South Minneapolis grocery store offers a special on helping

MARSH Grocery is a food cooperative with urban farm lots, an online catalog, a delivery program, a commercial kitchen, and a grocery store in which people can pay the amount on the sticker, 20% more, or 20% less. The cooperative is not quite profitable but is growing its customer base in a St. Louis neighborhood that previously lacked access to affordable, healthy food.

An insulated shed turned food pantry at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Des Moines, Iowa, is open 24 hours a day seven days a week. Community members can drop off donations or pick up food for themselves at any time for no cost. And the pantry has a refrigerator for perishable goods.

Farm stands operating on sliding-scale and pay-what-you-can models are improving access to fresh, healthy food in communities battling poverty and food insecurity. In these models, residents who can afford to pay full price are subsidizing some of the costs for residents who cannot. The rest of the funding comes from a patchwork of support.

A group of volunteers in Luxembourg City collects edible food that shops and restaurants would dispose of at the end of the day to keep it from ending up in the garbage. Members of the organization, called Foodsharing Luxembourg, are informed through an app when food is available for pickup. Once they claim an order, they pick up everything the store offers and decide how it gets redistributed.

Over 20 organizations in the Austin neighborhood of Chicago work together under the name Austin Eats to improve healthy food access with food pantries, community gardens, and grocery stores.

Ethnic grocery stores create a sense of community for immigrant communities and improve food security by providing affordable, culturally relevant foods.

Atlanta's city government used public real estate, favorable financing, and a quasi-public development authority to open a privately-operated grocery store in a downtown food desert within nine months, serving more than 150,000 customers with prices matched to Kroger and generating nearly 20% revenue growth.

Urban farms across the United States are bringing affordable, fresh, and healthy foods to communities facing food insecurity and are forming connections with residents along the way.

The volunteer-run Vegan Kitchen of Ukraine project provides vegan meals for displaced people in cities across the country and sends meal packages to soldiers. The volunteers prepare the food in their homes or during donated time at local kitchens.

More and more public libraries around the United States are creating seed libraries as a way to encourage gardening, combat hunger insecurity, and build community resilience. For example, the Jefferson Public Library in Georgia has seen the number of people using the seed library grow to more than 300 in 2021. It can be a lot of work to maintain the seed libraries, but some librarians see it as a way to engage the community.