Ways to End Hunger
Estimate your community's food aid needs
Increase your distribution capacity
Make food aid accessible
Reduce the cost of ending hunger by 25%
Reduce the Cost of Ending Hunger by 90%
Permit Needy to Access Food Aid as Often as They Need
Welcome, Reassure And Comfort Clients
Offer as Much Variety as Possible
Reduce Waste and Humiliation—Let Clients Assemble Their Own Food Boxes
Offer Food When Other Help Is Not Available
Reduce Pressure On Local Resources and Boost the Local Economy
Get The Government To Do Its Part
Evaluate your food pantry
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Reduce the Cost of Ending Hunger Up to 25%
How to change donors’ thinking
No one is suggesting that food banks or food pantries should just begin refusing or stopping food drives tomorrow. You can’t realistically do that. However, you should begin the long process of weaning America from measures that cannot end hunger to measures that can. Canned good drives cannot—they don’t leverage enough resources. But fund drives can add up to enough.
 So how to coax people who are accustomed to giving cans to start giving cash? Here are some ideas:
- Assemble a display of $10 worth of store-purchased food and $10 worth of food bank food next to each other to graphically illustrate the huge difference.
- Make a traveling exhibit to take to churches or civic groups. You might want to drop down to $1, as $10 in food bank food is generally too much to carry!
- Take pictures of the display and highlight them in your newsletter or other communications to convey to people just how much further their dollars will stretch if they have them used at the food bank instead of at the store.
- Assemble a display of $1 in food-bank food and take a picture of it to circulate as a teaching aid. Try it with a 1-pound can of powdered Similac, a 16-ounce box of Total cereal, a loaf of bread, some Pop-Tarts, a small jar of salad dressing, some popcorn snacks and some fresh produce. When people see how much further their dollars will stretch, they are easy to coax into giving money instead of food.
- In churches where children traditionally carry food to the altar, ask people to wash out an empty can and put their check in it so that the image of food and feeding is preserved while the dollars help 20 times more.
- Invite a group, which might otherwise have done a canned good drive, to collect money and then go to the food bank with the pantry staff and pick out what their money will pay for.
- If a group gives money to a pantry, send them a picture of how much food bank food that covers.
- Develop some money collection envelopes printed to look like a can on one side.
It is a myth that food banks or food pantries must have food drives in order to get enough food. One-to-one leveraging of resources will never add up to end hunger. By soliciting money instead of canned good drive goods we can.
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