Beating hunger. Why Unsung needs you.

Two years and one week ago, I finished running across the United States to raise awareness for homelessness in America http://www.wired.com/2014/06/bitcoin-run-jason-king/

#bitcoinacrossamerica

The homeless situation in America is an epidemic of saddening proportions that I have had a front row seat to.

The organization I helped found, Sean’s Outpost, has fed over 167,000 meals to the homeless in the past three years.

Although that number feels significant at first glance, there are an estimated 3.5 million homeless Americans, and another 46 million who go hungry each day.

167,000 meals doesn’t even begin to tip the scale.

In 2014, I was really depressed about this situation. I had no idea how to begin tackling such a large issue.

So, like Forrest Gump, I ran. I trekked 3,237 miles from Miami Beach, Florida to San Francisco, California over the course of four and a half months . I used the run to start a conversation about homelessness in America and to contemplate a way to address this issue at scale. By the end of the run, I had brought awareness to thousands of Americans about the plight of the homeless in this nation. Nevertheless, I felt no closer to a drastic solution to this issue.

To quote the founder of DC/LA Central Kitchen, Robert Egger “You can’t eat awareness”

Fast forward two years to today. I am still just as passionate about helping the homeless and feeding the hungry. But my mindset has changed dramatically. The problem of drastically reducing hunger now seems solvable.

This shift in mindset can be attributed to the work we’ve done at Unsung. http://www.unsung.org/

The piece of information that I was missing in 2014, that I understand today, is how bad the food waste situation is in the United States.I knew it was big, but the total scale is almost unimaginable.

In the U.S. we throw away over 500 BILLION DOLLARS(retail value) worth of food.

That amount alone is enough to feed every human on this planet for 3 months. Everyone, man, woman and child. In that light, feeding the 46 million who are hungry doesn’t seem that unattainable. There just needs to be a way to get such excess food to them.

Running across the country was one of the accomplishments I am most proud of. But honestly, if I could have that time back and devote it to what we are working on now, I would do it in a heartbeat. What we are doing at Unsung is truly going to make a difference.

At the end of the day, feeding the hungry is an inventory problem. Thanks to the revolution of the sharing economy, however, we now have a highly effective solution.

If you think about companies at the forefront of the sharing economy, they didn’t create anything new. They just figured out a more efficient way of dealing with excess inventory. There weren’t less empty seats in passenger cars before Uber or fewer spare bedrooms before AirBnB. Those companies just figured out a way of unlocking a value that already existed. I can’t think of a better value to unlock than basic nutrition for everybody.

With the Unsung app, if you are a restaurant, grocery, catering service… or you just have leftover food, all you need to do is open our app and tell us what food you have. You’ll get a tax deduction and our volunteer delivery people, competing to gain points on our leaderboard, will instantly get a notification of your offer. They will then bring your donation to a local charity or to someone in need.

It’s simple a simple concept. When we explain it people get it immediately and wonder why this never existed before. More importantly, the concept works. It actually works, our initial tests have been extremely promising. We’ve been testing it in the Baltimore/DC area for months and now we are ready to start scaling. If it can work in Baltimore, there’s no reason it can’t work everywhere.

So, if The world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate (AirBnB).The world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles (uber).Why can’t the world’s largest soup kitchen have no physical locations (unsung.org)?

There is no reason. Everybody should be able to eat. The team at #Unsung and I are 100% committed to making that a reality. And we are on our way, but we can’t do it alone. We’re going to need your help.

Currently, we’re running a crowd fund to finish out the development process of getting Unsung launched on the iOS and Google play stores. We’re raising $25,000. Not a small amount of money, but for the amount of benefit we’re building we think it’s quite the value.

In our first two weeks, we have raised close to $11,000 which is amazing. But we still have quite a ways to go. We could really use your help in getting there. Donate to Unsung, please. Any amount is a great help. That’s not hyperbole, a $2 donation can be very powerful.

Donate to this crowdfund, and tell everyone you know about it. Tweet it. Facebook it. Snapchat the hell out of it. Scream it from the mountain tops.

Know someone who owns a restaurant? See if they’d be interested in getting on the app. Want us to launch Unsung in your town? TELL US!

The kid gloves are off people. It’s time to get serious about ending hunger. We can do this. Together, we really can. Hope to hear from you soon.

#HackHunger