An organisation helping drive down food waste in the United States and Canada has won the fourth .ORG of the Year from Public Interest Registry. Food Rescue Hero has designed systems to automate the time consuming and variable coordination of food recovery, enabling a scalable impact on food waste, food insecurity and climate change.
Food Rescue Hero has been in operation since 2016 and today has a network of 14 partners in the US and Canada, and a growing community of 34,000 volunteer drivers. Together they have diverted 45 million kilograms of perfectly good food from landfill and mitigated 30.0 million kilograms of CO2 emissions. With Food Rescue Hero, coordination between food donors, non-profit partners and volunteer drivers is reliable, timely and transparent, and yields greater food waste prevention and shrink real time data transparency and greater overall impact.
Leveraging human-centered design, the Food Rescue Hero app offers an elegant, encouraging and positive experience that’s contagious and fuels the movement. The community of Food Rescue Heroes continues to grow and deliver at a 99% service level, outperforming commercial rates.
Food Rescue Hero was also the winner of the 2022 .ORG Impact Award for Hunger and Poverty and received donations of US$35,000 for .ORG of the Year and a $10,000 donation as a category winner to an eligible charitable entity of their choice.
There were a number of other awards in the .ORG of the Year that followed a record 947 organisations and individuals submitting entries this year from more than 68 countries across the seven award categories.
The other categories and award winners, who all received a $10,000 donation to an eligible charitable entity of their choice, were:
- Community Building – Kageno Worldwide – an African initiative with a mission to transform impoverished communities into places of hope and opportunity. Kageno works with community leaders to develop programs in four key areas of Education, Healthcare, Income Generation, and Conservation.
- Quality Education for All – Hello World – a global paradigm-busting solution to the education deficit that tackles the twin injustices of lack of educational resources in remote and last-mile communities and the digital divide. Hello World is helping solve the lack of global education by working with the most marginalised communities to build state-of-the-art, Solar Powered Internet Hubs and bridge the digital divide.
- Environmental Stewardship – TIP Sessions – focussing on a combination of gender-sensitive response to climate change, and technological intervention with lingual and regional context to achieve climate and gender justice.
- Diversity, Equity and Inclusion – Pro Mujer – working to advance gender equality in Latin America for over 32 years. It provides underserved women with financial inclusion, skilling opportunities and health services in order for them to reach their full potential, become agents of change and improve their living conditions.
- Health and Healing – Limbitless Solutions – a University of Central Florida-based, non-profit dedicated to empowering individuals by creating access for children—and soon adult first responders and veterans—to personalised, high-functioning and expressive prosthetic arms without financial burden, using technology and interdisciplinary efforts to address accessibility issues to increase access and inclusion.
- Rising Stars (leaders, under 25, making a difference in their communities) – Mathias Charles Yabe, AkoFresh – a green Agritech organisation that is offering sustainable agricultural services leveraging climate smart solutions for improved food security and ensuring ecosystem resilience in local communities. The innovation for AkoFresh is a mobile solar powered cold storage preservation technology that extends shelf life of perishable crops from the usual 5-day period to 21 days to reduce post-harvest losses and ensure improved livelihood of smallholder farmers.