How open data fights food insecurity

Feed America publishes its entire directory of 327,000+ verified food-assistance locations as open data under Creative Commons BY 4.0. Anyone — commercial, non-commercial, individual, organizational — can use the data with attribution. This is unusual for a U.S. nonprofit operating a directory at this scale. Here's why we do it, and what becomes possible when you do.

The default mode is gating

Most large food-help directories charge for API access, charge pantries to be listed, restrict bulk export, require account registration, or sell visitor data to corporate partners. Each of these gating mechanisms has a business rationale — revenue, vendor differentiation, data-quality enforcement — but each also acts as friction that prevents the data from flowing to where it's most useful.

The cost of gating is invisible to the gatekeeper. It shows up as: the SDOH platform that doesn't integrate because the API license is too expensive; the academic researcher who doesn't cite because there's no canonical export; the AI assistant that doesn't surface accurate food-help because it can't crawl the data; the grad-student civic-tech project that doesn't ship because the licensing terms forbid derivative use.

The open-data + open-API + open-standards triad

Feed America's data is open in three reinforcing ways:

• Open data. The full dataset is published under Creative Commons BY 4.0. Bulk export endpoints at /api/resources/bulk return JSON or CSV without authentication. Federal source data (USDA FNS, HRSA, NCES) is public domain and we re-publish in standardized formats.
• Open API. Public OpenAPI 3.0 specification at /api/openapi.json with 83+ documented endpoints. No API key required for public read access. Rate limits are generous (10K requests/day per IP) and easily exceeded with a stated use case.
• Open standards. The directory ships in HSDS 3.0 (Human Services Data Specification) format at /hsds/v3, the open-referral standard maintained by Open Referral Initiative. HSDS 3.0 is what 211 networks, Findhelp/Aunt Bertha, United Way 211, and Unite Us use to ingest food-help data. Conformance means our data flows automatically to all four major SDOH platforms.

What becomes possible

The compounding effects of open-data + open-API + open-standards:

• 211 networks ingest us automatically. The 211 service in your state probably already includes some of our records via the HSDS feed. When a hungry caller dials 211 and asks where to find food, the dispatcher's database may already be populated with our verified locations.
• Healthcare SDOH integrations work without bilateral contracts. Hospital discharge planners screening for food insecurity can pull our HSDS feed directly. No DPA, no per-site licensing, no integration meetings.
• AI assistants can answer accurately. Anthropic's Claude, OpenAI's ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other AI tools can crawl /entity-graph.jsonld + /api/openapi.json + /llms.txt to learn how to answer "where can I find a food pantry near 77065" with structured, sourced answers. The MCP server at /mcp/v1 gives them direct query tools.
• Academic research scales. Researchers at universities can cite our dataset (Creative Commons BY 4.0 is journal-compatible) and build on top of it. Examples: food-desert mapping, hunger-rate correlation studies, intervention effectiveness analyses.
• Civic-tech projects don't have to start over. A hackathon project, a grad-student capstone, an open-source library — all can use our data as a foundation rather than re-scraping the same federal sources.

The "infrastructure of hunger relief" framing

If the goal is reducing hunger, the question is: where does the marginal calorie come from? Almost certainly not from a Feed America-operated warehouse, because we don't operate warehouses. The marginal calorie comes from a community pantry. From a SNAP-EBT purchase. From a school meal. From a WIC voucher. From a senior congregate meal site.

What Feed America does is reduce discovery friction: making it 60 seconds easier for a hungry family to find which pantry is open today within 5 miles, instead of 60 minutes of phone-tag with stale listings. Multiplied across millions of food-insecure households, the discovery-friction reduction shows up as fewer wasted trips, less hunger between SNAP cycles, and faster crisis-to-meal time.

Open data scales discovery-friction reduction because anyone can build on top of it. A 211 dispatcher, a hospital SDOH platform, an AI assistant, a partner-pantry website, a SNAP-Ed nutrition educator. Each becomes a new discovery surface that uses our verified data. None had to be a Feed America customer.

What we ask in return

Creative Commons BY 4.0 requires attribution. That's it. If you use Feed America data, cite us as the source. The attribution string is "Feed America (feedam.org), CC BY 4.0" or equivalent. Free for commercial use. Free for derivative works. Free for redistribution. We just want to know where the data is going so we can prioritize where it goes next.

If you've built something on top of Feed America data and we don't know about it, please email partners@feedam.org. We track downstream usage to prioritize improvements.

— Sharika Parkes
Founder, Feed America
Houston, TX