Hunters for the Hungry

Through the nonprofit organization, Hunters for the Hungry, Virginia hunters help hungry families get quality meat by donating their surplus game. Hunters throughout the state of Virginia can participate in their sport and ensure that the meat does not go to waste by donating it to Hunters for the Hungry which then distributes venison to

Books are Food for Your Brain

Foods for Others’ partner organization, Books are Food for Your Brain, works to improve literacy for low-income children in Northern Virginia by making sure that children who visit Food for Others have plenty of books to read in their homes. What is Books are Food For Your Brain? Books are Food for Your Brain provides

Community gardens provide space for families to grow their own produce

“Give someone a fish, and you’ll feed them for a day. Teach someone to fish, and you’ve fed them for a lifetime.” The origin of this quote is hotly contested, but its validity is most certainly not. Self-sufficiency is a sure way to promote better health outcomes within a community. But what happens when the

My eye-opening summer at Food for Others

My journey with Food for Others began in 2009, when I was going through a really tough time in my life. I had been in a traumatic event which put me into a depression and someone suggested that trying to give back to my community might help distract me from everything I had going on

Rx for Food

As the Executive Director of a food bank/pantry, I spend a lot of time thinking about how to reach hungry people in our community. Even though we serve over 30,000 individuals each year, we know that 75,000 people live in poverty in Northern Virginia. That gap keeps me up at night. How do we reach

Why I love volunteering at Food for Others . . .

I have been at Food for Others for about three years as one of our volunteers.  I will be starting my fourth year in 2020. For my first two and a half years I worked on the Power Pack Program, but now I work on both sides of the warehouse : in P3 and as

Give your freezer a makeover to reduce your food waste

How much food do you think you throw away every year? Ten pounds? Twenty pounds? The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that each American tosses out 225-290 pounds of food annually. That’s the weight of two teenagers! You can do the math – a family of four creates roughly one thousand pounds of food waste

Food for Others raising money to fund a mobile food pantry

We have an audacious goal at Food for Others this holiday season. We know that there are families in need of food that we’re not reaching, and we’re going to do something about it. We’re counting on you to help. A couple of posts ago, I wrote about the economics of living in our region

Reducing Your Refrigerated Food Waste

A lot of food goes to waste in the typical U.S. family’s kitchen. TIME reported that the average family throws away $640 worth of food every year. That’s enough to feed a family of four for a whole month! At Food for Others, it is important for us to try to reduce this waste in