Place, Sharing & Caring Hands, Saint Paul Public Housing Authority (subsidized senior homes), & Glendale Food Shelf, just to name a few. As our funding & food supply grows (we are constantly hitting the pavement and finding new sources of food that is going to waste) we are constantly increasing the partnerships where we both rescue and share food. If you have a connection to sources of food that are going to waste or organizations we should work with for distribution, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us at communitydrivenmn@gmail.com.

We are confident in our work and our vision, and we invite you to get involved and help make our vision a reality. We are working hard to target and rescue healthy food that is going to waste that other organizations are not willing to rescue & transport….to put it bluntly: while larger co-ops and grocery stores have waiting lists of nonprofits ready to pick up their surplus foods— smaller businesses (restaurants, smaller groceries, etcetera) have food that is going to waste that is slipping through the cracks. Most organizations don’t want to deal with this food waste because it is less consistent and will take more work. We are willing to make the long-term commitment and put in the work to deal with this food waste that nobody else is addressing.

If you want to support established organizations that simply distribute food to the needy, then we encourage you to please support the numerous organizations in the Twin Cities that have been doing that work. We commend them and consider them to be allies in our organizing for the greater good. There is enough food going to waste in the Twin Cities that we believe there could be many more organizations finding their niche in rescuing local surplus food before we will ever come close to fully solving the problems of food waste in our communities.

If you want to support an organization that is new and small but dedicated to a more holistic vision, then you’ve come to the right place. What makes us different is our long-term vision of holistic community organizing to build a better and more equitable society. While our Foodshare Program is a simple idea and the first of our programs to see physical results, we don’t see our work as one simple food distribution program in a vacuum by itself.

While our Foodshare Program grows we are also working and planning to rescue food that other organizations will not be able to deal with. Our Neighborhood Food Project is one example of organizing that we are committed to that will increase food sources for the needy while rescuing surplus food that no other organization is working to rescue. We are also committed to figuring out the complex problems associated with prepared food that is going to waste that other food justice organizations will not distribute. Once food is prepared in certain ways it creates numerous health and safety problems for any organization that would want to rescue and distribute this food to the needy. Think about all of the half prepared, partially prepped, and baked goods that get thrown away almost daily at every restaurant or deli across the Twin Cities. Other organizations have decided that it would take too much work to rescue and redistribute this food that is going to waste, and we understand that it probably makes more sense for them to instead find more unprepared food and distribute that instead. This leaves a lot of perfectly good food that is going to waste, and no one is organizing a solution to this portion of our food industry’s food waste. We are committed to taking the time to figure out these complex problems, and even though it may take a huge investment of money and organizing time, we think that in the long-run it will be worth it for us to take on this challenge.

During our first fiscal year (May 2019-April 2020), we were able to rescue & distribute over 100K worth of food on a Foodshare Program budget of less than 9K (that’s over $12 worth of food for every $1 spent). Two months into our 2nd fiscal year we already distributed over 38K worth of food, putting us on pace to rescue & distribute over 225K worth of food during our 2nd fiscal year (and that’s only if our volume stays the same & we fully expect it to continue increasing every week).