When students move out of their residence halls for the summer, they tend to leave behind a lot of things, and that includes perfectly good food. As students rush out of their dorms, excited to finally be finished with a busy Spring semester, they might forget about the huge box of granola bars buried in the back of their cabinet or the giant jar of peanut butter they never opened. Unfortunately, when this happens, that food is thrown away as residential life services clean out the dorms. This perfectly good food is left to rot in a landfill, emitting methane gas rather than feeding hungry people in the community. Luckily, there are organizations working with Food Recovery Network (FRN) to ensure that this food never goes to waste.

Move for Hunger (MFH), an organization founded in 2009 that works with moving companies all around the United States to collect food to donate as people move out of their homes, is one of those organizations. Since their founding, they have recovered more than 16 million pounds of food. Last year, FRN had the pleasure of partnering with MFH for our third annual Move Out For Hunger event, expanding the model that MFH has built to college campuses around the United States.

Since 2017, FRN and MFH have worked together to ensure FRN chapters collect non-perishable foods from students as they move out of their residence halls. Our FRN chapters provide the people power to raise awareness for the event and collect food donations, while MFH leverages their partnerships with moving companies to provide the transportation needed to deliver the food to hunger-fighting nonprofit organizations.

As the Food Recovery Verified VISTA, I had the pleasure of planning MOFH in Spring 2019, where nine FRN chapters hosted MOFH events on their campuses: Brandeis University, Goucher College, Knox College, Lawrence University, Olivet Nazarene University, University of Delaware, University of New Mexico, University of Texas at Dallas, and West Virginia University. All of the students who participated saw the direct impact of their work as the piles of surplus food grew. Thanks to the hard work of our student leaders, the truck drivers, MFH, and FRN staff, 4,164 pounds of food was recovered and delivered to those who need it the most. This event was a huge success and we couldn’t be more grateful for the hard work of everyone involved.

We are especially grateful to our chapter at Goucher College. Not only did they host a successful event, but they were also kind enough to invite me and Cassie Olovsson, our Manager of External Partnerships, to join them. We were so proud to see the passion of our Goucher student leaders, as they worked hard to make this event a success. Originally, there was a fear that the chapter would not have the materials they needed to collect food from students around campus because food collection boxes were in short supply. But thanks to the resourcefulness of their volunteers, our Goucher College chapter was able to gather boxes from local grocery stores, who generously donated them so that the chapter could collect the food donations. The Goucher chapter recovered almost 100 pounds of food and thanks to our partners at MFH, the food was delivered to the Maryland Food Bank in Baltimore.

We want to thank Move for Hunger for their hard work ensuring that the food donations that our FRN chapters collected were delivered to nonprofit organizations in their communities. We would also like to thank Clif Bar, who were generous enough to supply hundreds of Clif Bars to our students to hand out to people as an incentive to donate their food. We look forward to hosting another successful Move Out for Hunger event in 2020. We have 30 chapters committed to hosting this event in 2020 so it is sure to be an even greater success this year! If you are a company that is interested in getting involved and learning more about how you can sponsor the event, don’t hesitate to email us at info@foodrecoverynetwork.org.