Meet the 20-Year-Old Fighting to End Food Waste While Taking Finals

When she’s in between classes at American University, college sophomore Maria Rose Belding is busy in America.

At 20 years old, she’s the founder and CEO of MEANS Database, an interactive site that’s helping reduce food waste and feed the hungry by connecting thousands of food pantries, soup kitchens, and other nonprofit groups with donors giving away excess food. Belding was one of 10 finalists in the 2015 “L’Oreal Women of Worth” contest, which honors extraordinary women making a difference in their communities. She’s also the 2015 Clinton Hunger Leadership Award winner and the author of more than a dozen nationally published articles on hunger policy. Her first major piece was published when she was 15.

Registered users post to Belding’s site what food they want to get rid of, and MEANS (Matching Excess and Needs for Stability) immediately notifies registered food banks and pantries, which can claim the donation. The database has already helped save an estimated 4,000 pounds of food across 26 states and has connected more than 200 large-scale food banks.

“We doubled our user count in October, and since then we’ve seen a steady incline in our site members,” Belding told TakePart.

Belding and her team, which consists mostly of undergraduate students, along with two professional programmers and cofounder Grant Nelson, have seen everything from canned beans to bacon and eggs posted to the site. The most unusual donation they received, Belding said, was 3,600 hot dog buns and 3,600 lunch bags—each filled with a cookie, a bag of chips, condiments, and a plastic fork.

The donation came from a charity event in Maryland; planners had overestimated turnout. Though they managed to get all the hot dogs eaten, the lunch bags and hot dog buns went unused, causing charity organizers to turn to MEANS Database for help. A homeless shelter ended up claiming the donation.

“They posted it Sunday and it was claimed that same day, and then by Monday it was going to places on the street,” Belding said. “That was really validating for me. I just sat in my room crying and thought, ‘We did it, we did it.’ I thought this was initially just for food banks, but Grant convinced me there was so much more we can do.”

Nelson, a third-year law student at George Washington University, agreed to help Belding build the program for MEANS Database when they first met about a year and a half ago. At the time, Belding was just starting out as a college freshman. She had conceived of MEANS Database three years prior, but without any knowledge of coding, she wasn’t able to create it herself.

Belding at a MEANS Member Pantry in Maryland.

(Photo: Facebook)

“It’s taken five years to get this off the ground,” she said.

Growing up, Belding often volunteered at local soup kitchens with her mom near their home in Iowa, but it wasn’t until she was 15 that she felt compelled to find a solution to food waste. Another church had donated 10,000 boxes of mac and cheese to her church’s soup kitchen, though it already had more than staff could distribute on their own. The director of the soup kitchen even brought many of the boxes with her on vacation to give to a food kitchen out of town. “I started to think, ‘There’s got to be a better way,’ ” Belding said.

It’s estimated that 40 percent of food in the U.S. goes uneaten every year. That’s about $165 billion worth of food that Americans are throwing out, a lot of which ends up rotting in landfills when it could be feeding families who struggle daily to put dinner on the table.

Thanksgiving and Christmas are said to be among the worst holidays for food waste. Food banks get a surplus of donations over the holidays.

“It’s great in one aspect, because people want to give during the Christmas season, but most food pantries are in need during Fourth of July and St. Patrick’s Day,” Belding said.

In terms of a solution to seasonal food waste, she said people should really think about how much food they’re making and how many people they’re going to be serving during the holidays.

This article was originally published on Take Part.