A high school student in Illinois has built an app that gets restaurants’ leftover meals to shelters instead of the trash, and it has delivered around 15,000 meals so far.
Navya Shah, a high school student from Naperville, set up Empower Futurewave with her sister to tackle food insecurity, then built the app, Bridge2Meal, to do the matching.
She saw that the food was already there and simply going to waste.
“So many restaurants, they have to cook fresh, prepared meals every single day. But at the end of the day they don’t have the infrastructure to store leftover food, (so) they dispose of it,” Navya told NBC Chicago.
Bridge2Meal works in three steps. A restaurant posts the food it has spare along with pickup details, student volunteers get an alert and accept the pickup, and shelters receive meals matched to what they need.
The numbers have grown quickly, from about 6,000 meals last year to around 9,000 so far this year.
About 20 student volunteers make the deliveries now, and the group plans to expand into Chicago and other counties. Empower Futurewave also runs English as a second language classes in eight countries.
Navya’s pitch to anyone thinking about joining is a simple one.
“You can make a difference, whoever you are, wherever you are. Everyone has an hour to give,” she said.
