Creating awesome food programs is hard work, farewell Food Not Waste

Hello all,

First, we want to say HUGE thank you to everyone who has supported Food Not Waste and us as individuals. Unfortunately, we have decided to shut down Food Not Waste and feel it is not the right time to start this program in Kitchener-Waterloo based on the current prioities of food assistance programs.

It has not been an easy decision, especially when there are so many awesome people out there, like you, who want to encourage us to keep working on it. We feel so grateful to the support of key people and organizations who allowed the Food Not Waste pilot to be such a remarkable success, collecting 7,334 lbs of food in just 4 weeks!

We have learned so much by starting Food Not Waste but we both feel that as new graduates we need to seek employment opportunities that can financially support ourselves and the repayment of our student loans.

Although, this may seem sad we want this to be the beginning of something great. So we are developing a toolkit, with everything we have done, all the financials, the contracts, and all the nitty gritty details. We will be publishing it soon, attached to this blog post. We want to do this so that others can take up this work in other communities and countries and so that people can learn from our successes as well as our mistakes.

We are still deeply committed to solving this growing problem of food waste and hunger. We hope that you can support our decision and that a few special people out there can take up this important work.

Peace,

Elle & Jon