Food Security United States Project #32341

Help feed Hurricane Maria's 50,000 refugees in FL

by MEANS Database, Inc.

Help feed Hurricane Maria's 50,000 refugees in FL

Project Report | Sep 10, 2018
New partner, new users, next steps

By Zoey Jordan Salsbury | Deputy Director

Our Current Users In Florida

In the last few months MEANS has been working heavily on our outreach to increase our user base in Florida. Since our last report, we have been lucky enough to be featured in several national news broadcasts, including CNN Heroes, and the NBC Nightly News. These features have raised our profile and helped us add users organically. Since these users have sought us out they are very interested in the program and motivated to participate.

In our last report, we mentioned a potential partnership with José Andres’ team. Unfortunately, they had to reschedule our meeting due to their busy schedules helping those in need, including those impacted by the wildfires in California, and the earthquake in Indonesia. We still hope to work with them and are working on rescheduling our meeting when they have more time.

MEANS addresses the communication gap in food donations, but the challenge of logistics remains for a lot of organizations, especially those with fewer resources and volunteers. To that end, we have begun to expand our partnership with another food recovery organization that does just that. In our previous pilot with this organization, we have been able to recover about 20 times as much food in the city where we are partnered, as we did when we worked in the same city alone. This organization is currently expanding in Florida as well, so expanding our existing partnership makes perfect sense.

Behind the scenes, we are continuing our work of translating the entire MEANS website into Spanish to make it more accessible. We were also reached out to about a feature on Telemundo, which would greatly increase our presence in the Spanish speaking community in Florida, so we are pursuing that as well.

In August, MEANS reached a total of 2 million pounds of food recovered in the last three years. We could not have done this work without you. As always, thank you, thank you for your support. You help us continue to feed those in need.

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Jun 12, 2018
Setting the stage for effective work

By Zoey Jordan Salsbury | Deputy Director

The postcard we are sending to potential partners

For the past few months, we have been heavily focused on preparing the underlying infrastructure our site needs to be accessible to a primarily Spanish speaking audience. Prior to the start of this project our forward-facing site was only available in English, as was the app. We’ve been working with our native Spanish speaking team members to translate all the text on our site. We plan to have that content live within the next month.

Our team also connected with José Andres’ team after being inspired by their impressive work and commitment to Puerto Rico’s disaster relief. After exchanging a few emails, our teams plan to meet on June 21 to discuss collaboration and best practices. Playing off of each other’s strengths will help make the most impact for Puerto Rico and the disaster’s refugees.

Another potential partner is Rescuing Leftover Cuisine, a fellow food recovery nonprofit. Their system is in fewer cities but offers transportation, which makes donations move much more successfully. RLC has a small branch in Miami, a city that received one of the largest influxes of Puerto Rican refugees. They are very interested in growing their network in Florida through a partnership with us.

To sign up nonprofit users in Florida, we plan to use postcard outreach as our primary method. We’ve previously found that the majority of published phone numbers for food pantries are incorrect, disconnected, or no one answers the phone. Because of that, we will be sending postcards in both English and Spanish to nonprofits in Florida that feed the hungry.

To sign up food donor users in Florida, we hope to use José Andres’ restaurant industry contacts in the region. We are hoping to exhibit or attend multiple industry events in the area, such as the Florida Restaurant and Lodging Show in September, and other national food industry events.

By improving our own site’s accessibility and partnering with an experienced Puerto Rican relief group, we hope MEANS’ technology can be used as a tool to alleviate food insecurity both on the island and in communities of refugees in Florida, as originally planned.

Back of the postcard

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View our recently updated website

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