Wednesday, September 16, 2015

End World Hunger

Would you mind paying a few extra cents for everything you order at a restaurant if you knew those pennies were going towards feeding the hungry? My guess is that you wouldn't mind. In fact, you likely wouldn't even notice the increase in price and you'd appreciate every bite of your meal even more if you knew you were helping end world hunger. I want to create an initiative that encourages restaurants and grocery stores (big chains and small family businesses alike) to give a small percentage of the profits from each sale to combatting world hunger. Some businesses wouldn't even increase their prices, but most probably would. Either way, this is an effort that would help everyone and bring the world together for something great. We could even develop an app that maps out every restaurant that has joined our initiative and taken the pledge to end world hunger to make it easier for average people to support the cause.

The restaurants would gain customers, because everyone loves buying things when they know the money is going towards something beneficial. We could provide window decals and signage to every restaurant that commits to our initiative for a minimum of five years. They could be as simple as their logo next to ours with "eat here to feed the world" below them along with our website. The app would be huge on a marketing level for both the restaurants and our non-profit's fundraising. Another potential marketing benefit for the businesses would be the ability to inform each customer how much they've helped the world by eating at that restaurant or shopping at that grocery store. Each restaurant's partnership with us would also allow them to receive some tax benefits. 

Everyone would benefit from doing something good with their hard earned money without changing a single thing in their lives. That alone is huge, because people want to help others even though their money is meticulously budgeted out. The app would allow people to quickly find restaurants near them that use their profits for good and not greed. Everyone would have the ability to receive a good meal and feed the hungry all for one price. This will put an end to those annoying cashier phrases like, "Would you like to donate $5 to ______ organization/fund?" I know they mean well, but they really are annoying. Plus, I'm confident that more money would be raised if everyone was donating 25 cents here and $1.25 there as opposed to a significantly lower amount of people donating $1 here and $5 there. 

The obvious benefit would be the money raised to feed the hungry both domestically and internationally. The awesome part is that we could use the donations to provide healthy food to the hungry by investing in gardens and educating people in agriculture and healthy forms of culinary arts. This would allow people to not only receive nourishment, but potentially get a job as well.

Let me know if you have anything to add to this or if you feel you may be able to help!



Edit 02/07/16 - I'm feeling pretty grateful right now. I just received a grant from the Yum! Brands Foundation. 100% of the grant will be applied to this project, but we still have a long way to go! Please let me know if you would like to help.