Public Good and Feeding America

The company I’ve chosen for my public good evaluation is one that I’m particularly partial to: Feeding America. A nonprofit, its mission–as stated on its website–is to, “feed America’s hungry through a nationwide network of member food banks and engage our country in the fight to end hunger.” Feeding America’s social good initiative is to essentially combat hunger by providing resources to those most at risk.

Feeding America uses surprisingly extensive and thorough data acquired through its research to target specific areas of need; it’s working with metrics and numerical values well into the millions. In a 2014 comprehensive project entitled “Hunger in America 2014”, Feeding America conducted research based on large probability sampling of food banks utilized and clients served. Stemming from the communities served, Feeding America was able to generate demographic information and descriptive statistics, such as hunger ratios. With its data, Feeding America is not only able to spread the word, educate, and raise awareness of hunger, but encourage donations and engagement from the public.

Having chartered in 1979, Feeding America is a pretty recognized player in the nonprofit sector, and it’s consequently well-endorsed for the most part. Annually, it publishes an exhaustive report of its finances. As trying to make sense of all the numbers provided in said report gives me a headache, I’ll just say Feeding America’s income is impressive to say the least. That said, it seems to be on the up and up with the allocation of its expenses, as roughly 96% of them goes to food procurement. An additional 2% or so goes toward a combination of public awareness and education, research and analysis, public programs and policy, and member services. Less than 2% is allocated to what I can assume are salaries and other fund expenditures.

The only way I can see anyone involved in Feeding America’s endeavors benefiting in those other than for the public good, is through secondary exposure. Feeding America has a slew of celebrity endorsers and corporate donors/partners alike that stand to gain a lot from being associated with such interests. Celebrities stand to have their respective brands validated for humanitarian efforts, earning them consumers of their work and new work itself. Companies stand to gain customer support and a likely generous percentage of the donated proceeds. All considered, it seems as though Feeding America does a lot for the public good with the resources it has. As Vania Sena says in her TED Talk, before raising the question, “Can big data be used for the common good?”: “We should expect and demand that data are used for the common good; they’re used to improve the living standards; they’re used to improve the society we live in.” My assessment of Feeding America is that it does just that.