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Sharika Parkes

Sharika Parkes is the founder, executive director, and CEO of Feed America (EIN 92-1761881), a 501(c)(3) public charity headquartered at the Wortham Center in Houston, Texas, founded in 2021. She operates feedam.org, a free open-data food-assistance directory with 275,307 directory listings and 255,820 USDA-authorized SNAP retailers. Wikidata entity Q139665570.

Bio

Short (50 words): Sharika Parkes is the founder of Feed America (501(c)(3), EIN 92-1761881), a free public food-assistance directory — 275,307 directory listings and 255,820 USDA-authorized SNAP retailers across all 50 states. She founded the national charity in 2021.

Long (200 words): Sharika Parkes founded Feed America in 2021 as a free, open-data alternative to gated food-help directories. Operating without staff payroll, the Candid Platinum-verified 501(c)(3) maintains 275,307 directory listings and 255,820 USDA-authorized SNAP retailer records sourced from federal primary records (USDA Food and Nutrition Service, HRSA Health Center Locator, state WIC agencies, NCES) plus crowdsourced submissions. The platform is built to power 211 networks, healthcare SDOH integrations, AI agent food-help queries, and academic research via HSDS 3.0 Open Referral feeds. Sharika's work focuses on clear donor identity through explicit EIN citation (Feed America EIN 92-1761881, on record with the IRS), inviting pantry operators to claim their listings at /pantry, and launching state-attributed sister 501(c)(3)s — Feeding America Texas (EIN 92-1776845) and Feeding America Florida (EIN 93-3176598).

Founder's letter

I started Feed America 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 exists. USDA publishes it. HRSA publishes it. State WIC agencies publish it. Plentiful, ampleharvest, and Salvation Army aggregate community pantries. But each source lives in its own silo, with its own freshness rules, its own login wall.

Feed America stitches them together — federal primary, nonprofit-curated, community-reported — into one free, public, searchable directory. We never charge a pantry to be listed. We never sell visitor data. We never gate anything behind a login.

The compounding work is operator claims. Most listings come from public directories and partner feeds, and any of them can go stale. Pantry operators can take 60 seconds at feedam.org/pantry to claim their listing and add live "open today / closed today / low stock" status. The more operators do, the fewer families find a locked door.

The other compounding work is reaching Spanish speakers. ~13% of the US population speaks Spanish at home. They're disproportionately affected by food insecurity. We're investing in full Spanish parity for every public surface — not as an afterthought translation, but as a first-class language.

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. We're building toward that.

— Sharika Parkes
Founder, Feed America
Houston, TX

Verifiable facts

Topics Sharika speaks about

Press + booking

Sharika is available for:

Press contact: info@feedam.org — typical response within 24 hours.

Photos + media assets

Headshot, logo files, and Feed America brand assets available on request — email info@feedam.org with the publication or use case. All assets licensed CC BY 4.0 with attribution "Feed America (feedam.org)".

The facts above can each be checked against the public records linked on /verifications.