Rio Thomas

Rio Thomas took her kids to the neighborhood food bank to teach them to volunteer in their community. In just a few hours each week, they got a startling look at the magnitude of the hunger problem right in their own northwestern American neighborhood. Their neighborhood is like most others: nice houses in a row, big supermarket a few blocks away....workers building new houses, delivering packages, cheerful at the post office. No signs of hunger, no homeless on the sidewalks, no headlines in the paper. But there in the food bank, they saw that there were hundreds of families without enough to eat, living right near by. Local folks with kids, unemployed yes, but also people with jobs, hard workers who still couldn't feed their families on the tiny wages they received. Seeing her neighbors were hungry, Rio decided to do something about it. She took some trips out to local farms and talked with the farmers, where she got an even bigger surprise.

Volunteers load fruit they've gleaned

Gleaning means to gather produce after harvest. It is a custom that is as old as agriculture itself. Rio gathered some friends and began visiting the farms to gather the abandoned harvest and deliver it to the food bank. In her first year she delivered 22,000 lbs of free produce to the food bank that otherwise would have been turned back into the soil.

Soon Rio's backyard idea grew into a non-profit organization. The Small Potatoes Gleaning Project delivers gleaned produce to food banks throughout the harvest season. Many of the volunteers are hungry themselves, and take home boxes of food for their own kitchens. Now in her 5th year, Rio has harvested more than 200,000 lbs of produce for hungry families in her neighborhood. One day she would like to begin canning and be able to provide food throughout the winter months as well.

Tons of food goes to waste each year