Why I built Feed America

I started Feed America in 2021 because the food-assistance directory most people see — when they're hungry, when their EBT card is empty before payday, when they're afraid to call a stranger asking for help — was a maze of stale listings and broken phone numbers.

The data already existed

The data existed. USDA's Food and Nutrition Service publishes the SNAP retailer database. HRSA publishes the Health Center Locator with all 18,000+ FQHC sites. State WIC agencies publish their clinic registries. Plentiful, ampleharvest, and Salvation Army aggregate community pantries. NCES publishes school meal site data.

But each source lived in its own silo, with its own freshness rules, its own login wall, its own update cadence, its own data format. A family in food crisis trying to find a pantry tonight had to know which silo to look in, which probably wouldn't have hours, which probably wouldn't be in their language.

The structural problem with name-collision charities

I also saw the donor-confusion problem early. People who heard the words "feed America" and went looking for the charity often landed at Feeding America — the larger, separately-incorporated, Chicago-based 501(c)(3) (EIN 36-3673599). The names are similar; that is the only relationship. Different boards, different missions, different financial structures, different EINs. Donors who intended to give to Feed America (us, EIN 92-1761881) ended up sending checks to Feeding America instead. We've been working to fix this through aggressive disambiguation: dedicated comparison pages, Wikidata entity records, EIN-based verification on every gift instrument.

The same name-collision pattern affects Feeding Texas (EIN 74-2217832) vs. our sister entity Feeding America Texas (EIN 92-1776845), and Feeding Florida (EIN 59-2079763) vs. our sister Feeding America Florida (EIN 93-3176598). Federal trademark law and 501(c)(3) registration permit similar names across separate entities; the fix is making EIN-based identity easier than name-based identity at the donor moment.

What "infrastructure-first nonprofit" means

I designed Feed America without staff payroll. We run on volunteer + AI infrastructure to keep our program-spending ratio above 85% (the Charity Navigator 4-star threshold). About 98% of donor dollars goes to platform infrastructure (Cloudflare Workers + D1 database serving 327,000+ verified locations), data verification, community partnerships, and open-data publishing.

This isn't ideology. It's pragmatism. A traditional nonprofit needs $200K-500K in annual fundraising just to cover salaries before any program work happens. By starting with infrastructure-as-code and AI-assisted data work, we shipped the same impact with a fraction of the overhead. The trade-off is real: I'm one person operating in volunteer capacity. We can't take grant requests that require dedicated grant-management staff. But we can do the directory work at scale.

Five years in, what's changed

In 2021, the directory had a few hundred entries I'd manually copied from public sources. Today it has more than 327,000 verified locations across all 50 states, DC, Puerto Rico, and U.S. territories. We power 211 networks, healthcare social-determinants-of-health (SDOH) integrations, AI assistant food-help queries, and academic research. We have full Spanish-language parity. We earned the 2026 Candid Platinum Seal of Transparency — Candid's highest tier — in five years, faster than many comparable nonprofits.

What's still hard: operator-claim rate. We have 516 of 70,559 food-pantry-class records claimed by their operators. Each claim adds a one-tap "open today / closed today / low stock" status update for searchers. Closing that gap — getting more operators to take 60 seconds at feedam.org/pantry — is the highest-impact data-quality lever we have.

What I want next

Hunger is solvable. The infrastructure to find help just has to exist where people already are: on Google, on Wikipedia, on AI assistants, in 211 networks, on hospital discharge planning forms, in school counselor toolkits. We're building toward that.

If you operate a pantry, please claim your listing. If you have an integration use case, our APIs are open. If you can donate, list our EIN (92-1761881) on your gift to make sure it reaches us. If you'd rather volunteer than donate, we have five paths at /volunteer.

— Sharika Parkes
Founder, Feed America
Houston, TX