Millions of dollars' worth of food ends up in school trash cans every day. What can we do?

The Lagos Food Bank Initiative works to address hunger and malnutrition among those in need and reduce food waste. It offers several programs including temporary food assistance, nutritious meal interventions, and family farming among others. Since it was founded in 2016, the organization has expanded its efforts and now has 17,000 volunteers across the country and has helped more than two million people.

The Grocery Spot is a free grocery store where residents can access redistributed food from local pantries and for-profit grocery stores that have more than they can sell. The Grocery Spot addresses food waste and access, providing more than 140,000 pounds of free food to more than 600 families each week.

The Madison Metropolitan School District created a food delivery program so students could access meals during the pandemic when teaching became virtual. When they noticed only 15,000 meals were being delivered, a low number, they created changes to their meal distribution program. The district collaborated with Badger buses to deliver the school lunches, then at specific stops school officials would distribute the meals to students. After the changes, 50,000 meals were delivered.

Using AI technology, home address data, and algorithms, the Metro21 Institute at Carnegie Mellon was able to find the best school bus routes to deliver school meals to students during the COVID-19 pandemic. The solution wouldn’t have worked with the help of a community of partners, leaders, and volunteers. “It truly has taken a village.”

To reduce food waste and address food insecurity on campus, Temple University students started a group messaging app to inform students about free extra food from events.

A community organization in Indiana called Cultivate "rescues" food from local caterers, hospitals, casinos, and businesses to then be packaged into take-home meals for students at Woodland Elementary School that come from food-insecure homes. Cultivate is in its second year of existence, has three staff and 400 volunteers, and hopes to expand beyond their pilot program to reach all 21 schools in the district.

In rural Alabama, where the nearest grocery store can be more than 20 miles, residents are finding that robust community gardens are helping to improve general wellness. Even beyond offering free and healthy meals to community members, the garden has also had impacts on mental health and physical fitness.

France is at the forefront of efforts to integrate internet literacy into standard primary and secondary course requirements. By partnering with journalists and educators, the French government is working to stop the spread of misinformation by teaching students how to identify misleading tweets, articles, and other sources.

In Michigan, private design firm Civilla successfully pitched a human-centered redesign of the state's unwieldy and redundant public benefits form. By highlighting and emphasizing the experience that applicants had with the old firm, Civilla convinced the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services to make a change, and the new form is now 22% more likely to be completed.

New Jersey legislators are introducing a series of actions that can help drastically reduce food waste and ensure more food is provided to those going hungry. The varied measures include provisions for farms where post-harvest produce is collected and donated, as well as clarifications on food labeling to help prevent confusion about expiry dates.