Helen ver Duin Palit, founder and president of the nonprofit organization America Harvest, told the story of how a potato skin inspired her to form an international organization to feed the homeless. The speech was the first event at Dartmouth for this year's National Hunger and Homelessness Awareness Week.
"For over 20 years, America Harvest's only focus has been creating sustainable food distribution programs. Our goal is to turn surplus food that would otherwise have gone to waste into plenty," Palit said to a small but enthusiastic crowd of Dartmouth students attending her speech.
America Harvest's collective programs deliver enough food to provide over 700,000 meals to those in need around the world. Currently, America Harvest has 122 harvest programs in the United States and 83 around the world, mostly in Europe. The foundation of America Harvest is the concept of picking up and delivering the perishable, left-over food to feed the world's homeless and jobless.
Palit came up with the idea for America Harvest in 1980 -- over a potato skin. After graduating from Texas Tech University in 1979, she moved to New Haven, Conn., and ran the Community Soup Kitchen for Yale University. At the end of a particularly trying day at the Soup Kitchen, Palit went across the street to "chill out" over a margarita and a potato skin, which happened to the be the ultimate in collegiate cuisine at the time.
Innocently curious, Palit asked herself "whatever happens to the insides of all these potatoes?" It turned out potato skins had become more popular than the cooked potato insides and restaurants had to throw out leftover potatoes.
Palit discovered a readily available amount of food that restaurants discarded every day and could easily be given to the homeless (after much discussion with the manager of the restaurant). Right then it occurred to Palit that it was inevitable that every company that has food as a part of its business would have some leftover food they could not sell.
As a "social entrepreneur," Palit developed a plan for a simple but groundbreaking nonprofit organization to pick up perishable food and deliver it directly to shelters, free of any charge.
"This final package is the harvest model that has stood the test of time and locations for 22 years and 203 cities," said Palit.
Palit spoke on America Harvest's current status in relation to the current downturn in the economy, though the speech focused on overcoming seemingly impossible obstacles. Palit put it as "a double whammy" -- the rise in unemployment has caused the number of homeless people to double or even triple and the need for food has steadily increased.
Also, America Harvest has always depended on grant money, but now "there has been a substantial decrease in the availability of grant money because most foundations have lost tremendous value in the stock market," said Palit.
Especially in the post-Sept. 11 environment the public has lost faith in the nonprofit industry, said Palit. Yet America Harvest perseveres, insists Palit, because the program is completely scalable.
"Our cost per meal is the lowest in the business -- 42 cents per meal" Palit said. Palit strongly affirmed not only America Harvest's cost effectiveness but its focus on new social solutions.
"I want to harvest the best ideas, the best practices, the stories behind the biggest successes and the abject failures. And I want to turn them into the seeds that will help people who are looking to start, improve or simply maintain their programs in growing the next 'crop' of solutions."
Palit challenged her listeners not just to participate with America Harvest but to go out and find their passions and to sow the seeds for solutions to our society's problems.
For example, Palit questioned what happens to all the outdated books from the Dartmouth libraries -- and what Dartmouth students will do about book shortages and other causes for social concern.
