#FeedThePeopleHI

The Beginning

In March 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic began to disrupt normal life, there was a rapid increase in the amount of unused food and number of chefs out of work willing to serve their community.

To help, we teamed up with Aloha Harvest and Pacific Gateway Center, to rescue that excess food and get prepared meals into the hands of those who need it most.

Through this partnership, Aloha Harvest took food/ingredients to Pacific Gateway Center where it was sorted and cooked (if needed) by Chef Hui and distributed to community organizations who fed keiki and kupuna.

Going Statewide

Chef Hui spread statewide and partnered with Activate Hawai‘i Aid to bring the #FeedThePeopleHI project to Hawai‘i Island. The program launched as a meal bag distributions meant to help “fill in the gap” in between other community feeding opportunities. 

Led by the community leaders of Puna, Hawai’i, we served meal bags containing ingredients and recipe cards for family-style meals. As much as possible, local ingredients were sourced to support local food producers, accelerate our food sustainability goals, and power an ag-focused economy.

On Friday, May 15, we began distributing 500 meal bags weekly. Recipes were developed by local chefs and by project co-leads based on “what get.”

We are grateful to the Puna team, Hawai’i County and the project co-leads Ashley Kierkiewicz & Mariah Williams for spearheading this effort.

CARES Act Funding

In October 2020 we increased the impact of our Feed The People program when we were awarded CARES grant funds to support local agriculture.

We went from rescuing food from shuttered restaurants to purchasing food from local farmers. With these funds we were able to purchase thousands of pounds of local ingredients, feeding over 10,000 people every week negatively impacted by COVID-19.

These ingredients were also used in our Give & Go program to produce 5000 meals per week for underserved communities.

Special mahalo to our partners Y. Fukunaga Products and Altres for helping us make this happen!