Boxing up hunger

Move for Hunger
USA (Newark)

As part of a family that owned a moving company in New Jersey for more than ninety years, Adam Lowy saw tonnes of food go to waste when people relocate. Six years ago he decided to do something about it, setting up Move for Hunger, now an ingenious movement that’s distributing America’s hidden food mountain. The social project works with moving companies to pick up unwanted non-perishable food items that people would toss away – and delivering them to local food banks.

Today over 800 million people don’t know where their next meal is coming from, yet 1.3 billion pounds of food is still wasted worldwide every year. For many the problem of hunger isn’t an issue that’s on their doorstep: “You don’t see a lot of poverty or food insecurity or food lines, or anything like that,” says Lowy. But watching people move he saw waste all around him. “I actually got a little upset by the fact that no one had shared this information, because you truly can’t fix a problem unless you know it exists.” With thousands of moving companies out there, he knew this simple call to action could move the needle quite a bit.

As one in seven Americans relocate each year, the success of Move for Hunger network has been remarkable. Now working with over 601 relocation companies across the US and Canada, Lowy and his team have provided nearly 5 million meals to those who are struggling: “The only way that we were actually going to fix problems is if we actually change processes,” he says. “What we want to do is to change the industry so that this process is so integrated that not only does the system exist to be able to support it, but people are demanding it.”

Adapted from a full interview in CollectivelyRead what happened when their Editor, Chris Bourn, chatted to our Editor, Lisa Goldapple, about Atlas of the Future.

Written by

Lisa Goldapple, Editor, Atlas of the Future (09 December 2015)

Project leader

Adam Lowy, Founder and Executive Director

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