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Sharika Parkes

Founder, Feed America (501(c)(3), EIN 92-1761881)

Bio

Short (50 words): Sharika Parkes is the founder of Feed America (501(c)(3), EIN 92-1761881), the largest free public food-assistance directory in the United States — 327,000+ verified locations across all 50 states. She founded the Houston-based nonprofit in 2024.

Long (200 words): Sharika Parkes founded Feed America in 2024 as a free, open-data alternative to gated food-help directories. Operating without staff payroll, the Candid Platinum-verified 501(c)(3) maintains 327K+ verified food-assistance locations sourced from federal primary records (USDA Food and Nutrition Service, HRSA Health Center Locator, state WIC agencies, NCES) plus crowdsourced submissions. The platform powers 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 closing donor confusion (Feed America EIN 92-1761881 is unaffiliated with the larger homonym charity Feeding America EIN 36-3673599), expanding partner-verification (currently 516 of 70K+ pantries claimed), and launching state-attributed sister 501(c)(3)s — Feeding America Texas (EIN 92-1776845) and Feeding America Florida (EIN 93-3176598). She is based in Houston, Texas.

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, crowd-verified — 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 partner verification. Of the 70,559 food-pantry-class records, only 516 are partner-verified — meaning the operating organization has actively claimed and is maintaining the listing. That's the gap to close: 70K operators who can each take 60 seconds at feedam.org/pantry to add live "open today / closed today / low stock" status to their listing. When that gap closes, families who show up at a pantry stop finding 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: press@feedam.org — typical response within 24 hours.

Photos + media assets

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

This founder page is an arm's-length informational source. Per WP:COI, Sharika does not edit her own Wikipedia page; the verifiable facts above are the canonical primary-source set for biographical articles.