0:00 Some of today's great business leaders earned their diplomas right

here in
0:04 College Park
0:05 Google founder Sergey Brin, Under Armour founder Kevin Plank top
a lengthy list
0:09 Well some of today's students are honing their entrepreneurial skills
by tackling
0:14 social causes
0:15 one of which is hunger. Senior Mia Zavalij and her friends were
leaving the
0:21 dining hall near closing time one day
0:24 when she noticed all the unsold food still sitting under the lights
0:28 where would it go? she wondered. She didn't like the answer she
got.
0:32 We saw how much food was being wasted on campus and at the
restaurants in the
0:37 surrounding area and we were like we have to do something about
this you know 60,000 meals
0:41 Are wasted every year from just University of Maryland and the EPA
0:45 estimates that there's 68 billion pounds of food in America that goes
to waste so that's
0:49 a lot of
0:50 food and in DC there's just so much hunger that we wanted to
0:54 stop the waste and then stop the hunger as well.
0:57 The Food Recovery Network collects food from two campus dining
halls

1:01 as well as leftover concessions from home football and basketball

games
1:05 students from Civicus, Alpha Pi Omega service fraternity
1:09 and other campus student organizations volunteer to pack
1:13 and deliver the food. In just one year the Food Recovery Networks
donated more
1:18 than 50,000 meals
1:20 spreading its wings from a small student group to a nationwide force
that's
1:25 eliminating food, waste, and hunger
1:27 on a major scale. How do we feel about food going out in the
community?
1:31 Well it feels a whole lot better than having it going into a dumpster
into the
1:33 waste stream in any way, shape, or form. It delivers to three
1:39 local shelters: So Others Might Eat and Gospel Rescue Ministries in
DC
1:43 and Christian Life Center just 10 minutes down the road. We are an
outreach ministry
1:48 here in Riverdale, Maryland. In this past year we developed a
partnership with the Food
1:53 Recovery Network
1:54 Where we're distributing food to needy families and homeless
1:58 individuals to soup kitchens and different agencies that we work with
2:02 Ben and I've come to this recognition that it is not a food
2:06 shortage problem in our nation. There's a food distribution problem.

2:09 And that's a problem they're solving with plenty of support

2:13 this year the Food Recovery Network won the School of Public
Policy's Do Good
2:17 Challenge
2:18 and the Ashoka Youth Venture's Banking on Youth Competition
2:21 and they've also received funding from a variety of sources
2:24 and success locally has provided a working model for other schools
2:29 the Food Recovery Network has established chapters at Brown
University
2:32 California's Pomona College and Cal Berkeley and is helping 15
other schools
2:38 come on board. America has 3,000 colleges
2:42 and universities. And about 75 percent of them
2:45 have no Food Recovery Program and are literally throwing away
2:48 tens of thousands of pounds of good food that could be
2:52 donated. Our end goal is to have Food Recovery Nation
2:56 where every college in America has a Food Recovery Network
chapter that can
3:00 have one. So you know it started here at UMD, but we want to go
nationwide
3:04 and eventually global.