America's Second Harvest

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

America's Second Harvest is a United States based nonprofit organization. It consists of a nation-wide network of over 200 food banks that serve every county in the United States as well as Puerto Rico. It purports to be America's largest charitable hunger-relief organization. It is headquartered in Chicago, Illinois.

[edit] History

In the late 1960's, John van Hengel, a retired businessman in Phoenix, Arizona began volunteering at a local soup kitchen, and began soliciting food donations for the kitchen. He ended up with far more food than the kitchen could use in its operations. Around this time, he spoke with one of the clients, who told him that she regularly fed her family with discarded items from the grocery store's garbage bins. She told him that the food quality was fine, but that there should be a place where unwanted food could be stored and later accessed by people who needed it, similar to how banks store money.

Van Hengel began to actively solicit this unwanted food from grocery stores, local gardens, and nearby produce farms. His effort led to the creation of St. Mary's Food Bank in Phoenix, the nation's first food bank.

In 1976, St. Mary's was given a federal grant to assist in developing food banks across the nation. This effort was formally incorporated into a separate non-profit organization in 1979.

In March 2000, America's Second Harvest merged with Foodchain, at that time the nation's largest food-rescue organization.