Project information
| Status | Finalist |
| URL | Go to website |
| Category | Health Health promotion |
| Country | United States |
| Operational areas | Rural |
| Target groups | Children, Youth, Women, Men, Seniors |
| Fixed connection | Dialup, DSL, IDSN |
| Wireless connection | WiFi, GSM, 3G |
| Access points | Home, School |
| Interact | Landline Phone, Desktop Computer, Cellphone, Laptop, PDA |
| Software License Types | Open Source |
Project location
Random images Challenge 2008
Family-to-Family - a not-for-profit grassroots hunger relief program
- Brief description
- Family-to-Family is an all-volunteer non-profit hunger relief program that links American families with "more" to rural American families with profoudly less, one-to-one, with each donating family shopping for and sending a box of non-perishable foods and other basic life necessities once a month to "their" sponsored family, along with a letter... creating food security, community, hope and connection across hundreds or even thousands of miles.
- Vision, Objectives and Goals
- Our first goal is to expand into additional impoverished American communities to feed more families. I started F-to-F (after reading a New York Times article describing the extreme poverty in the rural U.S. town of Pembroke, Illinois) with the intention of helping to bridge the gap the last week of every month for Pembroke families after food stamps were used up and local food pantries were emptied. We have already, in five years, expanded from one group of 17 volunteer donating families sending food boxes to Pembroke, to 40 groups (“chapters”) of donating families from 15 states now sending food to 400 families in 15 rural American communities. We are about to expand into two more “receiving” communities, bringing us into a total of 17 impoverished American communities in ten U.S. states. Significantly, these are communities that other hunger relief organizations have difficulty penetrating, because they are in out of the way, rural areas with few other support services. Our second goal is to expand into other countries. This is a program that is easily replicable. In the spring of 2007 we opened our first international chapter in Kampala, Uganda, where donating families are linked to, and are now supplying food to impoverished families in and around Kampala, all of which include partially orphaned and HIV/AIDS infected children. Our third goal is to put into place a “cyber-adoption” program. Right now, our operations are chapter based, i.e. all of our donating families are grouped geographically into chapters which are each organized by a local chapter chairperson. That person is responsible for coordinating the shipping of the food boxes for his/her chapter every month. We are in the process of upgrading our website to allow for “cyber-adoptions” – a way for individual donating families who are not located near an existing chapter and who don’t want to start a whole new chapter, to be matched with and to “adopt” a family of their own to provide food for.Our fourth goal is a very exciting and simple plan to extend our program into cities where local food banks are unable to adequately feed the poor. In New York City, for example, where food banks have run low on food this winter, needy families would register with the city and receive a number. Then, people interested in sponsoring a family to feed could order a box of food (seven dinner-type meals) through an existing organization (like Fresh Direct or America’s 2nd Harvest) for a particular registered family. Fresh Direct, e.g., would deliver that box, with that family’s number on it, to a local food bank, where the family would come to pick it up.
- How does ICT contribute to the organisational objectives
- Family-to-Family would not exist were it not for IT. Donating families contact us through the internet (email address on our website), receive written information about our program both from our website and through email after they first contact us, a profile of their sponsored family is sent to them through email and lists of “matched” families are maintained on our PC. Our website allows people unfamiliar with our organization to find out about it, gives information about how to join our program as a donating family, lists what foods to send each month and lists the day the food boxes are due to arrive at the chapter chairperson's home or office for shipping. A monthly newsletter detailing our activities is distributed through the internet as well. We send monthly email reminders for donating families that “Boxes are due!” Most importantly, IT provides a way for me to run the day-to-day operations of Family-to-Family with the help of only one paid employee, which keeps our operating costs extremely low. In addition, during national emergencies, Family-to-Family has acted as a clearinghouse for linking families in need of temporary help with families interested in helping. For example, after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, Louisiana in 2005, we linked (via our website and email) over 1,000 displaced families who had lost their homes, with families across the U.S. who wanted to help, each of which contacted “their” Katrina family, found out what they needed most (clothes, blankets, coffee pots, etc.), and bought those items for them on the internet.
- Transferability
- This program can be replicated by almost any organized, dedicated person with access to a computer - it doesn't have to be a large organization.
- Project summary
- Family-to-Family (FtoF) is a grassroots poverty-relief organization that uses a volunteer/friendship model to provide food relief to over 1,700 children and family members at 15 sites throughout the United States and one in Uganda. The organization uses the collective assistance of 400 volunteer families organized into chapters from 15 states. Each “sending family” sends a box of food necessities each month to a “receiving family” that has been assigned to them through Family-to-Family. Most receiving families have at least one child (many have more), although F-to-F also serves 2 communities of impoverished senior citizens. Email and the internet allow us to coordinate among and communicate with our far-flung chapters of donating families in a way that would be too expensive and time consuming otherwise. A single email can be sent to 400 donating families, or to the 40 chapters, or to the 15 community outreach workers who help coordinate our program on the “receiving” end all at once. Almost every single person who contacts us, either because they want to join us as a donating family, or because they are poor and are hoping to be linked with a donating family does so through email, and most find out about us through the internet as well. I run Family-to-Family from a computer in the basement of my home in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, and when I am away from my computer I use the internet connection on my cell phone to maintain email communications. In the last year we started writing a monthly email newsletter (http://family-to-family.org/newsletter/index.htm) about Family-to-Family to create even more of a sense of community among the donating families, community outreach workers and those receiving families with access to a computer. Our hope is that the newsletter will also help maintain longevity among our donating families. In addition to our hunger relief program, we’ve developed a number of programs designed to help teach children about living a “giving” life. For instance, we have a “Birthday Buddies” (Family-to-Family | Birthday Buddies) program, in which kids can make shoebox sized gift boxes filled with birthday surprises for a needy child, which are sent to one of our rural communities and distributed by the same outreach workers who distribute our food boxes. We also have a “Books for Life” project (Family-to-Family | Books For Life), in which kids (or adults) collect gently used books to send to our receiving communities, where books are an unaffordable luxury. We also have a party clothes donation program (Family-to-Family | Best Dressed Babes) and a breakfast foods donation program for teenagers (Family-to-Family | Breakfast Club), all of which are publicized and coordinated through our website and through email.
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