Feeding San Diego Named a 2021 Classy Awards Finalist 

Published On: June 16th, 2021By Categories: Must Read2.3 min read

We are excited to share that Feeding San Diego has been named a Top 50 Finalist for the 2021 Classy Awards. We’re honored to be recognized for our work and to be amongst such an inspiring group of national nonprofits doing commendable work in their respective communities.

Classy is an online fundraising software for nonprofits. They launched the Classy Awards in 2009 to recognize the achievements of nonprofits and social enterprises operating in our communities and around the world, and to shine a spotlight on the new strategies, creative thinking, and ideas that move the needle on some of the biggest issues our world faces today. We’re proud to announce that Feeding San Diego has been recognized for its work addressing hunger in San Diego County through food rescue.

Why Our Work Matters

Since its inception in 2007, Feeding San Diego’s vision has been a hunger-free and healthy San Diego. Over the past year, Feeding San Diego has provided 32 million meals to people facing hunger through a decentralized food rescue model and our distribution network, including more than 320 distribution partners, 225 farms and packing sheds, 10,000 volunteers, 19,300 donors, and more than 50 staff members. We serve children, families, seniors, military families, veterans, college students, and underserved populations with barriers to opportunity throughout San Diego County. Food rescue is at the core of our programs and operations. Our unique, resourceful model of operation focuses on preventing the food that already exists in the county from going to waste, and instead, connecting it to people in need.

2020 Accomplishments

The social sector at large experienced immense challenges in 2020 to drive their missions forward, but through our work, our team was still able to activate an impactful pandemic response. Our actions ranged from adding emergency distributions and launching our own large-scale ones in hunger hot spots to creating the Find Food Map to make accessing food assistance much easier. We also doubled the number of meals provided to the community through our direct sites and agency partner distributions, implemented no-touch and drive-though food distributions at hundreds of sites, expanded partnerships with local school districts, increased support and resources for our community partners, supplied additional food to our rural mobile pantries, and purchased nearly 800 percent more truckloads of food in three months than we typically purchase annually to meet the demand.

This year, 13 Classy Awards will be distributed across four categories: Social Innovation, Adapt & Overcome, Lifetime Achievement, and People’s Choice. We encourage you to vote for us in the People’s Choice category here. Voting is open until June 25. Winners will be announced on September 28, and we look forward to sharing updates with our community then.

For more information on the Classy Awards, visit www.classyawards.org.